Character Sprites (Posing/Color Practice)

[Rosier]

Title pretty much says it all.  It's practice with making characters look different from one another aside from just color placement.

[MysteryMeat]

Try playing with different body shapes and proportions, the poses showcase differing personalities but right now they all have samey silhouettes.
it's not ALWAYS a good metric, but usally if you can make a design all black and have trouble differing it from another you should probably take another shot at that design.


Note how when you black out the designs on your characters here, it becomes a bit hard to tell who is who between the two left characters. The height difference on the third helps to differentiate him, however.

while this is usually more of a western cartooning thing, it's a principle that's applicable to just about any medium i feel.

one animated series that does this well even with 'realistic' proportions is Avatar: the Last Airbender, usually through the use of accessories and varied props.


Note how you can clearly differentiate the characters here based on the shape of their outlines, that's the important bit to take away from this ramble.


[edit x7 combo, cripes I had more to say on this than I thought]

[MAVW]

I'll jump in what MysteryMeat said just to add the recent video extra credits did about pose design, it's really interesting.

Expressing the character's personality through posing will help a lot too, the Avatar example also displays that very well.

[Rosier]

So what I'm getting is give everyone hats...

But in all seriousness, I edited the two.  Blue is supposed to be really tall, but really skinny.  Red is supposed to be pretty tall, but a lot broader, so hopefully the edit communicates that.  Otherwise changed Red's hair to have two defined spikes, and it be really long. 


Also Pink is there.

[MysteryMeat]

I'd say slim down blue's pants some to emphasise his legs more and differentiate them visually from Red's.
The hair changes definitely help.
They're still pretty close in height though, it might help to straighten blue's stance some?

[Rosier]

Straightened up Blue's stance even though I'll probably give them more defined idles later on, played with Red's hair because I thought it looked a bit unclean, and added Tan because short.

That black thing on her shirt is intended to be a bow of sorts, but I feel that isn't super clear.  Otherwise I had trouble sizing her because of how small she is compared to the rest.

[Rosier]

Been working on these with help from a different forum and wound up with these.

A lot of the shading's been reworked obviously, plus a lot put into colors to stray away from flat grays.

[MysteryMeat]

Looks ages better! Only remaining critique I got is that some of the characters seem to have weird chins, it might help to push the mouths left on small brown horned girl and tall blue a bit to make the face more solid looking. As it is it looks a bit deformed, I'm only really noticing it on those two though.

[Rosier]

Looks ages better! Only remaining critique I got is that some of the characters seem to have weird chins, it might help to push the mouths left on small brown horned girl and tall blue a bit to make the face more solid looking. As it is it looks a bit deformed, I'm only really noticing it on those two though.

I find that a bit weird to say, considering Red is the only one with a unique face...  It did look like their mouths were weird on second glance, though.

Also, probably should mention that these are edited by another person.  My last "draft" I guess were these down here, and the ones above were another person doing their take of the shading and a few minor changes:


Basically a lesson in me trying to figure out what to do with black.  They didn't like how I used the lighter gray for highlights with Red's pants being the marquis example, so this was me trying out another type before they did their edit.

[MysteryMeat]

Here, I did some slight tweaking to show what I meant.

It might help a bunch to look up some proportions guides and do some figure drawings to get a better grasp on your anatomy, you got some good startings here but practice always helps.
Quickposes is a good place to start with figure drawings.