Guardian (CC appreciated)

[jimmay]

This is a sample piece and is about as finished as I can say. I spent around 3 hours toying with the form and about 2.5 actually pixelling it. It was a lot of fun for me to draw and labelling the features brought back elementary school memories. : )



Any comments and critiques welcome!

[Terley]

Maybe a bit too much dithering for metal but looks good.. I really think you could up the contrast on this, add a lighter shade for highlights or even take the time to do a bit of research on metal. It would really bring this to life. Theres so much more you can do with 14 colours.

[bengo]

A bit of an edit, got rid of some moar colors, more contrast between metal colors especially, to show its metal-ness.

[Faktablad]

Dithering is used to blend colors, but it also has the side effect of producing a grainy texture, especially when it's used in a small space.  The dithering you have on the robot hurts the impression that it's made of metal because it adds texture to what should otherwise be a smooth surface.  At this scale, it's probably more valuable to have the metal read as being metal than to have proper color blending.  So I'd say use smooth shading with high contrast and no dithering.  Also, metal is reflective, so think about in what kind of environment this robot will exist.  The metal should reflect the colors and lighting of the environment.  Check out this reference picture of stainless steel to see what I mean.  The metal isn't just shades of gray, but there are also some bright yellows and subtle blue hues in there as well, and that occurs as a result of the metal object reflecting light from its environment.  So in your picture you might want to infuse some hue shifts where the gray moves slightly towards a different color.

[huZba]

The shapes on the midle part are really hard to read cause it seems to be in a different perspective compared to other parts. The guns are straight top-down and the eye is tilted a bit. I suggest you give everything a consistent perspective matching the eye. Add in a secondary lightsource to have more to play with when trying to achieve shiny stuff. The palette is kinda dull too. Try and think of the place where this guy is going to be and what kind of colors are hitting it. It's very neutral at the moment. You have some great reference pictures and good advice to play with so lets see you grind this to the next level 

[jimmay]

So I looked at it more closely and it doesn't look as good as I thought it did. Probably because I was just relieved I finished it (did it all in a sitting ).
Yeah I agree the perspective is quite messed up. It was originally meant to be top down. The missile pod is mounted 45 degrees, but the rest is really not clear. Palette definitely needs some tweaking and I probably dithered more than I have every done in any single pixelart scrap... not sure why it happened, it just did.

The one thing that's always been conflicting me is that it seems the norm for "good" pixelart is to be high contrast and fairly bright and shiny with lots of colors. But I want to make a piece realistic, so to say. And real metal is hardly ever immaculately perfect and shiny like a watchface. (I realize your reference photo is an extreme to point out light sources, Terley.) That's what's been frustrating me. And I'm not sure how to improve at this point.

Just take my other C+C thread in this forum, I've gradually improved upon the tanks and artilleries, but they don't seem realistic...
There's one game that does this really well with low res graphics and that's C&C1. Even though the vehicles are 3d prerenders with pixel touchup, it's very convincing and doesn't have that cartoony feel that's prevalent to most other games that make use of pixel art.
I want to be able to achieve that level of believability with my art.

Can anyone give this noob some advice on how to do that?