AuthorTopic: amount of color per ramp / resolution used  (Read 2834 times)

Offline Cyangmou

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amount of color per ramp / resolution used

on: June 10, 2016, 05:51:19 pm


Finally I got an example for this effect, really wanted to bring up this for a really long time.

I believe that there is a spot for every style in pixel art, where your chosen resolution for a certain look is just really efficient to work with.

One of the first thing you will recognize if you start doing pixel art, is that the bigger you make your artwork, the more time it usually takes to polish up things like jaggy edges with handplaced antialias.
Another common thing is that the bigger the artwork gets, the more colors you can put in it (just from the grid) and therefore you have more values to create form with – but usually this also takes more time.
The bigger an artwork gets the more color we tend to use and the smoother the „gradients/bands“ look.

Speak the higher the quality appears.

But aside from this there is another thing, where even smaller resolution graphic could take longer to create depending on the style, because you have to fiddle around with every detail to get an somewhat satisfying looking result.

Now specifically to my example:
 
In this case the portrait on the left which is 48x48 completely broke apart and would be much more work than the 64x64 portrait next to it, because it uses too many colors for it's resolutio to be visually „crisp and clean“ and the stylization is to slight for the small resolution. The angle of the eyes doesn't align well and there are plenty of readability issues.

One thing one always has specifically have to consider with pixel art is to what degree certain features need to get stylized to convey them effectively with pixels.

This brought me to 2 very general basic observations:
The more slighter angles you want to portray in a clean way, the higher your resolution has to be.
The more stylized the art is, the smaller you can go.

If you make a stylization you should always ask yourself if it works well for the size you chose and you can portray all details effectively in your style (you always stylize in pixelart, consciously or not).

But The problem can not only happen with making stuff to small, but also with a really simple style which gets too big for pixelart. Therefore this would need a ton of work on smoothing lines with AA - which is quite inefficient to do with pixel art and therefore should be avoided.

I think the way to go about this before you start with any pixelart is that you should think about this basic relationship:
amount of color per ramp / resolution used


If you have a ramp of 5 colors, but only 4 pixels space, your ramp simply has too many colors and the image will break if you want to use all of them.
Although if you think about how big your average cluster should be for the amount of colors you want to use use and design our ramp according to that you will get overall much more cohesive and thought through results.
Of course personal bias will always play into it a fair bit.
« Last Edit: June 10, 2016, 07:24:10 pm by Cyangmou »
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Offline Vazovski

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Re: amount of color per ramp / resolution used

Reply #1 on: June 11, 2016, 12:08:22 am
Great little tutorial, I'd even call it as a "tip". Thank you  :y:

Offline RAV

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Re: amount of color per ramp / resolution used

Reply #2 on: June 12, 2016, 08:17:43 am
I appreciate every effort that highlights the grand constructive aspect of pixel art, rather than just the "pixel pushing". And towards that goal, I like the idea that thinking about style has a greater functional relevance in pixel art to learn about. I also like to see the inner mechanics of pixel art discussed. This is very important, to understand pixel art as relations between elements, than just celebrating any one style or technique. To me, pixel art is about the grid's mechanics of creativity in a greater sense and purpose, more than fixed function definition.

« Last Edit: June 12, 2016, 08:21:02 am by RAV »