[WIP] Hesper

[ninjascience]

This is Hesper, a pixel girl who likes to run around in the forrest surrounding her grandmother's cottage.

As an artist I'm a complete noob, this work heavily references the style of Soul Nomad and the World Eaters.

I'm not completely satisfied with the hair, the skull, or her belt buckle.  Any advice is much appreciated.

STATUS:
original
combined edits nixed
new smaller ver nixed

new original sized versions, with short hair and long:

[Sherman Gill]

Could you post the reference you used, like on TIGF?
The main issues right now are the readability and anatomy. The arm is barely separated from the hair and hard to see, and the legs and arms are pretty much just noodles.
You should do pen or pencil studies of real people's arms and legs if you want to be able to draw them well, even if stylized.
Here's pictures of a naked lady, to help you out: http://fineart.sk/photos/akira/023.JPG

Besides that, good start

[ninjascience]

it took me a few minutes to figure out what Sherman Gil meant by TIGF, but I got it.  This version is slightly different than the one I posted on TIGF, and I had deleted the reference from my doc since then.
Here's the image with the reference.  Hesper on the left, character from Soul Nomad on the right.  I basically made points where the "extents" of the body were, such as the top of the head, chin, shoulders, hands, knees, hips etc. then filled in for my character.  I studied some of the other characters to get the clothing and hair. 

more Soul Nomad sprites

[Kcilc]

I took the liberty of editing your piece.

The thing that stuck out to me about the skull is the fact that, how
you shaded it, makes it look more like a paper cut-out instead of a skull.
So what I did to fix this was shade it like the hair around it and took out the outline.

The problem with the hair is that, while it has a bit of shading, is again, not
looking very three dimensional. So I shaded just under the hair that is falling over
her forehead and added a little bit of back lighting behind her head.

The belt buckle I just shined up a bit.

The last thing I decided to do was pop a little bit more volume into the rest of the character;
namely the shorts, arms and legs. Then tweak the palette by getting rid of 14 useless colors
and bringing up the contrast on the other 20. I think I would be possible to bring the color count
down more than what I did but I didn't want to spend too much time on cleaning up the colors.

I know that my edit isn't perfect, just trying to give you a few ideas to work with. 
Happy pixeling!

[Atnas]

Danette is part cow, look at how her legs are. That affects her torso's posture. I think you should rethink her chest, it looks too superficial - it wasn't meant to be a "normal" standing pose. She juts her crotch out, and her chest back. Your character should be standing normally.

[ninjascience]

Here's some slight edits based on Sherman Gils comments. 

added some depth to the legs
made the hair darker where it shows between the arm and the body
added some hair peaking out from the right side of her face to match the left



@Kcilc
I like what you did with the legs and the clothes.  Although the hair is better done, the hairstyle itself isn't what I'm going for, which probably means I didn't do a good job on mine trying to convey what I wanted.
I like your skin tone a lot better than mine too.

This was my inspiration for her bangs http://flickr.com/photos/ninjascience/272310368/


EDIT:
based on your edits:

changed the hair so it doesn't stick out more, went back to the red eyes, beefed up the arm a few pixels, changed the hair palette

@Atnas
Yeah, I had thought I had moved away from that impression on my figure, but maybe not.

[Kcilc]

I thought I take another crack at the hair. While doing that I noticed some perspective issues as well,
mostly in the torso. I just clipped down the size of her (our left) right leg's pant leg and her arm respectively.
I'll stop messing with your sprite now, I promise!

[tocky]

Edits based on the original, I didn't spot that there was a newer one.

I think you need to punch up the size of the skull for it to read well, but I'm not sure my edit shows that, exactly - I can't really match the style. Drawing cute skulls is hard.

Probably you still need to clarify what's going on with the hair on the other side of her face.

Use negative space more to outline her arms.

[Sherman Gill]

New hair is mucho better!

MIEN -> <- YOUR
Legs legs sexy legs. You did not pay attention to the nude lady I posted, did you .
So yes, mostly an edit on the legs and shorts. I'll go from top-to-bottom here though
First, I made negligible edits to the skin palette, mostly on accident .
And the background I made darker because working on a white background will skew your perception of your colors (This is important! )
Next, I changed the lighting on the hair to be more from the top, since your lighting all over the image jumps around quite a bit.
Breasts! Changed lighting here too, to have higher contrast and to match an upward lightsource.
Belt: I only made like, a one pixel change here but it works: In your image I think it was too centered, so I changed the bottom right to make it look tilted and more to the left overall.
Shorts: Changed lighting! My edit isn't great here, but pretty much, upward lighting.
legs legs sexy legs: I made them kind of chunky, but pretty much, look at the nude picture I posted before. Look at how they have kind of an S curve and how it juts out right below the knee and how prominent the calf muscle is.

Get it?

[ndchristie]

sherm i think your edit breaks the style and gives her very very large legs for the sizes of the rest of her body.

i think the shoulders need to be reduced in size and the chin freed from them (either drop them a pixel or raise the head).  the expression of the source is pretty space-cadet but at the same time a lot cuter.  your character is grumpy/constipated, mostly eye placement and angle.  also, there's something sorta awk about the forehead, it's going very \ and would be a lot better if it went more /, if you know what i mean.

