[C+C] Cyberpunkish character

[Franrek]

I've made that character and since it's probably my first time creating big face like that I feel it looks really unrealistic and messy. Hoping for some critique and tips.

Little progress:

[MysteryMeat]

Study up on skull structure more, take some time to really draw the hell out of a skull in as much detail as possible from a photo reference. Understanding how it curves under the skin helps tons in preventing unseemly flatness like you've got here.

As for the glasses, they seem to hug his face a bit much for cyberpunk shades!  play around with that!

[Franrek]

Made some progress. Edited nose and made it bigger. Changed face shape in few places. Moved ear to the left a little bit. Added some detail to glasses but I'm not sure how to make them look more detached from the face if that's not enough. Changed mouth coz i don't feel it was fitting the rest of the character. Moved the jacket highter up coz I felt like his neck way looking way too long. Also made some more minor changes.

[rocifier]

Agreed more lighting and form study + references would greatly help you enhance this piece.

[Franrek]

Could you give me some tips about what excatly I messed up here?

[rocifier]

It's not so much you messed up, in fact you have some really creative ideas. It's just your rendering could be improved. For example, the front of the face feels very flat. Here is a quick skull approximation I painted when I was studying anatomy which I think will show you what I mean in terms of lighting the form:



For just about every thing else you ever draw, you will be rendering some variation of the following forms in 3d space, so it would pay to practice them. At least, it helped me:

[Swifty]

Yep, what Rocifier said. A lot of his face sits really flat, this is partly in the contour of the face (it's silhouette), and also how you have shaded the sprite. You need to think of your sprite as a 3d object, where you place the highlights and shadows will effect how it reads as a 3d form.

I did a really quick edit, removed most of the dithering as I don't think it's needed here. I pushed both the min/max brightness levels a bit, making the shadow tints darker and the highlights a little brighter.

I also increased the saturation of the skin tone a little bit more in the highlight & mid tones, as these areas are (presumably) getting light from the sun, they would be warmer, while the shadows slightly would lose their saturation.

[jcongerkallas1]

It might help to picture the head as a low-poly 3D model divided into planar facets.  Different planes will have different tones, highlights, and shadows based on the direction of the light source.

[Franrek]

Thx for support and tips. I defenitly need to train my skills in shading. Colour pallete helped a lot but I didn't go with everything like in Swifty edit. I wanted to keep his skin pale and also I felt like you made his face bit to small by changing left side of his jaw so much. I changed it but I did it gentle I think. I fixed the scarf basing on what you made. I copied jacket and tried to make something with it but I couldn't make it it look any better For now I'll stick with ur version if you don't mind.