AuthorTopic: TRVE MASTERS OF NEBULAR FROST - unfinished indefinately  (Read 15411 times)

Offline Helm

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Re: TRVE MASTERS OF NEBULAR FROST - unfinished indefinately

Reply #10 on: November 01, 2005, 10:26:51 pm
no worries.

filax: by dither brush I am reffering to a mode in pro motion ( which can be done in psp and ps too I guess ) called 'dither' on which you can set patterns of dither and when you paint, it automatically ommits the 0 dither squares and paints the 1 squares. So you don't have to do manual dithering all the time. Of course, once you've dithered a bit as you want it with the dither mode, you switch back to normal painting and do any detail work you want on the dither, gradient it in and out of places, add noise so it's not only pattern dither, depends on what you want to do.

similarly, darken and lighten mode are modes in pro motion where when you click with your brush at places, instead of placing down the colour you've selected, it darkens the pixels beneath your pointer according to how much you've set the darken brush to in the options. This is a good tool, but it needs careful consideration in usage, as this is not photoshop, this is pixel art. Careful placement of pixels and very delicate control is paramount here. darken and lighten brushes are useful for when you've pixelled large areas of a texture, and then want to give shape to it by darkening slices or whatever of it without upsetting the detail work or repainting. In pro motion, you simply select the area you want to darken as a brush, and then click it once or twice to darken it. Then you tweak and perhaps dither in and out and voila, now it's darker, but it's not destructively edited.

Hope all this helps. You won't find paint modes in graphics gale, ms paint or the like. You will in deluxe paint, personal paint ( amiga ), gfx2 ( there's a windows build now ) and of course, Pro Motion, which I suggest.

Offline Godslayer

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Re: TRVE MASTERS OF NEBULAR FROST - unfinished indefinately

Reply #11 on: November 01, 2005, 10:47:55 pm
As far as I'm concerned, you win at life. I lover reading all your posts and looking at the art you crank out, its all very inspiring to me. :o
How long can the floor creak before it loses its voice?

Offline Darion

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Re: TRVE MASTERS OF NEBULAR FROST - unfinished indefinately

Reply #12 on: November 02, 2005, 01:18:28 am
You are so intelligent. Beautiful job, BUT where the shadow ends under his left arm, the line is a bit pillowshaded. Was this intentional to give a fuzzy look? If so, good idea; if not ... well, it looks good anyway.

God, I love all the speculars eveywhere.
@darionmccoy

Offline miascugh

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Re: TRVE MASTERS OF NEBULAR FROST - unfinished indefinately

Reply #13 on: November 02, 2005, 08:22:49 pm
heh, i sure am glad that i kinda served as a source of inspiration for this piece (or have i?), nice nebular frost around his head :). it does good to see when an artist goes about his work with such a sense of what he/she's doing, which unfortunately is only worth mentioning here because when it comes to pixel art it seems to be a rarity (in the english speaking communities i know of). even though i've been making myself scarce recently i have to say that i enjoy this place the most of all pixelart related hideouts on the net (not that i get around too much anyways), mostly also because i usually can agree with the rest about considering someone a great pixelpusher and that with a feeling that his/her pushery is appreciated for the right reasons.

seeing such eye candy once in a while really makes me wish that more people with much more of an artistic background than most of us teenagers doing it just for the kicks of it (surely with a good deal of aspiring and becoming artists amongst it, just no made craftsmen yet) would bear with this rather underrepresented media...

ok, back to trying to get away from pixelart ;)

Offline Filax_666

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Re: TRVE MASTERS OF NEBULAR FROST - unfinished indefinately

Reply #14 on: November 02, 2005, 08:29:12 pm
Thanks for explaining Helm  :)

I use Pixen, and it only has the basic tools, no tricks or stuff like that.I agree that a dither brush IS helpful when youre doing such a huge thing like this one. Once more, a remarcable work.

Offline Helm

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Re: TRVE MASTERS OF NEBULAR FROST - unfinished indefinately

Reply #15 on: November 02, 2005, 09:42:54 pm
mia : you know your avatar started all this :P

about sense of purpose and control of form: most people who branch out to demoscene artwork and generally don't stick to game-art related pixel art have to give more thought to how they do things. Look at what Ptoing or Pep are doing... I too sometimes get tired of the 'I'm making game sprites! woo hoo! they'll jump around and... shoot stuff!' type of mentality. In that, there's nothing wrong with game art, but even then there is an underlying aesthetic to consider and to accentuate if you can. The big problem is not in inherent in art that is for games, then. It is in that the people that try to make it, are aping the style of the games they liked, without deeper understanding of the themes and processes that created them. This is not a call for 'originality!'. I know better than that. It's more that I'd like to see game art or whatever art by people with more critical understanding of what makes stuff work than just 'it looks nice... I liked it in other games... might as well, huh?'  There's only so much to gain from making yet another japanese-style rpg with graphics just like final fantasy or secret of mana after all. People are too busy trying to make nostalgia-fodder to consider computer aesthetic and the such. The demoscene was more left-field than that, but not all the time either.

