Beginner - Lights, shadows, borders etc.

[Zanorin]

From my experience you probbaly should create one new thread per art piece, or else it'll become confusing and you'll get less feedback.

[eishiya]

From my experience you probbaly should create one new thread per art piece, or else it'll become confusing and you'll get less feedback.

I disagree. It's much easier to effectively critique things when there's easy access to earlier work and critique, to see what the consistent problems are and how the artist has responded to them.
What's confusing is when someone wants critiques on multiple pieces at the same time, instead of posting one, getting it done, then posting another in the same thread.

I think Kroan did the smart thing here though, since it sounds like they're not looking for specific help for each piece, but are looking for feedback on what they're doing poorly consistently.

[Zanorin]

You probably know these sort of things better than I do considering you posted 10 times more than me haha. I guess I was thinking that, if a person has already visited a certain topic and is not interested in it, that person probably won't visit that same topic again even if he sees it's been updated, since he doesn't know there's brand new art in it.

[Kroan]

Ok so I will try to continue here. If there's not enough response I'll try with a new one.

I dared to do my very first character sprite. It's supposed to show a young man (around 20) with some headphones around his neck.
What do you think? Anything to do better? I admit that I followed a tutorial but I changed a lot. Different shirt, different hair, different eyes, happier, a bit more muscular . I also tried to give it a bit more comic like look (The tutorial one especially the face looks to realistic for me)

This is my sprite:


And this is the tutorial version (just for the comparsion):


Thank you and many greetings

Kroan

[eishiya]

The character looks off-balance, like he's going to fall backwards.

The things you didn't copy are the hue-shifting and good contrast - the stuff that's really helpful. The smaller the sprite, the more contrast you generally need for the different colours to read well.

The headphones are smaller than his ears. You exaggerated the head size, why not also exaggerate the headphones?

[Kroan]

Thank you eishiya.

Here is my second try



I tried to move the character a bit forward. I also used darker and lighter colors to give a better contrast, was it what you meant?
I increased the size of the headphones but I'm not 100% confident with the positioning of it.

Greetings

Kroan

[eishiya]

This is better!

You can create contrast through more than just darker/lighter colours, you can also use the hue. Changing the hues of the shadows not only creates contrast, it makes the colours feel livelier.

The character's neck blends into their chin. I recommend putting the neck in shadow, so that it's clearly distinct from the chin.

[Kroan]

Thank you one more time eishiya!

I made a version where I tried to work with the hue shifiting



also I made the neck darker you were right about that one.

Thanks and greetings

Kroan