Beginner Tree

[Novato]

Hello, i started today at pixel art and i tried my best to make 2 models of trees. I would really like some construct criticism to improve them, i will repost in this topic the image after implementing your suggestions. Thanks

[eliddell]

Here are the things that jump out at me:

1. The lighting's inconsistent.  The leaves appear to be lit from almost directly above (maybe just a hair to the right), but the trunks are lit from our right (and not from above at all).  Keep in mind that the trunks will be in the shadow of the branches and leaves.

2. The bottom edge of the highlight on the foliage of the narrower tree needs to be more curved.  Currently it looks messy.

3. The cutoff between the different shades of brown on the trunks is so abrupt it looks like you'd get hexagonal logs if you cut these trees down.  Break up those straight lines with bark texture or dithering.

4.  This is partly due to the stylized look you've chosen, but the transition from highlight to mid to shadow on the foliage are a little tidier than I'd like.  There should be occasional patches of shadow in the brightly-lit areas where a gap in the leaves lets you see further back into the tree, and occasional brighter patches among the midtone leaves near the highlight where some branch sticks out a bit further.  Experiment.

Just my $0.02 worth.

[cels]

Great start for a first day of pixel art! Keep at it!

I agree with eliddell and I would add:

- You might want to break the base of the trunk into a few exposed roots.

- I'm not a super fan of the way you've textured the tree, because there's a lot of noise. The single diagonal lines result in a lot of stray pixels, and the tree on the right has some extra stray pixels on top of that. That is why most people who pixel trees tend to either pixel many individual leaf-shaped leaves (usually by exaggerating their size) or using bigger clusters of colour to emulate groups of leaves and larger shapes.

[SeinRuhe]

Here's a really quick sketch of what I would have in mind when spriting a tree along some notes:

- Use reference
- Always establish a clear direction of the lightsource.
- Avoid outlining inside the sprite.
- Group shapes, you don't want to draw every single leaf, just draw some big shapes that resemble a cluster of leafs.
- Add some variation to the tree trunk by adding more interest to it, a little texture, some branches, some roots, a hole, etc.
- Maybe it's better to add a small patch of grass on the bottom of the tree to ground it a bit, interactions between stuff is a strong point to sell believability.

(By the way, this forum has a built in zoom function, so always post your sprites at 100%, if you need to zoom some image just click on it)



You can also check some tutorials by Saint11 ( https://saint11.org/blog/pixel-art-tutorials/ ) that are great for beginners, here's one on trees: