New Guy trying to make a sprite sheet

[JonnyHinkleArt]

Hello,

I am pretty new to sprite sheets, and I am trying to make some sprite sheets for a beatemup style game similar to streets of rage or x-men children of the atom.

I was wondering if I could get some help?

[JonnyHinkleArt]

[Gil]

This is not really pixel art, so should probably be moved to low res. Leaving that alone, I have an issue with all the blurring going on I think, I feel everything needs to be crisper. The individual drawings are quite good, but I feel that animated they don't work for two reasons:

1) Framerate is too low for something this big, it's just too choppy
2) There's no sense of squash/stretch (classic animation term), everything shrinks/grows without much reason to it. You should try to imagine how forms deform over time and try to get a sense of movement going. The simpler sidekick ball does a nice squash/stretch over time, so I'm sure you're familiar with the technique.

[JonnyHinkleArt]

Why would you say this isn't considered pixel art?

[Gil]

With pixel art, you have control over every single pixel in the image. That doesn't necessarily mean you hand-placed every one of them, but it does mean you have control over or have considered the importance of each pixel. It's sometimes called pixel-level control. What you have is simply low resolution artwork, which could benefit from some pixel level control maybe, but wouldn't necessarily ever need to be pixel art. I just mentioned it, because we have a forum for stuff like this, but the section you are in is more for pixel art.

[Decroded]

Why would you say this isn't considered pixel art?

Because it isnt pixel art.

Sure its game art but we dont use airbrush and tonnes of shades etc in pixel art.
A character like this  would be probably  6 to 10 colours in pixel art.
The animation would  typically be smoother  too since there is less to control though it seems more accepted to have less frames in non-pixel art stuff like this due to the high resolution  of things they can appear to move around  more smoothly just ny translating them.

[JonnyHinkleArt]

Hmmmm,

I basically took my basic drawings and converted it to pixel art after I colored it.

Not sure what the difference is

Ultimately I want it to look like pixel art, for sure.

Yeah, I get the squash and stretch, but I don't want the big guy to look cartoony.

Urg...

I didn't use air brush, I used a hard edge brush for tones and then converted to pixels...

[Gil]

I basically took my basic drawings and converted it to pixel art after I colored it.

It's not about tools, but there's probably not a tool in the world that can convert a drawing to pixel art.

Again though, does it matter? We have a definition of pixel art, sure, but we (certainly not I) don't care if something is or isn't pixel art. We have a separate forum for art like yours even, which is why I suggested it.


Anyway, even if you don't exaggerate the squash and stretch, volumes still need to keep sane over time, or it looks like random motion at a detail level. Your overall keyframe poses are fine, you just need to take care to make each separate volume also move in time and space, deforming. I'd edit it, but I'm not sure how to edit big massive pieces like this.

[Decroded]

Call of Duty renders to pixels on the screen, but it isn't pixel art.
When I'm drawing pixel art in photoshop I'm mostly using pencil not brush and all the AA is done manually, not from a brush with "hard  edges" that i still considered a soft brush in comparison with pixel art.

[Gil]

Call of Duty renders to pixels on the screen, but it isn't pixel art.
When I'm drawing pixel art in photoshop I'm mostly using pencil not brush and all the AA is done manually, not from a brush with "hard  edges" that i still considered a soft brush in comparison with pixel art.

Tools don't have a lot to do with it, I use color reductions, soft brushes, auto AA, the whole shebang and it's still pixel art, because I clean it up by hand afterwards. The point is, at the end, when the piece is finished, you need control over every pixel. But again, it doesn't matter much, this piece clearly can never be pixel art, as it's simply too large to manage. It doesn't matter though, I treat my critique just like it's low res, which it is

[washk]

You can read this, to get a visual sense of what other explained you
http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299&PID=139318#139318