Small Bird- first pixel art

[freezersalad]

Hi, I've been working with traditional art and decided to try my hand at a small sprite. I used some fluffed up birds as  reference images, but I'm not sure about the colors-

[DavidBowers]

Just my 2 cents, but I actually quite like the colour palette. The shades are different enough that I can clearly make out what I'm looking at, but not so different that they clash. Do you plan to animate it?

[Jad]

This is a good first attempt! The shape makes sense. The face reads as a face. The shading is nice, if a bit soft.

The dark purple is the one color that stands out as being making less sense than the others. It's too saturated. This degree of saturation in a dark color would imply that it's flourescent/glowing or such. As this bird likely doesn't glow, the darkness is mostly because light isn't reflected into the eye, which should mean the color shouldn't have as much red and blue in it (the closer to gray something is, the less saturated it is. this purple if you think about it in RGB, has red and blue in it, and too much of it to look like a solid surface in the dark.)

About the outline - the diagonals are sometimes shaped like a staircase of solid pixels. Try to thin out the outline to the maximum so that it becomes lean and elegant.

In closing, very good first pixel art. Sorry about going on a tangent about the purple - I just think it's more interesting to think about why it's too purple than to just say 'it's too purple, make it less saturated, you'll like it'. That's boring.

[freezersalad]

Thanks so much 
I changed the outline to a greenish color instead of a dark purple and I do plan on animating it in the future-

[Gil]

The body shading doesn't have a light-source, it's just gradually getting lighter towards the inside of the shape. We call this "pillow-shading". You can find lots of references on how to avoid this probably, but basically: establish a light source, shade accordingly.

[Ambivorous]

Hi Salad,

Welcome to Pixelation!
Since you're familiar with traditional art methods already I won't even deal with lightsources and such. You're quite fortunate because most of the guys around here start with no art background at all.

In pixel art we do a lot of simplifications of surfaces (reducing large areas that would contain a gradient or lots of detail to one block of colour) and we push certain key details more to make things recognisable. You'll know this as caricaturing or symbolisation I imagine.
Another thing we do in pixel art is making things that are further away darker/less saturated, as well as things that are lower. These are also just methods we use to pass across ideas and not necessarily realistically accurate.
We just lie a lot really.

So let's dig right in to an edit.



I've reduced the amount of colours in your piece and dropped a lot of the saturation.
Cleaned up some of the more busy areas and over emphasized things like the wings and the size of the feathers/fluff.
Made the lower areas, tail and right side of the bird darker in following with typical pixel practices.

Hope this gives you an idea of the kind of things we try to accomplish with pixel art, and that we'll see more out of you.