AuthorTopic: [ Adam's Amazing Adventure ] I desire crits of all shape sizes and form ^_^  (Read 6739 times)

Offline Mistajaye

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Hello,

I want any advice, comments, enhancement tips, ANYTHING I'm desperate. This is what I've got so far, I want to shape up the style more. Anyone have any clever advice? I am open hears. Please BE MEAN. Be as MEAN as possible! lol


Offline skittles.loli

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I'm fairly new to pixel art, so some of this may not be relevant.

The background looks very blurry, like you took the paint brush and then smudged it to look like grass/mountains, which I think makes it look strange since the rest of it is pixel art.
Your character look nice, the bird looks cute too, but the tree is kind of under-detailed compared to the bird, the trunk and the character. I would also put the bird in a different spot, maybe put some leaves in front of it so it doesn't look like its sitting right on the outside of the canopy of the tree.
I would also  move the tree a bit more into the foreground so it doesn't look like its sitting right on top of the ground.
Speaking of the ground...
Its just so... flat. Maybe you could make it look a bit bumpier?
I would also work on a tile or something to but in between the two ground tiles, the change from "top ground' to 'bottom ground' is super abrupt.

That's all I can see though, but again I'm pretty new to this so the others would probably have better advice than me. I just figured I'd state what I'd change. ^__^

Good luck!

Offline Jad

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nah skittles, good crits overall, keep it up.

I'd say if you want a good result (i mean like pixel golden stamp of approval good) you'd have to do a complete rework BUT

what you've got there right now is atmospheric and clear enough, so don't lose hope.

Now, what software are you using for making your images? Right now everything is a blurry mess AND pixels vary in size, so format-wise this is a total wreck (you asked for meanness, haha)

A lot of this is just smudged brush strokes in photoshop or whatever, so I can't crit that, but the whole piece needs some unification colourwise, needs a clearer sense of what colour the sunlight emits and thus what colour the shadows get, instead of these straight colour ramps that are there right now.

I like your character. Can you post your character in original size outside of the background? If you do I'll give him a separate crit.

For the background, well, first of all, remove the smudgy stuff and repixel with pure pixels (preferrably in an indexed mode, that is to say, for example pixelling in graphics gale with 256colour mode turned on) and post it again and we could help you from there!

Good luck, and still, good overall sense of atmosphere. If you just get it together with real pixels you can get far with this, I think.
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Offline snowsoft

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A couple of things I see right off the bat are there are a ton of colors here (I think 256) and the image looks as though you resized it, or at least parts of it. Did you make this bigger
to show people the detail? If so, the forum has a nice zoom feature built in already. If not, there are still some strange choices to me. Apart from the high number of colors, there are a lot of places where the linework is 2 or 3 pixels thick with no apparent rhyme or reason. Which again, leads me to think you blew this up for us. However, if you were wanting it this size not just for us to see, then you should go back and clean up a lot of your lines. In my opinion, it is fine to enlarge something that is originally yours, but you still have to go back and clean it up.

Also, his arm looks very strange to me. I can see you are going for some muscle definition here, but there is so much going on that it looks very jumbled. The arm is shaded strangely as well, which is not helping. It appears as though the light is coming from the upper left, but the way that his right arm is shaded is almost as though the light is shining directly at it. It almost looks pillowy. A little more contrast may help that.

A-ha! I found your other post with the sprite (thought it looked familiar) and am using that to show what I mean. Also, I see that the sprite itself is 60-ish colors, which is quite a lot. ndchrisite already gave you some good crits on the character in your other thread (including the arm).



This is just a pretty quick edit where I changed the arm some and got the colors down to 41, and you could probably get it even lower fairly easily.

You may even be better off simplifying the arm some with that more toonish look that is going on. All up to you though.
“Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.”
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Offline Durnus

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I'm really new here... just posted my first pixel-art thing, but I think I can say one thing without being good yet.

It's about the ground. It looks like you used the lazy way (no offense) and duplicated and flipped a little bit to make it seamless. This is NOT the way you should do this.

Assuming you use Photoshop, there's a really easy way to fix up a seamless texture.
  • First, put your tile into a new file, 64x64 or however big that tile is, or whatever you want to seamlessify.
  • Paste it in, and make sure it fills the whole frame.
  • Make sure it looks good. If you want to use the same thing you have now, get rid of half of it so it doesn't look mirrored.
  • Here's the magic: Filters -> Other -> Offset. Put in half of the sprite's dimensions for each offset: for 64x64 it would be 32 and 32.
  • Press OK. MAGIC! And your sprite now has seams down and across the center.
  • Now just whip out your pencil tool and edit the seam to make it work. Move some chunks of dirt around until you can't see the seams anymore.
  • Do the offset again, with the same parameters, and it'll be back to like it was, except perhaps with seams in the center again.
  • Fix those up, and you have a seamless texture!

Sorry if that was hard to understand, but it's incredibly useful. :) (And ok, it's not magic. It's just offsetting your sprite by a set amount in pixels so you can see how the edges interact. :P)

Offline xhunterko

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Hey there! It's nice to see more fellow clickers showing up here finally! But on your piece there. I'll let jad and the others handle the larger stuff like the background and the ground. For people new to pixel art it's hard to tell what's "acceptable" and whats not. Meh. But, on the other hand, I will try to say something about something very tiny. That cute little bird. Without knowing what it is now, I wouldn't be able to tell without looking very hard. I think, it suffers from contrast and readabllity. Maybe make it a pixel or two larger and give it some shadows here and there. Because I really thought it was a feather or leaf or something. That's all I got and welcome again.

ps: don't be afraid of mods. Sometimes you'll get some invaluable crit from them!
« Last Edit: August 03, 2009, 01:44:49 am by xhunterko »

Offline Dr D

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You have a ton of different styles here, nearly every element of the picture looks uniquely different from the other.

Also, why the resizing and/or stretching? It kills the pixels.

I also couldn't make out the bird at first glance.

Offline Mistajaye

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alright, well here is what i have thus far ^_^... too much of a change? is it going in the right direction? yes or no? yay or nay? ^_^



« Last Edit: August 05, 2009, 06:21:46 am by Mistajaye »

Offline Durnus

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I think it's looking much more solid as a piece now. The... uh... paleness makes it match the character more, and the style's interesting. :y:

I'd like to point out that you still appear to be mirroring the rocky layer to make it seamless. Some of the pixels are changed, so maybe you wanted to break it up, but I would still suggest you look at my earlier post. IMO it's also a bit weird that the rock extrudes towards us and goes back in a very visible pattern, almost like a sin wave.

Offline Overkill

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Wow, that's a definite improvement. Though, I still have a few crits.

The tree looks very flat, and the way you've colored it, it looks like the leaves for the tree are BEHIND the branch layer. Rather than, having the branches blend into the tree. I think part of this is due to your contrasting color selection on the branches vs leaves. And another part is that the "sphere" of leaves you have doesn't really  seem to accurately look like there's branches under it. You might need both brighter and darker colors on the leaves to bring out volume.

Your other parts, like the grass and dirt are good. But you have this weird, mix saturated with unsaturated colors thing going on. Since the color ramps are jumpy between different saturations, instead of being smoother, you can notice banding and weird patterns popping out more than others in the rocks and such.

The grass needs some highlights, and I don't think it should have a shadow at the top. That shadow especially doesn't work, because it goes too dark and it has weird grey buffer shades.

Anyway, I think you can fix this up and create something truly stellar.