Started learning 3 days ago, my first pixel art

[Milenchy]

Drew this with Pyxel Edit

[MysteryMeat]

Not quite sure what's supposed to be going on here, is this supposed to be like a dark souls fog wall or something?

[Milenchy]

Not quite sure what's supposed to be going on here, is this supposed to be like a dark souls fog wall or something?

More like someone practicing his magic. He's preparing a fireball. There wasn't really a concept at first, I was just going to draw the trees and grass, but then I decided to add the character (design heavily influenced by Sword and Sworcery because that game has great art).

[Samaramon]

This looks a lot like the Achebit tutorials

Anyway little tip, when using Pyxel Edit... ignore the opacity option for your pen (It looks to me like you used it - sorry if not). It's an easy "cheat" to shade and blur things out but it leaves you with dozens of colors you don't really need. Pixel art is about narrowing down your colors to display your art without necessarily using hundreds of colors.

I'd really recommend starting off with something smaller, like maybe just focus on the character for now and not the background or environment.

[Milenchy]

This looks a lot like the Achebit tutorials

Anyway little tip, when using Pyxel Edit... ignore the opacity option for your pen (It looks to me like you used it - sorry if not). It's an easy "cheat" to shade and blur things out but it leaves you with dozens of colors you don't really need. Pixel art is about narrowing down your colors to display your art without necessarily using hundreds of colors.

I'd really recommend starting off with something smaller, like maybe just focus on the character for now and not the background or environment.

Ah, but it's so convenient to use it  I will try not using it next time, but for darkening things like the terrain when going deeper and deeper underwater I think it's a good idea to use it?

[Samaramon]

Ah, but it's so convenient to use it  I will try not using it next time, but for darkening things like the terrain when going deeper and deeper underwater I think it's a good idea to use it?

It's convenient but deceitful It will not really make you learn colors and shading, but provide an easy and temporary cheat to do it. Eventually you'll end up (in a bigger, more complex piece) with more colors than the 256 old GIF limit and Pyxel Edit will simply not let you save your file above the color limit. Trust me I learned this the hard way when I first started...

But yes what you -could- use it for is to just darken, or in your case add a blue hue to the reflection, but only AFTER you've composed the scene with more limited number of colors.

Cause what you're doing now is, let's say you have 30 colors in your forest, the reflection will double that number cause it will add a new hue to all of them.

So yeah, start simple and forget about the opacity as easy as it makes things appear! 

[Pixel_Snail]

I'm fairly new to pixel art myself (so someone else may need to verify) - my advice seeing as you're literally a couple of days in would be to not do full scenes, focus on single objects and characters. Doing everything means you're not using your time as effectively as you could be. You need to get a semi-decent grasp of the foundational stuff first and therefore you would be better served doing a lot of iterations of precise smaller pieces again and again rather than big stuff with less focus.

And don't be to daunted by the above btw, if you really had your heart set on doing the full whack straight out the gate, you would literally just need 3-4 of the very basic techniques. Stuff like:

Colors -working with a limited palette and making sure you have enough contrast between shades.
Pixel Positioning - some of the simple but key rules to getting your pixels to "read well".
Basic Shading - some very basic light source ideas and not falling in the usual beginner mistakes. 


Check this guide out for more: 
http://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299

 

[Milenchy]

Thanks for the feedback guys! I will try to slow down and draw more basic things like just characters, at least for now