Programmer Art....lol

[Code_wizard]

First post!! 

My trade is programming, but I have wanted to try my hand at pixel art for a while now. I have no art background or formal education in the area. Tried a few times last year, but I gave up. Anyway, my enthusiasm was recently reborn and I found this forum while searching for tutorials.

I need some well deserved critique on all the art I've "finished" so far. What have I done wrong, and more importantly what have I done right.


Messing around and trying to create a shield. Each row is a new try and I think I got it right on the 3rd for the small shield. I decided to try my hand at a larger version.


Little walking elf animation I did for fun:


Ship I did when I got into pixeling the first time:


Anyway, commence the critiquing, TAKE COVER! 

[Bacon and Eggs]

I'm going to give a fellow coder some support as this sounds much like me at these forums.  I'm still mainly a coder with a pant load of programmer art, so my pixel skillz are not at the par of talented practiced artists either.  I use that clause as a crutch to say that I haven't honed my pixel skill as well as my code skill... I gotta stop doing that.



The only thing I can think of is to look at is the outline of the spaceship.  That being that there is a thick black outline surrounding it.  That's probobly okay, but there are L shaped pixels in there.  Meaning there is an outline pixel touching more then one side when it's not a straight line.  I know my explaination blows, but I'm not good with the words sometimes. This phenomenon does not exist with the shields or ISO as the outline pixels don't touch more then one other outline pixel except in the case of straight vertical or horizontal lines.  I suspect the phrase is to clean up the lines.

The other quip is that the spaceship has a black outline.  If it is a spaceship, black will usually be the default color of space, so a black outline is not going to help much.  If it's flying about the purple background as it's layed out here, then black works for me.

[Code_wizard]

Thanks for the input. I wanted the ship to blend in with the black space background and have a more realistic look to it instead of popping out like a cartoon. I do see what your saying though.  I am using multiple shades of a dark gray near the edge, but it might still be too dark on the borders. I would really like more opinions on this and the different shields I did.