AuthorTopic: Craig (South Park) Sprite  (Read 1411 times)

Offline Raisalis

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Craig (South Park) Sprite

on: July 23, 2017, 01:22:41 am
I enjoy doing tiny little sprites like this, but I can't wrap my head around shading pixels this size.
If anyone has any tips for improving this, I'd love to hear them. I want to try my hand at animating this once I get more comfortable with what to do and not to do.

Offline eishiya

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Re: Craig (South Park) Sprite

Reply #1 on: July 23, 2017, 02:08:44 am
An edit to show some suggestions:


- Just because something is blue or grey doesn't mean the colours you use have to be fully blue or grey. Highly saturated colours like your blues look unnaturally bright for fabric, and completely desaturated greys look unnatural. In my edit, I used less-saturated blues and the greys are slightly blue.
- Hue-shifting makes the colours look more dynamic than just using darker/lighter versions of a colour. I made the shadows purpler and the highlights warmer.
- The smaller the sprite, the more contrast you need for the colours to be visibly different. I bumped up the contrast everywhere through both making the values more diverse, and through hue shifts.
- Your two darkest blues and your two midtone blues were barely distinct, and the eye-blue was very similar to the blue of the hoodie. So, I replaced all your blues with just three: main, highlight, shadow.

With shading in particular, you'll notice I changed things quite a bit.
- Try to avoid highlights that are just one pixel wide or tall, as they don't read well. Think in terms of clusters, blobs of colours. The big highlights are much more noticeable, and help show the form.
- I added some folds to the front of the hoodie to make it look looser.  I also raised the shadow on the front pocket to make it look more like it's filled with his hands. You can get a lot of form definition in even at a small size like this by playing with the shapes of your shadows.
- IRL, humans have a harder time discerning details in shadows. In art, this means that it's often fine to leave details out of the shadows. In this case, I got rid of the separation between the hoodie and the shorts in the shadows, but the overall form still reads just fine.
- I got rid of the highlights on the left leg and arm because those areas should be getting less light. Having highlights everywhere tends to flatten things. Skipping highlights in areas further from the light can help create a better sense of form.
- I added some shadows on the face. The hood would cast some shadows on the forehead, and I added the pixel of shadow to the cheek to soften the shape of the face (it's less of a shadow, more AA).