Magika Style Wizard

[Deluxe0111]

I'm in the very early stages of learning pixel art. This is my first piece which i've made entirely from scratch myself.

Played around with the shading a bit.

What do you think? Any Advice?

[Zia]

I made a quick edit of your wizard:

I feel like you're relying too heavily on dithering as a method of shading. Dithering is one of those things that is easy to learn, hard to master - it's a simple trap to fall into. For sprites like this, using colour block shading is probably going to net you better overall results.

Most of your shades don't have very much contrast. To lend a feeling of volume and depth, it's better to "make it shiny" - don't be afraid to use very light colours to indicate ligh. That being said, it's better to avoid pure blacks and pure whites. They just tend to feel "off" in an image, though there are of course exceptions to this. In your image, pure white especially felt strange given the amount of shadow and the sense of ambient darkness.

Robes are flowy and don't just poof out and sit still like a hoop skirt. Your magician is meant to convey a feeling of mysticism, of eerie power! Their robes should always have a sense of movement and... possibility? to them. Try to avoid making them feel stiff. The arms, particularly the one that isn't outstretched, felt rather robotic and stiff as well. I made the shoulder more rounded and the arm moved a bit further back.

Your hood felt unnatural in how it lay. The top lip should bend down a little bit more and fall around the face - or black abyss, but well. I'm not totally happy with my edit of the hood, as the top lip feels a little thick, but it should convey the idea.

The face felt like it was facing a different direction than the torso and the hand. I reshaped the face-abyss to appear to be looking in the same direction as the hand and torso.

I would also recommend trying out some colours! I assumed you wanted to keep it more or less grayscale, so that's what I did. Here's one option of how you might colour our intrepid wizard, however. Generally, when shading with colour, just keep in mind shadows should be more blue and light more yellow. Not a hard and fast rule, but for when you're ready to start looking into that.

I hope this helps a bit, or at least gives you some ideas! Happy pixelling

[Deluxe0111]

Thank you very much, I appreciate the tips

I'll have a go at editing him and post my results

I'm just working with gray scale untill i'm more convenient, then ill have a look at colours

[Deluxe0111]

Here's my edited version

[miro42]

That looks much better!    I really like the change in the hood's design and that you gave more motion to the character.  I think you could do more to make a dynamic pose, but already it's 100 times better.  Keep up the good work.

I have to say that I do like dithering and I feel like your edited version is missing something because of the lack of dithering, especially in the hood (this could just be because of the side by side comparison).  Dithering can be abused or misused, but it's more a style than anything, so some people might not like it so much.  That doesn't mean you shouldn't use it, though.

[yaomon17]

First off, the progress you made is very impressive. There are several problems, one being with the perspective, especially the head. It should be closer to being directly from the side. The actual wizard is more or less a man shaped robe. You have some good folds going on toward the bottom. For the rest of the robe, there are several good references you can find. I'm probably not the best to help because I'm not very good with clothing myself. The arms are very odd and short; extending them is probably a good idea. I've posted my own edit. Good luck!