My First Attempts

[Link]

Hello,

I've been debating whether I should post or not because they are so simple. Anyways, here are my first attempts and I am looking for criticism.



Also, are images supposed to look odd in preview? They look curved.

[Pusty]

The strawberry looks kinda noisy (you can't read the lightning good because it's made out of single pixels). Also the contrast should be higher because the lighter red color is hardly noticeable.
I don't really know what the first one is showing ,but if it's showing a golden egg then this is very good.
On the second one the blade is very short and thin and I don't know if a knife/sword looks like that.

[Link]

I've made some of the changes you suggested and some others.

I made the blade wider and shaded it differently. Also changed the color of the guard to black. Changed the lightest shade of the strawberry to white and made the second darkest shade lighter for more contrast. Also made the seeds in the darker area darker. The first one is a golden egg. 

[odedrt9]

The sword looks much better although you can make the handle a bit longer, atm it looks too short to hold.

About the strawberry, shading aside you have shape issues, from this perspective it should be 3d and what you have is too flat.
Try remaking it but with looking at references first and then re-upload it.

[Silenia]

Looking good!
I agree with Pusty, that golden egg looks *good*.

The new blade is an improvement for sure. I would personally extend the hilt a little, because compared to the guard it looks a bit small, but the current length isn't necessarily wrong either.

The strawberry definitely reads like a strawberry. The noisiness hasn't been quite solved with your edit, though. The seeds interfere a bit with the shading, making the whole of it look more like the strawberry has a lot more seeds on that side. The lightest shade of pink is also nearly indistinguishable from the lightest orange/brown shade.

Because the strawberry already has a lot of "lone" pixels for its seeds, it would probably work better to keep the shading more connected. Made a very quick (and thus neither polished nor perfect) edit to show what I mean. Edit was done in a hurry and thus isn't polished. Can be done much, much better, it's just to show the difference in "noisiness" with more connected shading.



(Also slightly lengthened the handle on the sword to show what I meant there)
 

[Link]

I made some more changes.

So I made the handle of the sword longer as you said. I re-made the body(?) of the strawberry using references. One thing I noticed is that strawberries are more irregular than what I drew originally. I also made the seeds one pixel instead of two and the leaves darker.



Edit 2:

The darker seeds were bothering me so I made them lighter and moved them a bit.

[Decroded]

getting better 
i added some stronger contrast and tried to make the texture like little bumps where the seeds are.

[Link]

I tried adding the texture but it looked terrible. I am going to move on to another piece and try again the strawberry some other day.
Thanks to all for the help.

[Decroded]

http://pixelation.org/index.php?topic=19743.0

[Link]

Hello again,

I hadn't practiced anything since I made this topic. 

I attempted to do the strawberry again with Decroded's edit as a guide. This time I made it smaller and changed its position.



Edit 2: Made it more heart shaped.