What do you think about those characters ?

[Xenon02]

Hi guys !
I came back to drawing pixel art. My friend asked me about doing our first video game about our decisions (for now I'm trying to help my friend with coding, and drawing some things)

Can you guys check out how it looks like ?
I've tried to use some "shading" but I don't know if it's looks ok. My friend said that's ok but I know that maybe I should adjust some things.

[SilverBrick]

Here’s a tweaked version:



I think the three main takeaways here are the direction of the light, the volume of the character, and HSV shifting.

Light should always (usually) shine from a specific direction. In your case, it seems to be somewhere off in front of the character, to the right of the canvas; however the shoulders and hair contradict this. If you shade under the arms and the highlight the right side of the hair instead of the left, the sprite looks more consistent so it’s easier to tell what’s going on.

When you shade a character, you’re literally telling your audience “This is the bit that’s in shadow”. If your shading is only one pixel wide (on a big sprite, that is), that suggests that your character is paper-thin, which probably isn’t actually the case. If you widen the shaded area, it gives a better idea of the character’s volume.

Finally, HSV shifting sounds like a crazy technical thing, but it really isn’t. All it means is taking the color of light into account. During the day, the sun shines yellow, so you want your highlights to be yellow-ish, and your shadows to have less yellow (or more blue) in them. Mortmort has a great video on choosing colors that I recommend here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhgSM_tnPM4

A few misc things:

I messed with the positioning of the right arm. I think it’s personal preference which you think is better, just thought I’d put it out there.

Always exaggerate colors. They tend to look over-the-top close-up (the skin tones certainly did), but when you zoom out they’ll fit together better. If it still looks bad when you zoom out, that’s when you tone them down.

I continued the pattern on the clothes into the shadowed area. Again, personal preference.

I only HSV shifted the skin and shirt. The hair, pants etc haven’t been done. Then again, the pants are already blue so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And of course you have the other sprites.

I noticed an extra shade of blue on the pants, which could be easily replaced by the other one.

I noticed that the pattern on the left and right side of the shirt is uneven, so I went ahead and mended that.

Hope I helped! I know I had a lot of criticism, but I really do think they look great, and I especially love the question mark tee on the little guy! They just need a little refining is all.

[Xenon02]

Hope I helped! I know I had a lot of criticism, but I really do think they look great, and I especially love the question mark tee on the little guy! They just need a little refining is all.

I was hopping that someone will critique my work
I was struggeling with the colors, so this video helped me atleast how can I ("level" down or up those color depending on the light (dark area, bright area))

I tried to make the same color pattern according to your correction (find those colors on my own. It's pretty unfair to use already finished art without struggeling with it )
Filling this gap between arm and body is a really good idea (it just look a lot better) + deleting outlines (I was just used to my old works )

This is my second attempt (also I fixed a bit this kid, I think it looks pretty decent now.)



and I tried to make this guy look better but I have a filling that his arm is kind a off. Maybe it's just me. I'll try to change it
later, this is just a leak (don't edit it !!!)



PS. I also thought about changing a bit his arm (her is a second version)

[Xenon02]

Here is a modyfied version.

What do you think about that ?





What do you think about this color pick ?

[billywon]

Here is a modyfied version.

What do you think about that ?





What do you think about this color pick ?

I think this modified version looks much better than the previous one.