[WIP] Soldier (Show me how to proceed)

[Code_wizard]

Alright then, I am unsure how to proceed in shading/coloring this. Don't critique the line art it is fine for my purpose (practicing shading/coloring). Could someone tell me what I am doing right/wrong or whatever as well as how to proceed in finishing him. Also, if someone could actually SHOW me how THEY would do it with the colors provided I think that would be very helpful. Thanks a bunch 



Update (2\1\08):

I think I am getting the hang of it, not quite right, but here is my next stab at it.

[tocky]

-I've messed with the shapes a lot, but the main thing that you should change is the arms; make them longer. I changed the design of the armor to something I could visualise better, but you don't need that. I tried to mimic the muscles-on-the armor thing, but I couldn't figure how to get that to work at this size.
-Yours is a bit flat because it's mostly midtone. I think mine has about as much shadow as yours, so mostly you need more hilights.
-I switched the lightsource to top-down because it means you can use the same sprite for facing left/facing right - you wouldn't need one of each. I'm not sure if you even need that or not, I kind of did it on automatic.
-I added outlines, one shade darker than adjacent pixels, with exceptions where it would make things hard to read. This is just so the character pops out from the backgrounds. There's other ways to do that, but this is the easiest.

[Code_wizard]

Wow, thats awesome stuff  . I will be studying it closely for a while and using it as a reference for future projects. The tips were just what I was looking for, thank you so much for the time and effort you put into helping me!  Tocky, your awesome!

[surt]

It's hard to say what I would do as you don't mention the use it will be put to.

But taking a stab:


I would say that the provided colours are half the problem.
They are very simple with no hue variation across the gradient.
Skin colours exhibit very little contrast.
The darkest three colours are very similar and can easily be consolidated.
Size is not a power of two or multiple of eight. I thought you were a coder? 

[tocky]

powers of two, surt.

[surt]

What you talking about. 

[Code_wizard]

Thanks for the input Surt, that is awesome! Sounds like I need to work on how I choose my colors. I will consolidate all these into a single image I can reference while I try again. 

[Code_wizard]

Update!

[ndchristie]

What you talking about. 

you're probably joking, but if you aren't, and if anyone else is confused, then:

 you should keep most sprites within a box whose sides measure powers of two as these are common and best understood by most systems.

[tocky]

you should keep most sprites within a box whose sides measure powers of two as these are common and best understood by most systems.

This whole 'powers of two' thing interests me, because those sorts of technical limitations don't actually matter for most of us anymore. I see people making pixel art using palletes with, say, about twelve colours, and that seems like heresy to me. They could so easily have made that eight, or sixteen, it's certainly not any extra work if you plan ahead. But in truth I don't know what algorithm mspaint uses to convert my stuff to a png, and I doubt it really matters much whether I've used eight colours or ninety. Similarly, I heve this odd feeling that 16*16 sprites or 8*8 tiles are just better, somehow, though I couldn't say how, anymore. Why shouldn't people use whichever size images are most useful to them? How many bits does a 17*17 sprite waste? But such a thing is wrong somehow, some part of me cringes when I think of it.