[WIP] A gnome piece I need improvements on! Please help! :)

[gnomey]

So..
I made this piece on Photoshop and I drew it first on paper and pixelized it and then slowly started to make it into something that looks iconic. I'v been trying to make my own style of pixel art for a while now but I always end up using other people's methods or their style of drawing their pixels and just recently, I wanted to work on something original.

That being said, I came up with this piece and I'm trying to prevent using shades and rather simple colors. As of now, I'm trying to animate this with a fully waving beard, idling position, and hat slightly bouncing.

But before I get to do all that, I want to make sure this piece is perfected before moving into animating and making sure this guy here has proper anatomy (I yet don't fully understand anatomy as I am still in high-school).

Here it is! Help would be much appreciated!



**Edit** From what I see, I feel that the sword and the shield looks the most awkward. His legs don't look proper either and I need to bring the belt down.

[cels]

I love it. It certainly has the potential to be rather unique. I think I get what style you're going for, without the shades and crisp highlights, but I do think you either need to change the shape of the shield or use colours to help people understand its shape better. And clearly, one ankle looks thicker than the other, which looks odd, even though I guess it's because of the pants.

[gnomey]

Ok,

So I made some minor changes but I'm not too sure if its for the better.. I changed the shield angle + location and I lowered the belt..



but honestly, the shield still looks awkward.. I really don't know how to fix that up (including the sword).

[Pix3M]

The values are kind of muddy and it is really hard to see without zooming in.

The white background makes your gnome look very dark and if you know color theory.... darker values contrast poorly with other darker values.



With that in mind, I tweaked the values so they are easier to tell apart (Why imageshack butchered my image is beyond me, but you get the point)

[sevinkydink]

@pix3m - it saved as a jpeg (even though the extension is .png)....

This is great stuff, I think the initial positioning was fine, but as cels said the coloring just needed some adjustments.

[gnomey]

So I got to change the colors as Pix3m illustrated and this is the result (without the distortion of JPEG).



I removed the dark borders the shield had and I think it looks slightly better but still bad in a way... The sword and the shield is the biggest problem.

As for the color theory, I'm self-taught and I haven't gone professional yet with my art. I'm sure I'll improve as time passes with practice! Thanks for the critiques so far!

As of now, I'm trying to figure out ways to fix the sword and the shield.. Looks terrible!

[gnomey]

I removed the shield and put a bag/pouch instead (as if he is holding it) and I got to say, I like this better.



My question now is, what other color can I use other than this neutral gray color?

After I get that sorted out, I think I'm going to finally move into animating.

[Mathias]

Main complaint was the sword's angle. I decided to assume the pose was a casual one.
When casual and relaxed it doesn't seem natural to hold a sword that aggressively.
I grabbed an 18" ruler, stood casually, and found that my strong tendency was to relax my Sword of Measurements hand until the ruler was pretty much parallel with my forearm.



Then did other stuff.

[gnomey]

Main complaint was the sword's angle. I decided to assume the pose was a casual one.
When casual and relaxed it doesn't seem natural to hold a sword that aggressively.
I grabbed an 18" ruler, stood casually, and found that my strong tendency was to relax my Sword of Measurements hand until the ruler was pretty much parallel with my forearm.



Then did other stuff.

Actually that looks amazing!

But I was trying to avoid using different color of shades but I'm sure you just did that for the funs.

As for the sword angle, I wanted for this gnome to look more aggressive, almost appearing aggressive. So having that in mind and the fact that the sword angle is awkward as is, maybe we can point the sword a little bit above the 90 degrees to clarify the aggressiveness?

As of now, I'm mainly concerned for the sword and the anatomy.

[gnomey]

I changed up the hat a little bit because I felt that the beard and the hat had an indirect swirl which I didn't really like and I wanted to have the beard separate from the hat motion.