Critique > Pixel Art

thoughts on my kurama?

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daramon:
That's beautiful Keops. I love your style.

I made a couple of iterative steps working more on the front side of the beast. These are really quick and rough to demonstrate some ideas, not polished or finished.



Here I took your ear and smoothed off the outline. Previously you were creating a 'staircase' look (with double outline pixels at the steps) which looks blocky. If you want to make nice curves, avoid staircases and find a single pixel line. I also smoothed the forehead, getting rid of that big square corner.

Try to create curves by altering the number of pixels per "step" slowly and in sequence. So a curve of 3,3,2,2,1,1,1,2,2,3,3 would look good, but 3,2,3,2,2,3,2,2,1,2,1 etc. will look jagged. If you see what I mean. Making right angle with 2 pixels per side will also look jagged. If you need that explained more, just ask.



There were a few issues with the head IMO. I've tried to address some of them here.

 - It was completely side-on. I rotated it a bit and smoothed it off (using the curve rules above) to give the impression it's looking round at you. It's for the drama, dahling.
 - The mouth was a bit small to create a decent expression. I made it a bit bigger and tried to give it a little bit of a sneer.
 - The rear ear was a completely different shape to the front ear. I changed the shape of both to make them match a bit more, based on the artwork above.
 - I added some shading around the face. Under the eye (shadow), and to the side of the eye (furrowed brow).
 - I added a little lighter red and white to the eye, to make it stand out. I added a pink to help here.

The rest was creating some clumps of fur around the back of the face. They should act as an outline to separate the head from the body, and also start giving the impression of fur. Some of the outlines are a bit thicker to start giving the impression of shadow.



I've roughly placed the new head on the body. I think hunched shoulders will look a bit more menacing and a bit less like a well trained dog. :)

I've smoothed out the front paw and the back a bit as well, using the same rules as above.



Here's a first go at some clumps of fur across the back. Pull out the fur, add a shadow underneath. There were a couple of changes to the head fur and a bit of shadow under the ear. I added a new shade for that.



Now I started adding in shadow, taking into account the shape of the parts of the animal. This is really rough, I was running out of time! Still, the belly shadow starts to sell the impression of clumps of fur more; the top doesn't look quite as much like it's made of chiseled wood. Notice the shadow between the claws on the front paw, adding more 3D information.

These are just some ideas, I hope you find them useful. If you haven't read it yet, the fox thread in the featured section goes into a lot of anatomy, which really helped with the shape of the overall animal. If this was my piece I'd be starting off by moulding the shape of the beast to make it more convincing.

Keops:
Nice edits Daramon! If I had the time I'd probably tackle the whole piece and see how far it goes. It's probably a good candidate for making an inseanely detailed/flowy animation too. Good stuff. Hope the OP sees this and learns from it. I still learn or reinforce what I know by helping others so it's win-win :)

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