I was about to download and edit your sprites but then I realized you had prezoomed them, and that they're all one file, hence one palette. These things make it more difficult to edit than I can be bothered to deal with right now, so I guess I'll have to just tell you what I see:
I apologize. I'll be sure to take your laziness into account with my next posting.
I think the feet are nice. You're wasting shades by making them too close to each other. Shadows too soft, no highlights. No AA, but that might be a stylistic thing.
I don't palettize since I work off a base palette and with the exception of shading colors (10%-30% darker) don't tend to move outside it much. As for the other stuff, I have a pretty well known style that I like to keep within. I do employ some of those fancy tricks like shading and AA, but I use it so infrequently that to advertise it obviously would mean that I'd have to use it everywhere to be consistant. So I try to keep the shadows barely perceptable and use AA only for internal colors and never for the outline - though nearly invisible, they are still effectively softening and deepening the images to my satisfaction.
in my personal oppinion quality should not be sacrificed at the expense of style.
Well, it's more like quality being sacrificed because of talent
But I do have to say that I wouldn't do pixel art if I couldn't do it in this style. Though I absolutely respect the technical talents of the pixel artists on this board, the heavily aliased and shaded stuff isn't really my cup of tea. My inspiration really comes from NES games. SNES and up, sprites just stopped being as charming to me. I want my work to look like really damned good NES graphics. I like the physicality of it - that you can tell where the sprites stop and start, and how they have big heads so you can see their facial expressions rather than tiny little aliased brown pixels that are supposed to be eyes. The fancy stuff feels more artistic, but it doesn't always feel alive to me like the NES style... not to crack on anybody else's style. It's just a personal preference, and one of the cool things about pixel art that a lot of people don't appreciate is that there can be lots of different styles and tastes. If I had a nickle every time someone said pixel art was too limited to allow differences, I'd be a VERY rich man (I'm not kidding either, sadly).
There are times when I wish my style wasn't quite so limited - I mean, you'd think that black outlines and solid fill colors would be easy, but man wouldn't it be nice to be able to use that fancy stuff once in a while. Still, I can't sacrifice quality and style at the expense of making my life a little easier, right?
Nice to see you're still alive Sq..orgar
Shhh... I'm incognito. I stopped posting to Pixelation some time ago because there were a couple stalkers who were harassing me and using Pixelation as a way to do it. I don't know if they are still here, but I'd very much like to continue posting here. I've missed Pixelation so much, and it just sucks how only one or two people can really make me hate it as much as I did.
So this is for a game? Just for fun?
I've been trying to get a perfect isometric base down for... well, literally years. Partly it has been my own abilities keeping me back, and partly my preferred style of graphics (I think there's a reason you don't see many isometric games on the NES that don't involve snakes or marbles). But I have ALWAYS wanted to do something isometric. I'm absolutely infatuated with the perspective dating all the way back to some old BW MacPaint images I saw when I was a kid. It just has this feeling of toys on a playset, like LEGOs I guess (which I guess is another huge inspiration in my style). I mean, if you take an overhead game like a roguelike and then make it isometric, it suddenly feels so much more physical - like things have volume and depth, but it's not like 3D where there is diminishing perspectives or or polygon models which aren't nearly as alive as pixel people. Stuff like Syndicate, Tactics Ogre, X-Com, Spindizzy, Ultima 8... man, I could stare at screenshots of those games forever..
The design and line art are, as always, impeccable. The colours are fine too, but your shading ramps leave much to desire. The yellow of the jacket and the darker yellow shade are spot on, try to get the same contrast on the other shades. Also, the red is borderline too saturated perhaps.
That right foot is driving me crazy, as far as the line art goes. I don't like obvious shading and only use high contrasting shades for details rather than actual... you know... shading
The red is just a stand in color - nobody I actually make with the base is going to have a neon red "speed suit" on. I draw my pixel art against a rather dark background so my colors tend to be rather bright to compensate sometimes.
