characters- mana style

[uridicy]

I've always really liked the Secret of Mana characters, so I got bored today and made this two little characters.

[Turbo]

Nice readibility, including for zoom at 1x, and nice palette. The rounded protuding chest area tells me they're both women (although the bottom one in somewhat dubious, has a less round head, slightly more masculine), is that right?

Only pick i have is that the texture on the green one's pants doesn't quite read as stripes (which i think was the intended texture). The diagonal lines on the left read as dithering, to me at least.

[uridicy]

    Ok, so I've been doing pixel art for like 7 years now, but I'm not so familiar with the terminology.  I'm sure I do some dithering, but I'm not sure exactly what it means and what people generally use it for.  I also know what antialiasing is, but I'm not really sure how/why it's used for characters.  This guy from a mobile phone company was talking to me about my pixel art at the game developers conference in San Francisco,  and he asked me if I did anti-aliasing in my characters/tiled backgrounds.   I thought my characters and tiles were generally too small to need anti aliasing.  I mean how long does a line have to be before you say it's anti aliased?  Do you think there's any anit aliasing in these 2 characters?

Any clarification about the these terms would be really helpful.

Aside from that, the bottom one is suppose to be a younger male, of course it's harder to tell with that long hair.

[Turbo]

Anti-aliasing is when you smoothen a line that appears jagged, by adding intermediate colors (intermediate being 1 or more colors inbetween the line and the background's color). If you can see a jagged line, and it's considerably noticeable, anti-aliasing (AA for short) should be applied. Preserving line thickness should be a concern while using this technique, though.

Dithering is when you have two colors and you apply them to an area in a checker-like pattern (or some close variation of this) to create the impression of a third color (mostly used for color conservation). Similar to cross-hatching on physical/non-pixel media.

Regarding the size for a line to require anti-aliasing, i think it's more of an organic thing, if you can see something that looks too abrupt and spoils the effect you want, you go in and smooth it, regardless of it's size. Probably more related to contrast and palette choice than anything else.

I think there's a wiki in progress with most of these concepts explained, but i've never been able to find information there, i didn't find it very browsing-friendly so i don't recommend it.