My pixel art. Sprites/signitures etc

[skoby]

Greetings,
I am a self taught pixel artist, I have only posted a relatively small amount of my work here.  I have been pixeling for about 2 and a half years, but only every now and again.  I first started pixeling due to the game I play, pixel signitures became very popular and I joined the craze.  My first pictures were very plain and had little shading, but with time I have "poached" some techniques (I zoomed in on other pixel art and tried to replicate the shading) and it wasnt until about a year ago I found some good quality tutorials. 

Recently I have been looking more at more mainstream pixeling, and noticed that my dithering techniques are totally different to a lot of other artists and generally I rely more on different colours to dithering, only dithering to blur the boundaries, or to give texture.

If any experienced pixel artists could give me some critique and advise for developing my technique I would be very grateful.  I only have a handful of examples but they are all fairly recent works.



Excuse the photoshopped reflections, I did do a pixelated version originally but I felt it let the work down so i cheated



My favorite picture, and a self portrair of me and my girfriend in one of my favorite places.
and a WIP
I am having real problems with the sunset in this one, especially the change from orange to blue... any advise would be great

Here are some of my sprites and items all of these are at the very least a year old.  The game never really happened.  We were using a game engine (Konfuze or something) which was slightly modified by my friend.  It was abandoned due to frustration with the laggy software and constant problems with new versions of the software.

http://img172.echo.cx/img172/5174/items20056qs.png
http://img27.echo.cx/img27/6237/spritessofar9cm.png
http://img111.imageshack.us/img111/760/npcsvm7.png

Looking forward to some critique, also I know the forum rules say this isnt for ratings, I would appreciate some comments about the overal appearance as well as the technique

[robalan]

In general these aren't terrible, though they all suffer from oversaturated colors, lack of a clearly defined lightsource, and lack of polish.  Also, I recommend avoiding the spray can most of the time; it tends to be a bit uncontrolled and give the wrong texture.  I think if these were given a bit more attention to polish them, they could be pretty good.

Welcome to Pixelation; I'm sure that you'll learn a lot here; I know I have.

[inkspot]

Oh, I have seen lots of similar stuff. The problem with these things is that instead of quality, the presure is on quantity and size... Gosh. It has lots of undefined shapes and no depth at all. You should remember, that skill comes from small things, bit by bit, then you can make big things.

[skoby]

I have been experimenting with lower saturation, but never had too much success.  Can anyone reccomend some sites with tutorials and pallettes (i did have a site with loads of pallettes bookmarked but had to reformatt)

[edit] thought would add this here too, my interpretation of serenas linework.  How is the saturation in this one? think I got the balance about right

[robalan]

That's better with saturation, but it suffers from lack of contrast and roughness.  The folds in the skirt make no sense; they look more like a crumpled sheet of paper than a flowing piece of cloth.  The white/blue ramp could stand to get a bit darker at the bottom, and the red ramp could use a brighter highlight.  I'd recommend experimenting with hue shifting; your ramps are all very linear when it comes to hue.  Properly shifted, you could probably also use some colors across multiple ramps and conserve a few colors (not that that's necessary, but can make a piece more cohesive).  Keep it up!