Junk from school

[Rydin]

Yeah, so I have this class in school where I basically sit around and do nothing for days on end....and sometimes I open up the schools trusty "Apple Works 6" and goto the painting thing and ffff around.

They're all extremely messy and each only have about 30 minutes or less put into them, but all the students who don't know what pixelling is seem to get a kick out of them.

Comments and critiques welcome, though I highly doubt I'll change anything.


EDIT:
Oh, by the way, all but the "Chris" one were based off of references from the internet....I may muster up some strength later and get links.

[MoD]

I think the main issues here are flatness, high saturation, and antialiasing issues. In some areas, you do antialiasing that seems perfect, and I have no problem with (bottom of parrot's upper beak), while you only aa one pixel long in places where you need more. A good rule of thumb is halfway between the colors, halfway down the line it's aaing. Also it messes the look up if you only aa on one side of the line, but I can hopefully attribute that to time constraints.

The issue of flatness arises from the lack of consistent shadows and highlights. You have nce highlights in some pieces and then you don't do anything to show where light wouldn't hit. In other pieces, the opposite is true.

As for the saturation, what's the monitor and app like? Does the program have limitations or the monitor bad settings, or was it just that you couldn't be bothered?

[Rydin]

In some areas, you do antialiasing that seems perfect, and I have no problem with (bottom of parrot's upper beak), while you only aa one pixel long in places where you need more. A good rule of thumb is halfway between the colors, halfway down the line it's aaing. Also it messes the look up if you only aa on one side of the line, but I can hopefully attribute that to time constraints.

Yeah, the poor aa is mostly due to lack of true effort put into these, but also partly due to my lack of decent aa skills. I've been practicing on random shapes lately, and I think if I post more junk from school it, it should show (hopefully in all my pieces actually).

The monitors at school must be at some whacked out setting though, because a lot of the colors are different (lighter/darker) when I see them from home.  I'll take it into consideration to use more contrasting colors in the future, to hopefully address the issue of saturation and issue of lack of depth.

[Zolthorg]

Allow me to help 
This is a monitor calibration tool

http://epaperpress.com/monitorcal/

As for the fact that the computer is at school. On my standard network at school, i can hit ctrl+alt+f12 to open the graphics controller and adjust gamma.
Hope that works for you!

[Rydin]

Thank you Zolthorg, I found out that my home monitor even needed calibration; I'll be sure to callibrate at school.


Anyways, this is what I've been working on at home today (should really be pixelling for secret Santa, but oh well....):

It's kinda based on a dream I had a while back...but I'm really trying to focus on the antialiasing.  I have a backed up unAAed version, so I can start from scratch if it sucks.  Also my first piece that uses that blocky dither (possibly the last piece as well). 

Even though this isn't from school, I'd really love c&c on this one.