Cartoon Piggy! :)

[DeadAce]

Hi everyone, I'm new to this forum! I'm trying to work my way back into pixel land, as I've always loved it! I was a kid in the old Amiga days and did some stuff back then for fun, but I wasn't really good enough to do games work! Now I'm grown up, work as a 3d animator/character modeler, and would like to give pixels another go!
Please critique, comment, and use your right of free speech!

Oh yeah, here is Piggy:

[EyeCraft]

Hello, welcome to Pixelation.

Solid design you have for the character, your previous experience is apparent. Main issues to me are:

- character feels a little flat, mainly due to weak contrast

- excessive number of colours used (27). You could drop you palette down to 8 colours or so easily.

- Lots of jaggies around the silhouette. Some areas work really well, such as his right ear (our left), but his left arm and the back of the head are pretty rough. Perhaps softening the value of the outlines towards lightsources could help

- Purple shadow tone is jarrying against the blues, both in sudden hue shift and value drop. Maybe harmonise that transition a little more. I'd even lower the saturation of the purple.

Looking forward to updates!

[mrToad]

Looks good! Only if I am expected to search for something to pick about... perhaps the purple color should gradient to darker between the legs and/or be slightly more blue. He's mostly perfect and cool looking.

[Gil]

- excessive number of colours used (27). You could drop you palette down to 8 colours or so easily.

I don't think this is really necessary. I don't think he's wasting colors. A little color unification might be in order though.

[Mathias]

The color amount is borderline. It's actually got 29, counting bg. A real problem though, is that there are redundant shades in there.

This edit doesn't fix the color redundacies, just a quick palette touch-up.

- Lots of jaggies around the silhouette. . .

Eyecraft, would he just need to use lighter selout around the jaggy corners? This sprite will probably be used on a bg that will help minimize the jagginess. The solid light bg makes it's painfully visible, but it's surely not the intended context for the porker.

[Helm]

Latest edit was 27 colors. My edit is 16.

Selout hurts this a bit, also that there isn't much value range in the colors, and the darks are oversaturated. I tried to bridge the palette and to give it some pleasant tints, as well as showing the forms a bit better. Hope I helped.

[DeadAce]

Thx guys, your editing examples of Piggy is really helpfull, I'll try to pimp him up!
I know the colour count is a mess, and should be cleaned up! I tried a few days ago to optimize it in ProMotion 4.7, but I couldn't get a good result using the reduce colours option, how do you guys approach reduction? or do you know pages that describe this process? ..should have been carefull from the start! 

[PypeBros]

the pocket is still a bit odd, imho. Its curve isn't reinforcing piggy's belly and it looks "engraved" rather than stitching out.
(could be having importance on the "flatness", but only trying it out would tell).

[Helm]

Thx guys, your editing examples of Piggy is really helpfull, I'll try to pimp him up!
I know the colour count is a mess, and should be cleaned up! I tried a few days ago to optimize it in ProMotion 4.7, but I couldn't get a good result using the reduce colours option, how do you guys approach reduction? or do you know pages that describe this process? ..should have been carefull from the start! 

being careful from the beginning is the best way yes. And if you're cleaning up something someone else made or something you made before a bit carelessly, you certainly don't do it with any automatic tools.

The way I cleaned up your version was look at every color in the index in pro motion and see where it was used in the picture, as well as if it could be substituted with another color. You had a lot of near-same colors and a few that were used for one pixel here one pixel there. I will make a video of editing someone else's piece when I find a suitable one in the future that will explain this process in more detail if there's more interest.

[PypeBros]

I will make a video of editing someone else's piece when I find a suitable one in the future that will explain this process in more detail if there's more interest.

That would certainly be a valuable stuff to have around.