New to Pixel Art looking for C+C

[SkotKeller]

First Pixel Art in a long time guys. Looking to get better.

"I'm the Knight of hire. I work for the one who offers the most money."

[Pix3M]

Careful with dark colors. Dark colors do not contrast well with other dark colors and the human eye is more sensitive to light colors. It's hard to see any detail you intended to put in the sprite except for the white pixels for the vizor.

Forum's background color also makes it harder since lighter colors make other colors look even darker.

[SkotKeller]

Thanks for the reply and the info.
I took your advice on what you told me to change, and this is what it looks like now.

How does it look now?

[Alex Sinigaglia]

Did you think of a lightsource when making this? Because I can't find one.
The contrast isn't that evident. You have too many colours that are similar, for a sprite of this size you can cut off some of them (my opinion).

For the red tones you have four colours, you can have only two.
For the black/grey tones (1st sprite), you have a total of ten colours, if I were you I would use just four (five at most).
For the white/grey tones (2nd sprite), you have eight colours, you could go with four here too.

With your first sprite:

I changed the palette a bit so that he has less colours. I know it's rushed and all, but I hope it gives you a better idea of the contrast: the character has a bit more of character (heh) and he seems to be lighted from the right now, albeit there's something wrong in that left leg (our right). This to say to not use lots of colours that look the same.
I went with six colours instead of five... well, I could have used five now that I think about it: the lighter colour in his helm could have been black.

[SkotKeller]

Thank you Alex, And I can see what you mean and it is big help. Though I am sorry for not being more exact from the beginning. I am going after more of todays Pixel Art which has more then a 4 color 5 shades of each type of thing.

I do appreciate you pointing that out so something I can do later on in some ideas I might have. One thing I like to point out so you could better help people is they way you executed the correction was not the greatest and I think could have been done little better, yes I know you said was rushed but way I saw it was a major to sided color armor.

And with the red with 4 tones is the way I looked at it is the caped shoulder would have to darker shades of red sense it is behind him and would not get the same lighting as the front shoulder.

Thank you again and appreciate your time and thoughts.

[astraldata]

I am going after more of todays Pixel Art which has more then a 4 color 5 shades of each type of thing.

Sorry, but I have to interject here.

You are apparently very new to pixel art if you think "today's" pixel art uses more than 4-5 shades per color/thing/etc. to indicate form, lighting, depth, materials, etc., since pixel-art is pixel-art, regardless of when it was created. Pixel art is simply the controlled placement of pixels to create art. The more colors you add that aren't necessary to indicate depth/lighting/etc., the less control you have over the placement of pixels once you start grabbing colors that are too similar to tell apart with a quick glance (after all, that's how viewers will look at your art -- they're definitely not admiring your subtle gradients at this low of a resolution -- they're looking for clarity in an image as quickly as possible.)

Aside from it simply sounding like an excuse for your "style" and whatnot, your interpretation of the number of colors in pixel art is just incorrect. With about 14 colors in your knight sprite, my eye only reads maybe 4 -- 1) the slits in the mask, 2) the gray color on the stomach/chest area, 3) the darker color across most of the sprite, and 4) a single red on the cape -- and if I have to zoom in or look more closely to see the other colors in the image, you've missed your chance at clarity, and thus the image looks flat and colorless to me with only 4 colors in the end -- the equivalent of a poorly done NES sprite -- which is, according to your reply to Alex's edit, NOT what you're going for. The same goes for the lighter version of the knight too.

I suggest you listen to Alex when he says you should use less colors. His edit points out the issues in your form/lighting -- it wasn't a sloppy edit at all, it was just a quick way to illustrate his points on the most glaring issues -- the points I just made again to reiterate how important what he said was to an image like this since you seemed to rationalize why Alex's edit wasn't done well enough to help you fix the issues you somehow thought your sprite didn't have. Just because he suggested to limit the colors didn't mean that he meant for you to go and restrict your entire palette to 4 colors (after all, that's the problem with the image now -- with 14 colors, it still *looks* like it only has 4 -- more colors rarely means better pixel art, and if you believe that, you might as well use photoshop brushes and vector graphics because that'll look a lot better since it generally is at a higher resolution where finer gradients can be more appreciated.)

I'm not saying you're ignoring his advice completely, but I am suggesting you give it a lot more consideration. Your work will be better because of it.

[SkotKeller]

Now better understanding what you meant I edited it and would like to know what you think now.

Thanks

[astraldata]

Only *slightly* better. Still, the red reads as a single color against this light forum background, thus it needs even more contrast.

Try zooming it out to 1x scale and see if you can see your 3 red colors at a single quick glance -- if not, either remove the extras, or add more contrast / difference in value between the shades until you can tell them apart easily.

The armor is easier to tell the difference between the shades, but it also could still use more difference between the shades to offer more interest in the form, giving it a better sense of 3d shape.

[Ymedron]

If you want to focus on pixel artings and not have to worry about creating a color palette, I would recommend searching out a premade limited palette to use!

Pixel art was originally born from limitations - limitations of color, size and creation methods.
Limiting yourself to a carefully constructed palette forces you to make choices about how to shade certain things and how to separate areas with similar colors. (at least, in theory..?)

For example, Dawnbringer's 16 bit palette.
http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=12795

The latest sprite has some contrast issues in that the body is very washed out and the red is super dark in comparison -> it seems to become more about the red shapes than the knight.
Seconded astraldata, the red looks like it's just one dark red shade. Either you need to make them more different or just drop all the extra shades.

Now that I think of it, I think pixel art's main theme is "optimization."
Waste as little as possible and do as much as you possibly can.