This has really come to my attention.
I shall give this proper attention.
I will begin with the grass..
your underlying base color is too dark and laced too much with a blue hue. Grass has a more yellowy tinge, where as leaves and pine needles have the bluer tinge to them. It is also a medium range color - true in this example it is your darkest green, but in essence it is still a mid range color.
When working with details/textures, the only instances they disappear is during deep shadow or extreme highlight. Deep shadows have less to no detail because there simply is not enough light hitting that spot to reflect the proper look. Extreme highlights end up washing out the detail with an abundance of light.
Since you have a medium tone for your darkest green on the grass, that is why it seems abit odd or empty. The green itself is suggesting it is recieving a fair amount of light to give that nice rich color, where as your detail is suggesting it is a lack of light.
This causes a contradictory image to the eye.
Looking at the actual details of it now. you have rather large oblonged shapes that you are trying to illustrate as blades of grass. Keep in mind though, we are not face to face with the grass. It still has some distance on us and we will not be able to see the blades of grass that large. The thinest and most refined you could make the grass would be 1pixel wide.. the other method would be to suggest it through clever shading.. but right now these large oblong shapes appear to be more of leaves on the ground than grass.
Grass is a tricky thing to decide upon. Whether to have it long, short, or medium. How to portray it, and when to portray the depth. But dont have a mix on your main repeating tile. You have short grass (where there is no detail) and long grass, where you have shaded your oblongs all on the same tile. When tiled, your map looks like it has small bulges in the ground every where. Try to keep your blade length the same throughout the tile, and then make transistor tiles. generally with grass, you have 2 options. Either the simplistic approach where not much grass detail is seen at all on your short grass.. and then just subtle suggestions as it increases in length on the next tile - but the entire tile shares the same amount of detail.
The other option is to create largely complex detailed grass patterns. The reason for these is to eliminate the grid. The simplistic approach you end up grouping large areas of same color together, and the complex detailed way cant have the eye focus on a specific spot to determine grid (if matched edges).
Then you have black lines on some parts of grass. Dont forget though you are slightly above the tile and not straight onto it. All your black lines are as if you are looking closer to straight on. Bring some black line detail downward too.
Rocks.
They are not simply a cutout that you can place ontop of your already premade tiles. you have no shading beneath it, and some half grass blades poking out that are obviously covered. You can still use those same tiles, but quickly edit them to show abit of shadow beneath the rock to indicate it is sitting on the grass, instead of simply a black line suggesting it was just placed ontop.
Tree.
lets take alook at your tree now.
why is it slanted? hmm a good question you may ask. it is not the detail at the moment. It is your perspective. and i know.. i know.. like you already told me when i spoke to you earlier - you do not want to fix anything related to perspective problems. But well... im still gong to bring it up here again in a more explanatory fashion.
you have a contradictory tree again. The base/roots are struggling to be seen in an iso perspective, where as the trunk and the top of the tree is seen at a straight 2d sidescroller fashion.
Isometric is seen from above and from 2 sides. REMEMBER THIS. you seem to like to forget about seeing things from the top. The trunk of your tree should be foreshortened quite significantly. Probably about to where you have the lowest back leaf. This is because since you see from the top-down.. you would see the canopy first which is covering the trunk.
the way you have the canopy currently also looks like a cotton ball that has been caught on a twig on just the very edge of it.. The leaves are huge and in large mass behind the tree but absolutly nothing in front or to the sides really.
Like I said before, with the trunk of the tree. You will see more canopy - from the top and the side. So instead of shading it straight on, you then have to add depth to indicate the top and the sides of the canopy. Shouldnt see any branches. Like i said with the grass we are quite far away.. and dont have our eyes right by the tree. The leaves should hide most of the branch details.
So you need to bring the canopy forward, over top of the trunk in a sphere shape (unless you make many spheres like seiken densetsu 3) and make sure they are spheres, instead of circles.
I will leave this for now.. and see how you will change it.
oh, actually one last thing. Those are some MIGHTY large roots for the tree. they are 1/2 or larger than the trunk itself. should be shrunken in width. Main roots end up becoming the different sections that 'wrap' around the tree. Not 1/2 the tree entirely.
again though. I will wait till you fix perspective before i comment on details/textures/colors.
Sprites.
These are in need of a total perspective overhaul. It absolutely saddened me to hear you would not fix them. That you feel 'they look fine, and that you can pull it off without changing it.' It is not in proper perspective, and it should not matter if you feel you can pull it off. It simply does not work, nor fit the perspective.
Example: It would be like placing a mario platformer sprite into a zelda world. True they both have side run animations, but zelda has a slightly top down perspective, and mario is straight on sideways. It would not fit - although both are simply running sideways.
Or placing the link sprite into a mario world.
Yes you can make it work.. I suppose, if you really stretch it and are stubborn. But it is not right, nor proper. Something always seems alittle off or funny about it, no matter how convincing they try to make it.
Anyways. back to your sprites.
The large sprites you have in the iso boxes... Just because you have them drawn within the bounding box of the iso tile does not make them isometric. if you take those very same sprites you can simply draw a straight on 2d rectangle bounding box around them.
Now I see you are trying to use the smaller sprites. You attempted to add somekind of a perspective on them.
all you did though, unfortunately was keep the straight on perspective and slightly rotated them.
yet again you forgot that iso you are looking down. Meaning bodies and legs are shortened, and you will see the tops of head and shoulders.
the rotation you added to them was very minor. About 1/5 off from straight on.
Isometric, as you illustrated that you understand with your tiles, is a 2x1 ratio.
The sprites you have (neglecting the fact they are still straight on) is roughly about a 9x1 ratio.
It is not close to iso, and you should not feel good about wanting to leave it.
The rotation is not proper, nor is the top down aspect of it correct either. Actually, the stance you gave them is near proper for a megaman style. He never actually stands straight sideways, or straight front. He has that slight twist in him. But lets remember, Megaman is a sidescroller platformer, not an isometric game.
I will not critique your sprites until you correct perspective.
It should not matter if you do simply do not want to fix it or edit the sprites 'yet again.'
If there is a blatant issue, and not simply a 'style disagreement' then you should try to correct it. Artists will constantly try to correct whatever is wrong, and shouldnt settle simply because they dont feel like editing the mistakes they created.
If you want to make this project worthwhile, which it seems to be the plan (since you have been working with these characters and ideas for quite some time now), then shouldnt you do it properly?
It will not only make your project and finished product better, but it will also improve you as an artist.
It irked me when you told me that on msn, and I do hope you decide to change that notion of yours.
I will see how your new updates turn out, and perhaps I will continue my critique with you.
But until then, this all for now.
--Extra addition--
I just realized, perhaps at somepoints I may have been unclear, or you simply do not understand what I mean.
If you need clarification ask.
Also, if you are unsure on how to turn the sprites into an isometric perspective I will help further with that. But Im assuming you understand that perspective.
