I need opinions and suggestions for my first piece of pixel art

[davido213]

So, i wanted to make a 2d beat'em up , with an adventurer as you, but something here doesn't feel right, and i dont know how to make a whip animated, so, i came to here for help. Here they are, i only have 3 photos, but that should be them. http://davido324.imgur.com/all/

[keiotu]

can't see any image from your link.

[davido213]

? is this how you do it? and and last but maybe also least ?

[pistachio]

? is this how you do it?

Hey David.

Yes you did the embed right (direct image link + [img] tags).

So on to the crits.
This will sound harsh but it's pretty obvious that this is an edit of Megaman.
You're not gonna learn a lot artwise by doing just sprite edits. PX isn't for that, we come here to learn straight up skills.

There's a lot of ways to animate a whip/attack animation. 2 frames, 4, 8, depending on the speed and tech specs (or fake tech specs) you want for the animation.

Actually there's a good one you might want to check out...

Castlevania

All in NES specs but it gets a lot done for only 3 frames.
If you take it apart frame by frame (good practice when you're starting out) there's 2 frames anticipation and 1 strike.
In some of these due to restrictions just the top half changes, some (Castlevania III) the whole sprite's pose changes.
The restrictions here aren't the point, instead it's to watch these poses.

So my advice if you want to build pixelling skills is try making a small low color sprite from scratch.
If you want to make the attack animation, then from there use this (and others) as ref.

Try it out sometime.

[davido213]

Oh thank god that you agree that i should make it from scratch, my folks think that i should do that when im starting out, as to not be too harsh on my self. And thanks alot for the whip idea, i might be done in 3 or four days, considering what i could do from my imagination, and when i am done, i might resurface once more.

[davido213]

Once again i am amazed at what the human brain could do in just this short hour, as i have only started now. Here it is Yay , any suggestions, improvements, or maybe a crit? (isnt that what you call a harder hit on enemies  in games?) Tomorrow i am going to do the walk, and the whip.

[hapiel]

Crit can mean critical hit, which is indeed the hard hit on the enemy, or critique. We mean the latter

Cool work, it is nicer to see you make something ourself than copy of others!

My critique is:
Cartoony or not, learn some anatomy. Plenty of tutorials online that will teach you how to draw a human body, just an hour of pencil drawing will help you so much already! Right now his shoulders are dancing in mid air, and the person looks made out of wooden boards rather than organic material.
This is where all beginners start out, so don't worry too much about it. Consider how much time you want to spend on progressing for your game and how much time you want to spend on improving as an artist

[davido213]

This is where all beginners start out, so don't worry too much about it. Consider how much time you want to spend on progressing for your game and how much time you want to spend on improving as an artist

I might just ditch the idea of the game for now, and give myself a month or two to improve my artistic skillz. Perhaps you could link my to good tutorials, im not too sure of what i am to look at.

[pistachio]

Cool that you haven't given up on this.
That's already a step ahead of the rest


They've stood the test of time so I will post these tutorials again.

Cure's goes over the basics of what pixel art is.

Fun With a Pencil/Figure Drawing For All It's Worth goes over the basics of drawing, I'd say start with the first.

Actually the gist of it (gesture and construction) can be picked up in about a month or two, just takes longer to master.
I'd say if the time you have falls in that range you're good to go.

There's also Preston Blair's Animation and Drawing Comics the Marvel Way

All of these books are basically going over the same thing, but those two books are more specific.
Definitely worth checking out at a later point but the first two should get you started.

[Meowsor]

Other than tutorials you can find on pixeljoint or even here you might want to have a look at programs you can use.

I'll list a couple off the top of my head:

PyxelEdit
Pixothello
The ones I use :
Evilpixie - I use it quite often for small spec art [32x32 24x24 16x16]
GIMP - I use this one mainly for larger art and where transparency is needed.

There are more but heres some I know, you could also use photoshop.
This guy also did a bunch of video tutorials on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/achebit/videos