AuthorTopic: Gallery of Chaos! - New Member, Micro Creator  (Read 10216 times)

Offline KidChaos

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Re: Gallery of Chaos! - New Member, Micro Creator

Reply #10 on: January 25, 2007, 11:15:48 pm
Questions, then....

No Airbrush, Smudge, Magic wand, or the likes.... right?  Do I make it piece by piece or as a whole?  I would like to stay with the comic art, and the posing isn't all that important to me, so that will change...  I just have to make these things without all the special little tools.... :(       :-\

Well, it's going to take a lot of work, but I will try.  I will spend most of these opening weeks for me just checking on how you guys do things, and try to learn some new techniques, but I will make something shortly.  Then the real work can begin...

By the way, I really appreciated the comments on picking the lightsource.  It was something tangible that I can work on.  That's what I need.  Plus.... :-[ what does "dithered" and "anti-aliased" mean?  And, should I abandon the comfort of my Adobe?

Offline KidChaos

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Re: Gallery of Chaos! - New Member, Micro Creator

Reply #11 on: January 25, 2007, 11:18:45 pm
And ..... Hi, Wayuki.  It was your presence at MIB that caused me to take things a step further.  I'm glad to see you here!

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Re: Gallery of Chaos! - New Member, Micro Creator

Reply #12 on: January 25, 2007, 11:20:23 pm
basically you are right about the no smudge, airbrush and the tools like that.
pretty only the pencil tool
I am not sure about the magic wand because I don't use it

Dither is a type of shading
Good tut here http://spriteart.com/tutorials/01_dither.html

Anti Aliasing is the smoothing of edges
and a good tut is here http://spriteart.com/tutorials/01_AA.html

Offline fil_razorback

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Re: Gallery of Chaos! - New Member, Micro Creator

Reply #13 on: January 25, 2007, 11:44:36 pm
"And, should I abandon the comfort of my Adobe?"

You don't have too, some pixelers (including me) use it.

Offline Wayuki

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Re: Gallery of Chaos! - New Member, Micro Creator

Reply #14 on: January 26, 2007, 01:01:40 am
And ..... Hi, Wayuki.  It was your presence at MIB that caused me to take things a step further.  I'm glad to see you here!

Glad I could inspire.  ;)

I use Adobe for pixel art as well, it works just fine. You can use the magic wand tool if you uncheck the "Anti-alias" box and set the tolerance to zero. You can also use layers, as long as you keep them at 100% opacity and don't use any layer effects.

Offline sharprm

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Re: Gallery of Chaos! - New Member, Micro Creator

Reply #15 on: January 26, 2007, 01:10:44 am


I use graphics gale. Just set the pallete size to 16 colors and fixed some little things like the light source and stuff. I meant to say
antialias before.
Modern artists are told that they must create something totally original-or risk being called "derivative".They've been indoctrinated with the concept that bad=good.The effect is always the same: Meaningless primitivism
http://www.artrenewal.org/articles/Philosophy/phi

Offline ptoing

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Re: Gallery of Chaos! - New Member, Micro Creator

Reply #16 on: January 26, 2007, 01:51:14 am
Welcome to Pixelation

My 2 main concerns are the solid black outlines and the colourcount.

It looks like you have a base outline and then you just colour that with whatever colours.

This bit of the head in yours has 130 colours (with the bg) --- mine has 16 with bg


If you look at what I did you can see that firstly I removed the black outline and corrected the lightsource, straight from the top. Not that nice, slightly asymmetrical would be better but for the sake of the edit it will suffice.

Mainly there are 4 colourramps in the head:

- Skin
- Cap
- Golden rims
- Glasses

The skin can share the darker tones with the gold (the 2 brightest shades after the white for each are unique the darker colours after that are shared.
The brighter colours of the cap can be shared with dark colours of the skin and to antialias between the both as I did around the cheek area.

Now this leaves the glasses, for which i have 3 colours left, 2 of which also occur on the leather as highlights and the darker desaturated purpelish colour on the leather is in the glasses as well. We call this general technique tinting or rampmixing. When working with low colourcount and not for game with swapable palettes it is a good practise to do this, to maximise the use of the colours at hand, as well as giving a more unified, coherent look.

I also used som basic dithering to smooth out the transitions on the leather and to give it a kind of texture as well, show that it is a bit rough.

You wondered which tools you could used for pixelart: There is a consensus among many of us that as long as you have full control over every colour, and the placement of every pixel, then your art is pixelart. Any tool that generates new colours for you on it's own, such as soft brushes or layer effects can be considered dirty tools. Some more than others. So you can use the magic wand and similar selection tools as they have nothing to do with manipulation of pixels as such.

Hope this helps, feel free to ask if something is unclear.

Have a nice stay.
There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline KidChaos

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Re: Gallery of Chaos! - New Member, Micro Creator

Reply #17 on: January 26, 2007, 04:22:18 am
So, the fewer colors I use, the better off I am?  What is the purpose of that?  Is it the challenge?  I'm not understanding. 

As far as "dithering"...  That is okay, but the Smudge tool is not?

I just need clarification.  I am absorbing all of this info...

Lastly, The tools on Adobe, PSP, and those other programs were developed to make all of this work easier.  Why do you not use them?

Again, I'm just asking so I can learn the philosophy of the art...

Thank you, everyone.  You are all being VERY helpful!  This is helping me immensely, and I haven't even clicked one pixel yet!  This has been an incredibly supportive experience!

Offline Stwelin

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Re: Gallery of Chaos! - New Member, Micro Creator

Reply #18 on: January 26, 2007, 04:50:40 am
the reason pixel artists shun the tools that make things 'easy' is because they can also ruin a pixel piece. By placing each individual pixel you have control over everything, whereas if i draw a line and then smudge it, i have no idea how many different shades of that color have been created.

The idea behind color limitations is to do... a number of things, depending on how you look at it:
style: pixel art is a style of its own, and differs from CG. A lot of game developers will still use pixel art in games because the style is cleaner than CG work.
color theory: sometimes artists will limit themselves to a certain number of colors for a piece, and then see how many different effects they can create with only those colors just by changing the patterns of the "dithering." for example, if you were limited to a palette that had no skin-tone color, but it has a red and a white, and a yellow, you could interchange the pixels in some fashion to make it look like a skintone. here is a really good example of a restricted palette piece done by a member here: http://www.wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/index.php?topic=3059.0
limitation and size: when you limit colors, you drastically reduce the size of the image file. it's just basic logic. if you have less colors to define, you have less imformation in the file. this allows for faster loading in games that use pixel art, as well as allowing low-bit machines to process the art with no color loss.  For example, if you tried to display one of the works in your first post on a machine that could only render 16 colors at a time, it would give you an error saying that there are too many colors, or it would result in the loss of integrity of the artwork, whereas Ptoing's edit would render fine, as it has only 16 colors, and would generally look better under those circumstances. if you want to read into some more color limitations and things like that, head over to Wikipedia and search for a little machine called the "Commodore 64"

Hope this is... enlightening. :)
« Last Edit: January 26, 2007, 04:53:03 am by Stwelin »

Offline Sherman Gill

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Re: Gallery of Chaos! - New Member, Micro Creator

Reply #19 on: January 26, 2007, 04:55:53 am
Using fewer colors gives you better control over the little 'pool' you have.
Smudge is bad in all cases. Most professional artists will tell you never to use it. Ever.
Not using the 'shortcut tools' is good because they don't have the control or the heart of the simple tools.
Oh yes naked women are beautiful
But I like shrimps more haha ;)