I decided to play around a little bit too, and I'm finding out that I'm quite fond of working on hands and faces...
The hands in particular are not the best thing ever, but I prefer giving them some definition rather than leaving as just blobs of paint. I mean, it's alright to leave them like that, but they're so expressive, it feels like a missed opportunity.
Mouths at this resolution are hard to do. I think I prefer leaving them more as an implied thing.
I love the guy's belt pouch by the way. Catching juuust a little bit of light.
Maybe darken this area to the right of the woman's arm?
One last quick edit for the woman's left hand, sorry:
Thanks a lot for taking the time and making me reconsider my choices. Ultimately I'm trying to find a style and a level of detail that finds the perfect balance between fidelity and economy, to the point where it becomes possible to animate without hiring a whole studio of animators. Of course, a professional pixel artist can work with a different speed than I can but I still have a vain hope that it'll be possible for me to make a small game some day. Just a little treat for me and my family to enjoy once in a while.
I also really enjoy the aesthetic of certain older pixel art games that left a lot to the imagination. Like the people in the game Flashback, who all have blank faces and rely on body language and dialogue to express emotion. Similarly with Prince of Persia and Another World. So I'm experimenting to see how much detail I can add before it becomes too much.
For example, the red peasant lady was supposed to look young but she looks old due to her dark eyes (which appear sunken), her clothes and the fact that highlighting her cheek bones makes her look like a crone / witch. How do you make a character look feminine and beautiful at this scale? Maybe you can't. Maybe I should do like Prince of Persia, where the princess is a blank face with long hair and a slender body. But then, what happens when you increase the size of the sprite to a height of 60 or 80 pixels? Is it better to do like Superbrothers or Narita Boy and take a 40 pixel tall abstract sprite and simply display it at 2X?
These are questions I'm playing around with right now. If a person is roughly eight heads tall, I guess I need to think about how many pixels I need to do different faces without making them cartoonish like Super Mario. At 80 pixels height, the head is roughly 10 pixels tall and the face is maybe 7-8 pixels.
I really liked what you did with the hands and the shadows and the man's face. For the woman's face, your version looks good but old. And I'm not sure if I can make her look young but I tried.
Hahahaha @cels XOXO, Kisses and hugs <3 xD, By the way, there is a really fast way to learn gesture (30 something hours), or at least it worked like a charm for me, search at https://www.nma.art/ for a course called Dynamic Gesture Drawing by Glenn Vilppu, it's paid but worth every penny, you can find other great courses there, growth in drawing is directly translated as growth in pixel art!
If you are short on cash I recommend you to take the 15 days trial when you have time to finish the course I told you and cancel before they bill you, if you have spare money and time it is definitively a heck of investment.
Yeah, I got the reference after a bit of thinking!
Thanks a lot for the suggestion! It's only 7 days trial now (I guess everyone finished their courses before they had to pay) but I will try it out and then hopefully become a paying member this summer when I have time to concentrate more fully on art. Or maybe I'll just stay a member after 7 days, if it's really working out.
And I agree that growth in drawing is directly translated as growth in pixel art. I find that stuff like landscapes and trees and clouds is easier to learn with pixel art than certain other mediums, because it's so easy to paint over and move stuff around and change the colors. But for drawing people, I think I need to practice more with pen and pencil again.
Btw I have uploaded this to the PJ gallery now. Over the next few weeks, I will concentrate on paper sketching and restrict myself to very small and simple pixel art that doesn't take up a lot of time.
