Gritty pixel art

[Glitchcraft]

Hi dudes,

This is my first post. I've been doing art for a few years but just recently got into seriously doing pixel art. I've never really been concerned with execution and, over the years, I've done my best to turn my sloppiness into "tasteful sloppiness" -- that is -- to embrace and refine the rawness and sketchiness of my natural tendency to draw like a schizophrenic kid on Ritalin. I've just always been an idea guy: more concerned with the core design and concept. Typical INTP personality type I guess.

As I've said, I want to get serious about pixel art and master the fundamentals to the best of my ability. But, I don't want to just do generic pixel art. There's nothing wrong with paying homage to the classic style or enjoying more typical pixel art, but I want to capture my pencil on paper style in pixels. The problem is, I don't know how to do that without it being too messy and noisy. How do you make gritty, chaotic pixel art simultaneously clean and appealing? My guess is that it'd probably work better at a large sprite size, but for the game I'm (trying to) work on, I'm doing 32x32 tiles and a 54xsomething character sprite.

Please keep in mind that this isn't the final work and I honestly might even scrap it. I just wanted to show what I meant by "gritty" since the term could mean a lot of different things in art. If anyone can offer some tips or be like "hey! That looks like the art from so and so game, only way shittier!" that'd be great. Particularly sketchy references would be awesome.

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[MysteryMeat]

I think if you're going to work with the rough look you gotta have good colors to offset it and keep things readable. It's fine here, but a shade lower and the focal point would have been lost in that background. As it is it gives everything kind of a somber ambience.

[Glitchcraft]

Thanks for the feedback. And noted on Photobucket being bad.

You mentioned the color choice being important. I think that out of everything there is to master in pixel art, color might just be the toughest thing for me. Most of my game design experience has been drawing out the levels and characters on graph paper with pencil and then giving them to the artist/animator. When I'd sketch out a sprite, I'd say "this guys cloak should be a muted brown with red as an accent color" but I wasn't fine tuning color ramps. Now that I'm designing sprites start to finish in pixel art, I'm seeing just how much I took color for granted.

My issue is, I want to make a really dark game, but pixel art (IMO) works best with high contrast and bold colors. So I guess I need to figure out a way to convey "dark" atmosphere without actually having a dull palette of muddy, muted colors. I went to school for computer graphics but I was working mostly in vector art with a style more akin to Castle Crashers and Alien Hominid. I guess I need to just drop that mindset because, so far, I haven't been able to make bold black outlines and shading work with pixel art.

I have a lot of learning ahead of me and this is definitely not gonna be as easy as I thought it would be. Thanks again for the critique.

[MysteryMeat]

Hyper Light Drifter has a bunch of areas that use darker palettes while remaining vibrant and colorful. The forest area and the southern labs come to mind, maybe do some studies off the screenies there.

There's also this thing, which I've made use of for practice work in the past:
http://www.pixelfor.me/crc/F0000032

[Glitchcraft]

Hyper Light Drifter is some of the greatest pixel art I've seen in a long time. The style is definitely much softer and abstracted than what I'm going for but I've absolutely been studying the palette. I found an artist on Newgrounds called Carrion who does some amazingly grim pixel art.

I've actually used that color ramp site you linked. Paletton is actually a really useful site as well.

I think I'm making the common mistake of getting too far ahead of myself. I want to jump right in and develop my own style, but I think I need to just pay my dues and master small 16x16 8bit style pixel art first to real get a feel for the fundamentals.

Thanks for taking the time to post.