Just starting in this pixel art dealy

[RPin]

Heya guys... I found pixel art some days ago and been trying my hand at it ever since. Ever since I was a kid I always wondered how games were made, and even though the only tool I use is photoshop right now, I'm eager to learn what techniques and tools are specific to the crafting of pixel art.

I've been looking through the images posted here and they rock. Hope I'll be able to get in touch with you all.

Anyways, not to start out by posting in the wrong bard, I will show something I just did. It's a Yuna sprite, Street Fighter style. (It is roughly bigger than the average SF spritem tho, I believe the standart there is around 95 px). I zoomed it 300% to make it look better:



Let me know where I need to improve.

[Xion]

Please, don't zoom the images for us. Images can be enlarged by clicking on them.

About the art; It looks .jpg'd. From what I can tell, it looks like her, perhaps styled like a sketch in Kirby's Dreamland-esque pastel strokes.
It'd be easier to crit this if it were smaller and more well compressed.

[Peppermint Pig]

We have a zoom feature built into the forum, so we may click and zoom on smaller works...


Your dark blue outlines are unbelievably choppy as to suggest that this was not pixelled, or was pixelled and then scaled. Also, in saving this at a larger size, I see dithering on some of the pixels, which suggests more than 256 colors present before you formatted  this for the web. Fighter sprites can be easily done with just 16 colors in most cases. You should start over with a clean outline and check some tutorials on sprite construction.

[RPin]

Ooops, my bad. I didn't know about the zooming feature. The original is here:



I don't think it is a compression issue, this was saved as a PNG 8 bit, so the colors should match the ones I was working on. I did clean up the outlines but that actually made the sprite look uglier, so I placed intentionally sparce dots outside it. I don't know if this is common procedure. I was looking on some SF and Darkstalkers sprites and it seemed to me some of them used this, but I could be wrong.

I did follow some tutorials from PAO and decided to show the results for criticism. I don't know, are there any tutorials in specific that you reccomend?

[Zach]

looks like you scaled it... idk what to say about this though, until i see something that looks like you pixeled it

[Crazy Asian Gamer]

Agreed. Appears to be shrunken down with anti-aliasing, and then, color-depth reduction'd. After all, those blue pixels in her hair look oddly out of place...

[Conzeit]

would you drop it already? I find it really unnecesary to state the same thing over and over. why not go and crit on a piece than you like, rathen than continue ranting the same damn thing here?