Shield with some gold on it

[Diamphotoxin]

Hello guys! I drew a shield with gold on it. I spent about 2 hours and I can't find the mistakes by myself, can you help me?

[SeinRuhe]

Hi Diamphotoxin,

There are a couple aspects you can improve on the shield:

- The first one is highly subjective but I would avoid connecting pixels at the outline in a staircase manner. Some people do see diagonals as disconnected pixels so this is merely personal preference.

- The skull hardly look as a skull, always reference pictures if you can. No matter how much experience we have as artists is better to never trust memory.

- Always have in mind the lightsource and how it interacts with the object you are drawing, this is the key to make something look good.

- Study reflective materials, they have a pretty specific behavior. I recently explained it so please check this post https://pixelation.org/index.php?topic=65186.msg257285#msg257285

I do not have enough time for a full edit so I re interpreted the skull, the ornament on top of it and the corner at the bottom as a standalone thing. Hope it helps a bit to illustrate my point.



PD: Use imgur as an image host to post on the forums as .png, avoid inserting images as attachments since it takes really long to be approved.