AuthorTopic: I'm a beginner and I want my work critiqued! :)  (Read 2519 times)

Offline gnomey

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I'm a beginner and I want my work critiqued! :)

on: November 17, 2013, 05:06:41 am
Ok, here's all my stuffs I want to get checked out so I can improve! :) (picture overload :o)


For one of my game iv been planning.

Game stuff (text adventure iv been working with Java)

One of my recent works







These are some icons and stuff I'v been working on and felt very unsuccessful.


As you can already tell, I like working with little pixels. I like to make my work very "iconic", i tend to reference a lot of work from Vlambeer, Miniboss, and a few other game developers that aren't on top of my head right now.

I'm lacking a LOT of detail on most of these work but at the same time i like the simple look. I feel like since I'm using less pixels, its a bit harder to place where they go and making that one more pixel change makes it look slightly weird or not right. I would like to know what I could do to prevent that from happening and making sure they all look "OK" to look at.

Offline Ai

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Re: I'm a beginner and I want my work critiqued! :)

Reply #1 on: November 17, 2013, 09:06:25 pm
* Posting many works in one thread and asking for critique rarely works out well -- people don't know which one to focus on (and they don't know that you are focused on one specific item, either.. which reassures people that their critiques may actually get used.). As a result, very few people reply, generally. (at the time I wrote this, 100 people had viewed this thread, with no replies.)

* For animations, it's not appropriate to only post the still frames. Timing is a large part of animation, and can make the difference between an animation looking mediocre and looking snappy.
For example, here's an animation I put together based on your 'slime' frames.

Just assigning the same delay to every frame would make it look quite weak and unappealing.

* One particular trend I can spot throughout your pictures, is lack of perspective -- you show most things side-on, and this generally makes things flat and difficult to make appealing. Pick up a pencil and paper and work on your perspective. moatdd's 5-part Digital Art Basics series on Youtube, particularly part 5, shows some exercises you can do to help improve your perspective, amongst other useful things.

* one pixel change == weird is pretty normal for pixel art, since each pixel represents a relatively large proportion of the picture as a whole. Understanding and practicing clusters can help you make good-looking shapes. (look up Helm's stuff on this forum about clusters, eg. the Cluster Study thread. Participate in it.)

EDIT:

* In your previous post you alluded to using the Move tool. If things are not looking right, it's probably because you don't understand the object's form in 3d space, so until you do, it's better to draw each new frame completely from scratch. If you only have a mouse, you probably want to do this part of it with pencil and paper. Traditional art forms ( or high res digital art) are better for working out the rough movement of objects through space anyway.
« Last Edit: November 17, 2013, 10:43:23 pm by Ai »
If you insist on being pessimistic about your own abilities, consider also being pessimistic about the accuracy of that pessimistic judgement.

Offline Decroded

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Re: I'm a beginner and I want my work critiqued! :)

Reply #2 on: November 18, 2013, 12:04:20 pm
haha rusty leaf cool name  :y:
stick around im sure u can make this all look alot better.
please uninstall all the pink backgrounds it hurts my eyes.
50% brightness grey is a good default when u dont know what will be behind sprites.
the greys u have r too bright.