[WIP-ish] My first Pixel Art Monstrosities!

[keantoken]

Helloes, everyone.

I just recently registered after discovering that I'm not too bad at pixel art (Or am I...?). I started somewhere around a month ago, when trying to make some sprites for Cortex Command at http://www.datarealms.com/. Before that, I played Cave Story all the time and gained n interest in tile-based level construction. I play a lot of old games, namely Super Metroid, the Megaman X series,

Since then, I've been testing myself a bit with different spur-of-the-moment challenges arising from sudden urges to bring up Graphics Gale (free edition). Here I'll show you my few current monstrosities. Feel free to critique and suggest.

Most of these were purely pixel-pushed, with some small use of the line tool and sometimes the rectangle tool.

I believe this is my first serious endeavor, though I'm not sure. I was inspired by the spikes on Megeman X6, and was drawing these as sort of concept for something for Cortex Command.



I believe this is my second, though I'm still not quite sure. This was for a mod for Cortex Command but I can't release the details for fear that someone from Datarealms might take a peek. My inspiration was my deep freeze and those thick metal boxes that supposedly carry nukes that you see all the time on movies.



This one is concept[?] for a game I'm programming that I'm calling FlopNinja for now. It's pretty old and now it's kindof obsolete for what I've got going, but it's an honorable mention since it's supposedly my third serious pixel art endeavor.



These two are things I just sorta did on the spur of the moment. The one on the left is the original, and I edited it a bit on the right, because I thought about using it as a banner and I needed to make it look just a bit more sinister. My reference for these was a spare stereo cord I had just laying around, and had been itching to try and draw in Graphics Gale. I used the line tool to make most of the lines, though I pixel-pushed most of it.

 

So, how likes?

 - keantoken

[keantoken]

Really?

Drawing those sort of things isn't really in my style, but then again I guess I haven't developed much of a style yet. My brother told me I got the metallic sheen down pretty well. To me it looks very close to those high-fidelity gold-plated and polished cable connectors where they're so smooth that they're like a mirror made of gold.

I could go into detail about all the various audio connector types and their designs, including RF filtering implementations, as I'm just as elaborate (to my budget's extent) with my audio. I enjoy composing using sequencers on my computer.

But whatever.

Anyone else got something to say?

 - keantoken

[robalan]

I'm not sure what the other reply said, though I guess it was either ass-esque or a one-liner, since it has since been deleted, so I'll say something productive.

The spikes look like spikes, but they look like something done in a couple minutes, lack contrast, and don't really say "Hey, I'm a sharp spike; don't land on me!" to me.  Perhaps they'd be better in context, but standalone they don't really appeal to me.

I have no idea what that second thing is, so I won't even try to critique it other than to say that it could probably use more contrast, whatever it is.

The shirt looks like a shirt, though it would probably be a good idea to clean up the lines (remove "jaggies" and double-pixels) before trying to color it.

The stereo cords are the best of these by far.  I could immediately tell what they were, they aren't lacking contrast, and they show a good sense of how light reflects off things.  However, there are still a couple things that probably want tweaking.  Specifically, the red cord suffers harshly from banding.  Banding is when the bands of color all line up and emphasize the jaggedness of the pixel medium.  Here's an edit to show how to take care of it:

Note that that was a very quick edit and I'm sure it could be cleaned up better, but you get the idea.  The same concept probably wants to be applied to the spring-looking area, since it also suffers from banding.  Also, I'm not quite sure where your lightsource is in this one.  The lighting of the metal implies that light is coming from the top of the image, but the cord is pillow-shaded, with light coming from the viewer.  If light is indeed coming from the top, the shading of the cord needs to be revised.

[Sherman Gill]

Aight. I did an edit too.

Arrow A points to how I added a dark line to the bottom of the the cord things end. This is because there's really not anything that could be reflecting light onto the tip at that range.
Arrow B is about consistency. The left side of the object has no outline on top, so the cord shouldn't either.
You also need a stronger lightsource. It appears to be... a little below the viewpoint in the picture, which should never be! It also doesn't appear consistent. In mine, the lightsource is coming from above, although moved a little closer towards the viewpoint

[keantoken]

Ah, thanks for the crit!

Yeah, I knew the light source was messed up but for some odd reason (no idea what it was), I decided to leave it that way. I know it wasn't laziness because I would have easily gone in and revised it. About the banding, that was somewhat intentional, because I just kinda liked the look of it. But I Anti-aliased it anyways. I had to AA because I was running out of room on my palette.

About my light sources, I was studying my reference in my bedroom, where there are three light sources: my turtle aquarium behind me and slightly below my head, my ceiling light, and the huge window to my left. That's probably the reason it turned out that way. Too many light sources! XD

But I've revised it based on everyone's crits (thanks!) and hopefully it looks much better than before. About the spring-thingy, I couldn't do anything to make it look less blocky because doing so would destroy the clarity. So, I used the little pixels to my advantage and dinged up the coil so it looked more realistic the way it seemed to just shift in one direction.



 - keantoken