Need help with space ship coloring and shading

[smithy101]

Hello everyone,
I started drawing a spaceship on paper because i was bored and ended up with this.

i quite liked and and drew the outline in gimp 2

than i wanted to color it but i didn't knew what collours so i decided to go with a neurtal grey colours but it does not give the effect i want (even after 3 trys) so i ended up with this.

what am i doing wrong should i use more colors?
Different colors?
different approach to the shading?
Ps:i am new to making pixel art but have edited some to make games

[Gil]

I think you're working a bit too big. There's better things than pixel art at that size.

As for shading, read this thread:
http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=16790.0

[smithy101]

What size do you recomand because i cant resize it without screwing it up in gimp. Should i make it 2 times smaller or 4 times smaller?
Thank for that link to the other post it is really helpful. I am trying to apply new colors and shading to the big one to know how it looks befour i redo it.

[Gil]

Well, the tutorial was written for something with detail 4x smaller than what you have, which would look like this:


But you could do something big too:


By following my tutorial and studying this big piece, you should be able to do something similar, so if you go "WOW, that looks neat", you can do it too!

[yaomon17]

I would also recommend making it smaller. A couple things to note here; the perspective would be difficult to work with since you can see both the front and back of the ship and there seems to be 3 converging points each at the center of each section of the ship. Second, the shading is a bit odd. I don't work too much with these type of flat, geometric pieces, but generally I find a good rule to follow is to use similar colors for the faces facing the same way and a different shade for each different face otherwise (top tier explanation  ). Hopefully the edit shows it better. It is obviously far from full accuracy but I should probably go back to studying for my final in 3 hours. Good luck!



There are some things like cast shadows from the ships sections and guns that weren't included but you can put them in if you want.

[smithy101]

thx for the awsome advice gil
I made it half as smale and complety redid the coloring

after that i tryed to add details but it is quite difficult


I just saw your poste yaomon17 when i was done so i can't change the shading to your example.
I want to try it on my next spaceship (I still have 3 concept drawings left).
Thanks for the example I really like the screw detaile mabe that is what mine is missing