girl in dress

[ndchristie]

the dress should typically be as much brighter as the skin in shadow as it is brighter than the skin in light, but in the shadow, your dress becomes far darker by comparisson.



in all though, very nice work.

[Wayuki]

Edit on the hair:

[Zomby138]

wow! nice! that is awesome, thank you very much, I will study this.

[notoalpena]

she got some big ol titties haha 
looks great

[Dusty]

she got some big ol titties haha 
looks great

I don't quite mind one liners that much when the art posted is great, but this kind of one liner is terrible and immature.

Anyways, I think the darkness 'inside' her dress should be darker than the shades being used outside, instead of the same. Gives a weird sense of depth. Also, her eyes look crooked.

[Faceless]

I quite like this (especially after Adarias' edit) but I think you really need to work on the lighting, and form of her left leg - the boot in particular.
I also think the legs could do with some outlining.

[Helm]

edit of the edit of the edit. Here's why pixel art is more complicated than it looks.

You're working very methodically. You have three shades for this and for that, you put the light shade on the dark shade and you buffer with the midshade. But shapes may require the usage of the midshade as the main shade. And palettes can share colors which could work on more than one context. Colors in the same ramp may share hue and value, they might not. Mixing things up might lead to good things.

The breasts were verging on ridiculous in my opinion. Especially on the first view (the one I didn't edit). Gratuity just offends me not because I can't deal with big breasts (there's real women with huge breasts out there) but because this isn't a woman. This is a video-game sprite, and as such it is an outlet for some semiotic content which is very stylized and selected by the creator of the artwork. When I see a real woman with big breasts, I am looking at a whole person with innumerably many and unfathomably complex signifiers. When I see this I see 'figher sprite' 'pixel art' 'huge boobs' 'elaborate dress'. That's pretty much it. So yeah, in this context, the boobs are kind of meh. If you had drawn a more realistic human female (not an anime face, wearing clothes that I could connect with something else than an anime) I could take the bigger boobs easier because they'd just be part of a personality. As such, they're there inspite of a personality, especially with that blank non-emotive face you had going in the original.  The face is an anime face but could be made to be an anime face with more character, so as to emote better, I feel. I tried. Excuse that she's looking at the viewer with kind of a condescending look, that's where the edit took me.

The forearm was huge, perhaps.

[The B.O.B.]

   Wow, this is pretty good. Also like how people are coming out of the wood work with their edits. To be honest, this piece, including all other edits, seem to make the character flat. The dress itself shows no depth, at least in my eyes. I understand that there is a light directly above her shining down, but that still doesn't mean that all parts of her dress will be completely lit up. In fact, when light hits something, it reflects off, and immediately becomes weaker when bouncing off non-reflective surfaces. In this case, the above light source has to hit the head, shoulders and boobs first. These body parts should shadow over the other "layers" of her body below (hope that made sense...). Any who, I had my go at it, to describe what I'm trying to get at:



   Now I know you didn't want the dresses style to change, but I felt the narrow rims on the outer helm was too boring. Ladies need flare, ya' know. So I decided to add some ruffles to the dress. I also decided to give her some breast reduction surgery, as dem' burbs' were spilling over. Changed the eyes and hair a bit also. Obviously, it's not a fairly good edit, but I just wanted to get the point of depth across. If it's too much of a style thing, than ignore this edit all together. All in all, though, great work. Can't wait to see this done...

[Zomby138]

hi, thanks bob and helm for the edits.  I'm really surprised about how everyone is reacting to the boobs, I really didn't think they were that big, certainly not big enough to warrant a short essay on aesthetics.

@ helm first.  I need to keep my different ramps separate and not use colours from different ramps in different parts of the sprite so that alternative ramps can be chosen for the hair or skin without messing everything up, so I can't really mix things up like that, everything I do seems to be really methodical, you're right, I guess that's what you get for being a mathematician.

I find it very interesting that you look at her and see "fighter sprite", what about her makes you think she's a fighter ?  I sure wouldn't expect her to be throwing punches, and she's definitely not stood in a fighter-sprite "stance" or anything.

I never really set out to make her an anime character either, as digital painter I've always done a psudo-realistic-ish style, and never anime, the methodical cell shading style that I seem to have adopted for this kinda led me to it I guess... that's the first face I've ever put on a sprite btw, I really didn't (and still don't) have a clue how I would have gone about making it look non-anime, I guess it wouldn't fit in with the cell shading style I have going on (which I want to keep btw, as it is very easy to do and as such will speed things up no end when animating, considering that animating will be the main thing I'll be doing when things get moving, no pun intended).


@ bob.  I am infact up for design suggestions for the dress as well as technical things, and I really like the ruffles you added, I think they look great, although I worry that having something like that might be biting off more than I could chew for when it comes to animation, also you have definitely improved on the lighting/form, I will be trying to improve on that in my version.  I'm surprised you both think the forearm is too big, we'll see about that.  I quite like what you did with the hair as well, although I think you've used the most light colour more than I would have done.

thanks a lot for your time and edits :)

[Helm]

I need to keep my different ramps separate and not use colours from different ramps in different parts of the sprite so that alternative ramps can be chosen for the hair or skin without messing everything up, so I can't really mix things up like that, everything I do seems to be really methodical, you're right, I guess that's what you get for being a mathematician.

I think the benefits of color shifts are so few as compared to an interesting palette going on that I would suggest manually remapping the different palettes you need by hand, and not having hue-switchable 3-color ramps. It doesn't take too much time, and it looks much much better.

I find it very interesting that you look at her and see "fighter sprite", what about her makes you think she's a fighter ?  I sure wouldn't expect her to be throwing punches, and she's definitely not stood in a fighter-sprite "stance" or anything.

What else could she be? It's the physique, the costume, the boots, the flat planar, everything, really. if she didn't have shoulderpads, has a uncut dress, was wearing shoes that fit a regal dress, wasn't taking eyes out with her nipples, wasn't color-mapped for hue-shifts for player 2 she could be a princess in a different sort of game, perhaps.

I really didn't (and still don't) have a clue how I would have gone about making it look non-anime,

It is difficult, but doable. If you want an edit I'll try. I'll probably end up taking away facial features because in that size a single pixel is just too much for a nose or whatever especially if we're talking high-contrast that celshading has, which burns out a lot of detail.