However, to be fair, this is still just a joke picture about black metal. So it's not like I'm practicing what I'm preaching here a lot. There's smart stuff going on in the aesthetic, but it's otherwise quite vacant art. Which is why I gave up on it mostly. The other half was that I succeeded in pixelling the textures and stuff I wanted to do. Flesh, leather, hair, nebular frost. From then and onwards it was just a matter of doing MORE of it. And that's boring for me, at this stage.

Offline Conzeit

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Re: TRVE MASTERS OF NEBULAR FROST - unfinished indefinately

Reply #16 on: November 03, 2005, 02:40:41 pm
I absolutley know what you're talking about Helm, and I agree a with it all, except the statement that Demoscene was that much better, afterall it progressed based in technical feats and was mostly copy work....

I always try to create a new kind of aestethic statement with every piece I do, as unsuccesfull as I may be.

about your piece, I totally agree with you, smart stuff going on with the skintones, and I really like the expression, but this is one of those pieces where the sums of the parts is lesser than each one of them on their own, since as  you said there wasnt ea very important binding theme, just some quick inspiration.

I dont understand how you got "bored" of gameart anyway, except for that flashack mock up I didnt really see any gameart anyway. you should really give animation a try before you say that, it is quite a freeing form of expression.

Offline Helm

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Re: TRVE MASTERS OF NEBULAR FROST - unfinished indefinately

Reply #17 on: November 03, 2005, 10:16:45 pm
Demoscene was at least marginally better because they looked to more varied sources for inspiration than OMG LOL FINAL FANTASY LOL. In the very least. Copies? Yeah, copies. At least they were copies of great artists, not final fantasy. And there's a lot of work that isn't copy work too.

A big agreement on the loss of the sum in regards to the part, nailed it on it's head about the lack of message and defining theme. Not every picture needs these, but some do.

I got 'bored' of empty game art. Mimed game art just like the game art before it, made to be stuck in games that will be like the games before them. I still make a lot of games ( which I don't advertise here ) so I do my fair share of game art, and a lot of animation. Neither bored with it all, or done with it all at any stretch.

Offline Darien

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Re: TRVE MASTERS OF NEBULAR FROST - unfinished indefinately

Reply #18 on: November 03, 2005, 11:04:43 pm
You make it sound like everyone who makes game art is a Final Fantasy fanboy, Helm.  Although, that is true that many people who get into pixel art do so because they want to make a game (generally RPGs) and to do so they study what they would logically study: art in a video game.  I'm not going to get into why people want to make games and why it's always an RPG, but it would not be at all logical to start out by going, "Hmm, in order to make art for this game, why don't I get some inspiration from the Impressionist era."  I believe that the best place for an aspiring game artist to start would be a video game.  Not that's where that artist should stay; on the contrary, they should explore all types of art.  But to get on an artist's case by looking at Final Fantasy or any other video game for inspiration because he wants to make game art is rediculous.  Especially since it's hard to create an aestitic statement in an art medium when you don't have a firm grasp of that medium yet.

Offline Helm

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Re: TRVE MASTERS OF NEBULAR FROST - unfinished indefinately

Reply #19 on: November 03, 2005, 11:09:20 pm
"Hmm, in order to make art for this game, why don't I get some inspiration from the Impressionist era."

that sounds so awesome. Someone make that game.

But on a more serious note: the generic anime aesthetic of these japanese rpgs has little depth most of the time even in it's ORIGINAL state. Immitations of that by 19 year old americans can only stand to become even more vacuous. Sorry. What can I say? I no longer am interested in rpgs with the valiant blue-haired knight with cross scar on his cheek and huge sword and the blonde fairy girl with the cat ears and the evil cape guy with the overdone shoulderpads. Sorry. Game art can be more than this.

Also sorry if I wasn't clear: looking at video games for inspiration for video games for me is fine. Looking just a little deeper though, to see the machine aesthetic, is more of what i'm talking about. Looking at resolution. Squares. Aspect ratios. Refresh rates. Scanlines. antiquated palettes like EGA or c64 colours... there's a special history and something very intimately ABOUT computers in video games that shouldn't just be conviniently brushed aside are replaced by quick-CG-just-like-anime-lol!
« Last Edit: November 03, 2005, 11:13:14 pm by Helm »