[ninjascience]

Yeah, I agree about the legs. 

@Sherman.  I did look at that nude and tried to add some definition to the arms and legs while trying to keep the cartoony style.  Your legs look good, but not on that fig, and not for the style I'm trying to achieve, even if the body was sized to match the legs, they are too... shaderific.

@Adarias.  Not sure what you mean by the forehead.

@tocky.  Your skull is much better than mine!  Mine was too flat, and not big enough, I'll incorporate it. thanks!

Thank you to everyone who has given me feedback so far.  Even the elements I won't adopt have been very useful for this beginning pixel artist.  I'll be working on this more this weekend.

[Sherman Gill]

Alright, but overall I really don't think your current legs are working

[ninjascience]

@all: thanks so much for the C+C and edits that were posted.  Slowly but surely I'm learning.  What I realized most of all is that I really need to learn how to draw.

@Sherman Gill: I agree on the legs; here's what I came up with using some of the edits folks kindly did.  I also softened her right calf a bit with a semitransparent pixel



After trying to do some other poses for animations, I realized how much extra work I was getting myself into
as a beginning pixeler trying to work this character into a game.  I decided to make her smaller.

Where previously I used Soul Nomad sprites for reference, here I used Megaman ZX sprites.  These pixels are all original, I simply had
a bunch of different Megaman sprites copied into my doc for reference on shading and form.

Here's what I came up with.



She doesn't seem to have the same depth as the first version, or the referenced sprites from Megaman, maybe it's the color.  I had used the same palette
for the shirt and shorts, but I decided to use a different one for the shirt.  Looking at it now, I see that it's not different enough.  The hands were a challenge, the
Megaman sprites all wear gloves and have extra large wrists.  I ended up giving her fingerless gloves because the hands just didn't look right.

EDIT: i just came to see if there were any replies and it looks worse to me than ever.  Feel free to C+C, I'll learn something surely, but I'm going to make some major changes to this one.

[Atnas]

That was a quick edit mainly just to show you a better palette option. 

[Ichigo Jam]

Some things I noticed:
1) dark line on top of head makes it look like her skull's too flat on top. Since the lighting appears to be coming from the top-left, the top of her hair should be lit anyway (since you're not going for a fully-outlined style)
2) Lightsource isn't terribly consistent - why is her stomach highlighted? Also, her shorts are a bit pillowshaded.
3) right arm (our right) looks a bit too large.
4) the dithering/toes on the foot on the right are unnecessary - your bigger version had very simple feet, which seems to fit the style better.
5) you seem to be using a lot more colours than are really noticable. If you're thinking of animating it, I strongly recommend you cut the palette down considerably!

Also, I preferred the colour scheme of the older version - you've already got 4 main colours (skin, hair, grey, red) and I think more than that should be plenty in a sprite this size - especially if you're going to animate it.

Here's my attempt at an edit (I'm sure more experienced artists will probably still see plenty wrong, but hopefully it will at least give you some ideas)
->
I also took the mouth out entirely - at this size I think it looks fine without it. And I fiddled with a lot of other little bits

[Sherman Gill]

5) you seem to be using a lot more colours than are really noticable. If you're thinking of animating it, I strongly recommend you cut the palette down considerably!

I only see one set of colors that this is really true for (And that's the skin outline and hair shadow)

[Ichigo Jam]

5) you seem to be using a lot more colours than are really noticable. If you're thinking of animating it, I strongly recommend you cut the palette down considerably!

I only see one set of colors that this is really true for (And that's the skin outline and hair shadow)

Hmm, maybe I overstated things...
As Sherman Gill suggests, I was referring to the skin and hair, which between them seem to use 13 different colours - including one brown (RGB:108,50,4) which is used for only one pixel.

[ninjascience]

okay, just wasn't happy with the smaller size version, even with the improvements posted by users
I looked carefully at all the edits and incorporated some into a new edit, but all in all I prefered the expressiveness of the bigger version, even if it wasn't as practical for use in a game.

I took another stab at the original size, paying attention to the crits on the legs.  I went back to my reference source (Soul Nomad game) and studied some more.

I changed the skin color and redid the hair and face, the arms and legs are new, but not especially different.

My wife also commented that the girl is wearing a tube top, which she thought a bit
strange.  I agreed so I turned them into overalls.  I kept the rest of the clothes pretty much the same. 

While redoing the hair, I got to a point where I had just short hair and bangs and thought it looked appealing so I kept that version around.




any preference for one over the other?  I like the short hair but she seems more bottom heavy than the one with the long hair.

I keep getting comments about extra colors.  Some of them are directed towards purposely placed colors, but some of them refer to odd pixels of discarded color left around.

I switched to GraphicsGale and found the color count tool, but if I think there are extra colors, how do I find them?

[tehwexxl0rz]

MUCH better!

I think the addition of a neck made a world of difference, heh. Also, I love the new hair! The short version that is; the longer version kind of makes it harder to read....