Secret of Mana-style Sprite

[ceddo]

Hey guys,
I've always been frustrated by conveying perspective into pixel art, especially in sprites. I'm making a bunch of sprites now and I'd like to get some feedback on how to improve them. Here's my first one. I realize my anotomy is far from perfect - in fact, it may be the flaw that's holding me back, but some tips from you guys would really make a difference.
#1   #2

[EvilEye]

Secret of Mana sprite:



Your sprite:

#2

I am critiquing this one because I think its the better of the two.

Shoulders way too broad, she looks like a body builder.

Head is about 1/3 the body size on yours, on the SOM sprite its about 1/2 ( vertically ).

Waist is about 1/2 size of head, and legs are about 1/2 size of head ( vertically ).

The perspective on yours looks like its from the front only. This has to do with the head / body / leg size ratio.

Color on yours looks good, but the shading seems a little thick in some places like on her mid-section.

[Xion]

I made a quick edit:

the legs were good, but the upper portion was too long to be seen from above, and too much crotch was showing.
As EvilEye said, the shoulders made her look buff.
her head was also pushed too far back , showing neck, which should have been hidden for top-down.
Also shifted the eyes down.

But...
I...
don't know if I just made her look short and fat now though...

[ceddo]

Thanks for the replies!
@EvilEye: the second one is actually an update of the first, i should have made that clear. I'm also not looking to copy the SOM style, i'm just using the same angle as they did - not particularly aiming for SOM-like stylistically. Thanks for the crits - perspective is one of the things i'm finding hard to portray correctly.

@Xion: lovely edit! she definitely looks cuter and more feminine (although she does have a bit of paunch ) I'll take all this into account on my update.

edit:

[Tremulant]

These are developing really nicely. 

One very important thing (which Xion addressed in his edit) has to do with the eyes. They need to be quite low on the face in order to give the impression that the character is looking straight ahead, and not upwards towards the viewer. I think in the case of your update, the eyes could be moved 1 pixel downward, as could the hairline, so that we see more of the top of the head, less of the face.

On a side note, the darkest and second-darkest shades could be combined. They're nearly indistinguishable at 1x.

[ceddo]

'nother update.

- Lowered hairline by 1px.
- Lowered pupils by 1px.
- Lowered head by 1px.
- Combined darkest two colors.

I think it's already so much better than the first one.

[Tremulant]

Oops.. 

I ignored the outline when I was talking about the 'darkest' colours. The ones I meant were the darkest gray-green colour, and the purple, though the ones you combined should stay as one, too.

On second thought, the colours I originally meant maybe shouldn't be combined, but the purple should at least be darkened a bit.

[ceddo]

Better? old and new

[tehwexxl0rz]

Edit:


Hope that helps!

[Doppleganger]

yours edit

I spent a fair amount of time studying SD3 character sprites back in the day, and so I thought I should throw in my two cents.

The two main issues I noticed were that her head was too square and her body was too broad. One minor but important detail I noticed was that she was an odd number of pixels wide. It seems innocent enough, but it can really make a character look squished or stretched. I think this has to do with:
A) Much like we can spot problems in anatomy automatically, we can spot that same issue because even width character sprites are so common place in rpgs.
B) The face tends to be too thin or too fat, because the space between the eyes should be precisely an eyes width, which usually happens to be two pixels
Other than those main points I felt that a few too many colors were being used and everything in general was kind of blurred together.

What I did was; reduce the colors used, simplify the shading, add more body and depth to the hair, and, of course, change the width to an even number. I also grew out the legs and shrunk the torso/chest area. In my opinion this results in a cleaner and easier to read sprite.

I'm not sure how much this edit will help you, seeing as I took it a completely different direction, but I wanted to give you a different perspective to look at.