hood [Finished?]

[Snippa]

                                         
(original) (1st edit) (2nd edit) (final edit) (final edit +1) (final edit +2)

Have been tweaking & retweaking this thing all morning.
More or less trying to make the hood look more like cloth.

Changed up the colors to fit my tastes, gave a bit of a gradient to the top of the hood to make it feel more like there was actually a light source.
Maybe I should use more bland colors? heh
I dunno, feel free to post your thoughts on it.

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edit: Am I never completely satisfied? lol
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Other edits in this thread (most aren't mine):

[ejay]

I like where it's going, the new version is already quite an improvement over the previous one, in my opinion.
I think the main problem right now is that it's too noisy, which makes the forms a bit difficult to read. Try shading the larger forms first, and add details only after they are readable .
I did a quick paint-over (pixelover) to show my point:

You can see that I removed a lot of the texture but kept hints of it in some areas such as the beard and top of the cap, I think it's more readable this way.
And on a sidenote- I only used colors from your original palette, but managed to reduce the color count from 24 to 13 (and it can definitely be reduced further). It's not crucial if you're not actually developing work for a technically limited hardware , but I find that limiting my palette makes me think differently about the use of color and the ways colors interact in a pixel based piece, It's something worth paying attention to .

[Snippa]

Hmm, thanks, I'll see what I can do to make it look better. You're definately right about it being noisy... getting rid of the texture itself seems to have helped out the most.
You also did a hell of alot better job with shading the face than I did, I'll have to work on that a bit as well.

Thanks for the tips.

[Snippa]

Some edits, removed the noise on the hood completely. Couldn't get a decent wrinkle effect that I liked.
Did a little bit of editting to the face based off your edits ejay, not major, but I don't want it to look like there is too much light hitting the face.
I got a bit distracted while I was working on it, I'll probably do some more edits later.

[Atrophy]

To me without zooming in i thought the beard/hair was blood so maybe changing the colors of that may help it out a little bit
But for the hood all the cits i can suggest had already been suggested.

[Overkill]

Looks good, but man, that palette! It's hurting this piece a lot. So here's a rough edit where I experimented with the colors a bit, and tried to make the hood more cloth-like:

[Terley]

I prefer the original palette.

(as in snippa's latest versions' palette.)

[Snippa]

Cleaned it up a bit, reduced the color count to 13, did a bit more work on the face.
No amazing changes really, but unless someone else has any suggestions I think I'm ready to call this finished... at least until I start work on a body

Overkill: your palette makes me want to cry, definately not what I'm going for, and far from my personal tastes.. aside from that though, your edit does look decent.

Thanks everyone for your input, it is definately appreciated.

[Oceans Dream]

I still think it could use some work. I don't like the extreme ditheryness of the hood, especially since the other parts have like about 4 or so colors each. Pretty good job with the face itself, though!

If you really wanted to reduce the palette, I got it down to 8 (Which includes the background color) by using the same colors for the skin as it is in that hood stripes things (I don't know what they're called). You don't have to, especially if you're not limited by colors.

I added a bit of saturation to the skin colors, I found them a bit too unsaturated for my tastes. So, here's my edit. Also added a bit of contrast, I love contrasty colors. I also liked Ejay's edit. You could even learn from Overkill's edit, perhaps not by the palette colors, but how it's done.

[kakikukeko]

nice character Snippa, and good progression 
I think you can work a bit more on it tho.. the main problem I see on it, is the lighting;  it's hard to see (by the lighting) that the head is hiding under the hood..

I kind of suck at sprites so I thought it would be a good exercise for me too 
so here my attempt to explain what I meant..
(I started from your 2d edit and got it down only to 16 colors)


I changed the shape of some stuffs more for my taste than for good ^^ but I hope it may be helpfull