[WIP] Witch Doctor Beer Label

[morbrorp]

First post here.

Lately, to get some creative outlet, I have started to design Beer Labels as pixel art. I have made a lot of effort and I feel that this piece is almost finished. I have some questions though.

- Are there any parts of this image that are hard to read, due to noise, stray pixels or lack of contrast?
- Does the style of the title (the actual text) fit the rest of the label or should it be more simple? (less shine, boldness).



I hope my questions make sense.

P.S. The size of the piece is supposed to be blown up to atleast thrice the size to fit a beer bottle.

[BadMoodTaylor]

I can read it just fine.

Looks pretty sweet! Is it for an actual beer?

[morbrorp]

Thanks. I will start homebrewing when I move to a bigger apartment, so it's not for an actual real beer yet.

[Neometry]

Nice work, I read it easily !

Nice image too

[MysteryMeat]

Only crit I really got is that you might want to tone down the crosshatching a bit, it's a bit intense especially on the mask there

[morbrorp]

Only crit I really got is that you might want to tone down the crosshatching a bit, it's a bit intense especially on the mask there

I see what you are saying. My idea was that the heavy crosshatching added texture to the mask as much as it did shading, but I'll try and see how it looks with less.

[morbrorp]

I have tried to clean up the mask and I have two new versions. Any thoughts?

Original:


Less dithering:


No dithering:

[eishiya]

I like the "less dithering" version. The "dithering" (is it even dithering at this point?) reads like some interesting texture. The "no dithering" just looks bland/vague with no texture at all. However, I think I prefer the hair in the "no dithering" version, those bits of black didn't seem to serve a purpose.

[r1k]

some of the AA isnt really working, most obviously to me, on the bottom of the arm. The problem is that the dark AA color youre using there is so dark its nearly indistinguishable from the black, and so might as well not even be there. The 2 lighter AA colors are more noticeable, but are also so close to the lighter color they are AAing into that they are not very effective.

It would work better to just take 1 color that is about right inbetween the light color of the arm and the black and use that. You can also make the AA pixels "longer", each color of AA doesnt need to just be a single pixel, especially if youre trying to AA a line at an extreme angle, like in this example. You can stretch that color over 3 or 4 pixels if you need to.

I did an edit showing this. Then I added an extra image on the bottom showing how you could just add the AA color from the middle image, inbetween the AA colors youre already using if you wanted it even smoother.

[morbrorp]

Thanks for the replies.

eishiya: The more I look at it the more I agree, especially about the hair. I'm going to change that i the middle picture.

r1k: Thanks for the explanation, I'm going to work with that. This is the first time I've tried out AA and therefore I'd like to ask if there's a quick and easy way to find the exact color that lies in between the two other colors. Should the AA consider both hue, saturation and brightness?

[MysteryMeat]

My usual go-to is to either faff about with the multiply function on aseprite or faff about with the opacity/color until it looks right at native resolution to me.
Take with a grain of salt though, I'm colorblind and it does affect my work with this sorta thing.

[r1k]

I'd like to ask if there's a quick and easy way to find the exact color that lies in between the two other colors. Should the AA consider both hue, saturation and brightness?

Ya it should consider all 3. I just chose a color from your existing palette which seemed about in the middle, but if I were to add a color to the palette for the AA I'd approach it by thinking about the hue, saturation and brightness seperately first. Like in the example in my previous post, you want a color between black and a color fairly close to white, so you know right off the bat that the value will be close to 50%. IN this example the hue is easy, because you can just keep it the same, but if you were AAing between 2 very different colors you can pick a hue somewhere in the middle of those 2 colors or a gray. In such a case it would probably help to lower the saturation too, because when you mix 2 colors together (atleast in paints) the resulting color is less saturated. You probably dont want your AA to be too saturated in general, because otherwise it will stand out too much instead of blend in. I wouldn't worry too much about making the AA color perfectly inbetween though. Since youre doing it manually you can make it whatever color best suites your image and palette, you just need it to be close enough to be functional.

[morbrorp]

Thank you for the help. I have experimented a little with the AA on the arms and changed the hair.