Starting anew

[Krizmo]

Hehe, there must be a million of these threads that I have made about starting pixelling again.... but this time (hopefully), I shall continue.

I am starting again focusing on my colouring skills first, and then will move on to lineart as I develop my skills more. So, I have chosen one of SplatPixel's linearts to work on (love his work). I have some basic knowledge of pixelling, as I have been doing it on and off for a few years now, mostly off.

Please, detailed crits on how to improve because I really would like to get better at this.

[Xion]

Are those nipples? They're really close together, as I think nipples are usually closer to the outside of the pecs.
As for your coloring skills, I'd say some hue shifting and desaturation (of all the colors) would be really beneficial to this peice.
Also, I thought the guy's head was a bag or mask or something. You colored it like it was flesh. Though I may be wrong.

Anyway, keep it up.

[ndchristie]

a note on nipples: you should be able to draw an almost equilateral triangle that connects the nipples and the hollow below the throat.

i like this guy a lot.  and who is to say that its not both flesh AND a mask?

[Xion]

i like this guy a lot.  and who is to say that its not both flesh AND a mask?

Good point.

I also just noticed that the pants don't have nearly as much contrast as the body.

[Krizmo]

Hehe thanks..

Well, the nipples were done rather quickly, and I had almost forgotten about them until you brought them up. What do you mean by hue shifting? Sorry, I need to catch up once again....
I think I will also add in some highlights at some point today, and I'll update it with your crits/comments.

Thanks once again!
I'll update this is soon as possible

[ndchristie]

'hue shifting' is a blanket term that covers several techniques that involve visual mixing of colors with different hue values.  most of my work involves hue shifting of some kind, and nearly everything helm does has some degree of what's become known as 'hue shifting.' 

most of it stems from 4 main artistic concepts:

basic visual mixing (in pixel art, we must constantly rely on very few completely opaque colors and no blending, hense the need for creating visual mixes including multiple hues)
equiluminous blending (using multiple colors of near-equal value to create visual exitement)
atmospheric perspective (as objects recede in a piece, they assume the colors of the nearly-invisible air between your eye and the object.  also, the scientific reason for colored shadows)
and chromatic equilibrium (representing all of the primary and secondary colors within a piece)


but there are 2 other reasons that youll probably see more often:
its fun to experiment with on occasion
it saves a ton of room on your palette

in addition, its used for the less exciting reason of matching observation.  skin, for example, is made up of an infinite variety of hues.  not as interesting conceptually, but just as important visually.

helm's reasoning is, as best i can attempt to paraphrase (sorry if i get this wrong): white light is made up of all colors, so they should all be represented whenever light is refracted or reflected

[AlexHW]

to add to adarias, check out the munsell color theory and the chroma scale. If you're hue-shifting, which seems to represent simply the changeing of hue, you need knowledge of the chroma scale. Knowing the chroma scale makes shifting colors easier.

[Krizmo]

Hmmmmm, I'm not sure I completely understand hueshifting... could you do an edit of my piece as an example. It would help a lot.

Apart from that, I contrasted the pants some more (I hope) and a few other small changes, ie. the nipple.

[Frychiko]

The shading under his mouth, makes it look like his mouth is open.

[junkboy]

The main problem with this piece is that your aren't being very consistent with your lightsource (or you don't know how to shade shapes properly). I'm not good at explaining, so I did a quick edit.



I interpreted it as the light was coming from the right-behind. Notice how that bigass head of his produces a shadow that falls over his chest, how the light creeps around from the left (round objects tend to do this), etc. I also added some ambient lightning (the lightsource behind is back bounces on the white (?) floor and back on him). In reality I reckon it'd be much stronger, but I didn't want to overdo it. I also added another color to make smoother transistions between light and shadow, notice however it's not used everywhere, for example on his chest, where the shadow produced by his head gets blurrier the further away it falls.

Just a few things to keep in mind, I guess.