A boy and some cave rocks

[dustinaux]

Hi there, new here.

I make games and need to improve my pixel art so I'm looking for some super harsh critique.  Here's a boy giving the player his "shiny rock" he found in thanks for rescuing him, which is actually a stat increase item.  Also here's a cave wall WIP.

      

I wanted a big wide grin for the boy but it's hard to see at 100% size so any suggestions there would be much appreciated.  The rocks are going to be a tileset with kind of an angled top-down view, which is proving pretty difficult.  Probably not much to critique there since it's a WIP on the angled parts.  I'll be sure to update it when I complete more of it.

[astraldata]

Contrast. The teeth and the skin need to have a different value/hue than one another. Try making the skin more red-orange or at least a bit more orange-tan.

You need the image to have significant contrast between values when viewed in greyscale for example. The teeth and skin color are both almost white, so you can't see them very well due to this lack of contrast.

[32]

As Astraldata pointed out your biggest issue is contrast. The second biggest is your colour count, yours is at 35, I cut it down to 18. While there aren't any hard and fast rules about it, less colours are easier to manage and create a harmony throughout your image. Especially when many parts of your sprite are similar colours. If you're going to use outlines be consistent with them. The last thing is that the legs and feet were very blobby.

I quite like how the rocks are turning out, can't wait to see what you come up with .

[Demonyo]

This is actually my first attempt at doing pixel art so take my edit with a grain of salt because i don't know much. I couldn't really explain why i made the choices i made other than i thought they looked right, I'm hoping to learn the logic behind the art. It's best to just look at it and see what might help.

[pistachio]

You still there?
Did an edit earlier so I thought I'd throw in some tips which should help.
More than contrast the biggest issue is that the silhouette is too compact:



All it says is that it's a blob guy standing. We don't know what he's doing.

A good silhouette describes the character's actions. It makes a pose THAT much more readable. The smaller the sprite, the more important readability is.
In this instance he's holding a rock up to the player, at a 3/4 angle.



At a sprite this small you only need about 4-12 colors. That depends on the level of detail you want and the res it's going to be seen at, but start with a few that you can block out the major shapes with using a larger brush.
Easier to manage, better workflow.
Then add colors from there.
If the color can't be seen at 1x/at a glance, it doesn't matter or could be handled another way.
Reusing your colors comes down to, this color is similar to the other, so experiment with that color's properties until you find a color that works for both.
Sprite size is also a factor there.

Posting on rocks soon, sorry for the bump/sporadic posting, but right now it's what I can do.