for the king of spriters

[Ryumaru]

after all the critiques given by helm on my earlier sprite i was like" oh well, its just for fun"
but then i remembered that one of my new years revolutions was to strive in my art endeavors and i wouldnt want to lose a resolution THAT quickly. noting that i should wait till ive drawn that character i made this instead. which right now i think shows my anatomy knowledge much better. i hope to get rid of all errors at a basic stage so that it wont haunt me later. i would greatly appreciate edits and critique of any sort and i need most help on the hands the knee joint area and his feet. note his right arm is purposefully pumped up like that .

[Helm]

It's good that you decided to stick with it. This however, suffers from anatomical issues as well, and since it's not obstructed by clothes, the errors stick out much more than in the other sprite. You're inventing muscle groups everywhere, especially the lower arms and crotch and legs. He's also completely off-balance. What I suggest you do is pick up an artists's anatomy book, and study from the ground up. No amount of pixel-tweaking will help directly at this stage.

The hard way to help yourself would be to not study anything directly, just keep drawing iterations of the same strange muscled people, until either of the two things happens: a) you get gradually better as you find your own errors, or b) you don't get much better in that front, but get better in others sufficiently until everybody thinks the strange anatomy is your 'style'. The former way just takes years you could shave off if you buy ONE book and instensively study for 6 months. The latter is just artistic death, in my opinion.

If you'd like, I could edit this to make it more or less correct ( I'm not a master of anatomy or anything ) but as I said, I'm not sure it's going to help to study step 12 when you're one step 1 right now.

[Ryumaru]

i looked at various pages on google on lower body anotomy while doing this. guess it didnt help much. also, where you say muscle groups in the lower arms, are you sure that i just dint exxagerate them correctly? on the legs i can understand as i officially suck at the anotomy of the lower body. i think ill scrap this one as well and try a different pose of him. an edit i think would still help, since ive got 2 anatomy books right now and using both the book and the edit i would probably find my mistakes easily.

[Ryumaru]

i took a look at a book written by andy simth(comic artist, for titles such as first man and armor X)
and heres what i came up with. im timid to do the hands and feet because i really like the result of this so far and second they are what i need help with the most.
(dont mind his ass, ill try and think up something to cover it)

[AlexHW]

Sometimes it helps understanding the underlying structure of the object in question, such as a foot you could look at all the bones in it and go further by seeing how muscles attach to the bones and where the tendons meet and so forth. This can give you a larger understanding of how multiple pieces of a larger whole comes together to be defined a certain general way that is recognizable and identifyable to anyone.

[Ryumaru]

ill look into that, i did look at some models of bone structure in the feet when i did the last one. but it didnt really help out to much.

[Helm]

the second is generally much better than the first one, but try to keep in mind that even in superhero physique, people aren't made of blobs of bloated muscle. Try to contrapost curve versus line, outside curve to inside curve. The last thing you want is 'balloon muscles'. A lot of people, even professionals do this as well. I'll try to make some sort of relevant edit later on.

[Ryumaru]

i think i need to fix some of the muscles that connect his thighhs to his obliques. ill stop posting now and wait for your edit 
fixed those muscles, i think i fixed them correctly but im not sure. i also just HAD to try and give him a little color and i like the result of it. but i dont know if its final.

[Ryumaru]

ive colored more, and even tho i still have to "tighten up" the shading i am in love with this sprite. i might add onemore color later, but im not sure, the contrast between the black and the darkest shade is maybe  a bit too much for me. well anyways here it is.

if helm never critiqued my last sprite i wouldnt have even made this, thanks alot man.

[Ari]

holy fucking shit! that coloroing is insane dude! Forget about everything else, thats some insane shadeing!

[Ryumaru]

heh, thanks im pretty proud of it, especially since the low amount of colors, i think i will start making more sprites with more unified pallettes, they allow for much more shading if you want to limit the colors at all.

[Razz]

That's really cool, but also a very simple character design. Maybe you can consider adding some sort of clothes / accessories / armor / crazy tattoos or something.

[Helm]

I haven't had time for editing. I suggest you watch out for shading too much towards pure black. And the colours are too saturated, but that might be intentional... also, there's places where you have your brightest shades one pixel away from your darkest shades, no buffering between the two. Flesh NEVER has so sharp an edge to call for that.

[Ryumaru]

That's really cool, but also a very simple character design. Maybe you can consider adding some sort of clothes / accessories / armor / crazy tattoos or something.

i want to get the shading on everything right first. he will have things such as scars, chains and shackles, and some tatoos on him once i finish his whole body first

[Razz]

Nice.

[Ryumaru]

little update, some highlight things fixed and the pallette altered a bit with less saturation

[Ari]

Man I love this. You arnt even useing a lot of colors.. and it seems like you have over 100. Cant wait to see finished.

[BoogieManX]

Man I love this. You arnt even useing a lot of colors.. and it seems like you have over 100. Cant wait to see finished.

I agree with Ari 100%. This is awesome Ryu, you have done an amazing job on it.

[Ryumaru]

little more of an update, unsaturated him more to my liking and on the side are some accesories he might have, id especially like some comments on those

[Ari]

I don't know about the golden chains around his waist area. The little shackle on his ankle is prety good though. I would put some kid of chain that raps around his right arm and he clutches it at the end, or have a spike ball or osmething on the end that hangs a little bit below his right hand.

Looks awesome man. you should add feet and aother hand before you do accesories though

[Ryumaru]

i just cant do the hands and feet right now, i cant do feet at all.

[Conzeit]

hey, that sprite is really good, it has a good use of terminator shade and a exceptionally clear lightsource.

those chains are completly killing the depth of the pic, because they kill the illusion of the pitch black darkness, I also think the perfect circle on the back kills all it's volume since it isnt affected by the muscle shape, and just seems to float there.

This stuff just makes him seem like...a wanna be pimp or something with all the gold, I'd put something to emphasize effort or pain, like rusting restrains, or maybe a fakhir style blade trough his limbs, or a burnt in tattoo (tattos made by scarring)

Eitherway, go back to the basics of the char, remember why you put that protuding deformity in his shoulder, what it meant to you, try to express that with any add-ons you put there.

I really liked the portrait too, seems like you're buclking down and doing some real shading, I cant wait until you implement the concepts you did before with this more down to earth aproach, before they were just aloof ideas executed badly, but given you keep the basics right they can work great.

[Ryumaru]

yes, these ideas were very aloof since i was just adding them because people were complaining about him being to simple. i might add a color that i could make scars with, with my pallette now i dont thin i could do it without ruining shades. some burnt in tatoos would sound cool