Critique my cow please

[Zenobia]

For the Pixeljoint challenge ^_^



It has a stunning 37 colours, but nevermind that.
I really like my idea, hoewever, sadly it turned out a lot less nice than it should have. What reaaally bothers me is that I can't get the text to look right... tried to pixel it myself, tried about 20 pixel fonts... just... crap.
Also YES it's a .png file because I'll .gif it when it's finished. Sorry about that. And do you think I need to add blood?

[AdamAtomic]

nothing wrong with .png files, they use indexed colors just like .gif files.  However, your'e wasting a LOT of shades on the cow without actually communicating much in the way of volume or real shape.  Its horns look more like caterpillars than horns, and the eyes appear to be like glowing golden nuggets?  The nostrils are superdark too, which is kind of weird.  Also, just curious about even whats going on - two thick-handled, triangular knives + a cow = cheese?  Very confused!

[ptoing]

Also 8bit png files are in most cases smaller than gifs, but most programs do not attempt to compress them as good as possible (photoshop is especially crap at it).
Google for pngout which is a nice little commandline tool to reduce the size of pngs drastically in many cases.

[Zenobia]

nothing wrong with .png files, they use indexed colors just like .gif files.  However, your'e wasting a LOT of shades on the cow without actually communicating much in the way of volume or real shape.  Its horns look more like caterpillars than horns, and the eyes appear to be like glowing golden nuggets?  The nostrils are superdark too, which is kind of weird.  Also, just curious about even whats going on - two thick-handled, triangular knives + a cow = cheese?  Very confused!

Haha I'll fix the horns. And nostrils.

And it's strange because I was wondering if it was clear enough myself... and the three people I asked all said it was perfectly fine.
Maybe they were trying to be nice ^^; shouldn't trust friends.

Also my comment regarding the .png file... I meant that the white looks stupid on this dark background ^^; I was just talking about transparancy, not file size etc.

Edit: did this help any?
I'm a bit fuzzy on how to change the colours and the shading... but I did edit the horn and nostrils.

[AdamAtomic]

.png files also support transparency 

[Zenobia]

Ok re-try:

Whenever I don't make a file transparant I save it as .png
For no reason at all.

But this is all kinda besides the point? Since my cow still sucks.

[Gas 13]

You can replace text with icons of cheese with green V and meat with red X 

[Zenobia]

You can replace text with icons of cheese with green V and meat with red X 

I was considering that actually.
If you think that's better I'll give it a shot.

edit:
Doon't ask a vegetarian to try to pixel meat ^^;



edit II: running out of time, so I submitted it.
I suppose this topic can be locked or something.