Figurestone's Pixel Experiments

[NickZA]

Hi all,

I'm posting on behalf of my partner Figurestone(Will), who is unable to do so due to certain sites (i.e. this one) being blocked by his provider. Please see our main thread (see sig) for more info. He'll be back here in the week, hopefully, to give feedback. In the meantime I'll forward any feedback on to him.

Here are two small experiments he's working on right now, to try and improve his technique.

Hand


Blob

[NickZA]

Figurestone has just pointed out to me that I am a moron (kindly, though!)... he actually can post, he just can't see images... doh. My bad.

[figurestone]

Yep, cheers Nick. I'm currently having to browse using mobile phone internet which sucks. So I'm mailing my graphics to Nick to post here and back and forth etc...

So, I'm looking to improve my technique and learn a few tricks.
Rip me to shreds!

[rikfuzz]

I did a quick rework of your hand:



A lot of the changes are quite obvious (less colours, no dithering, different palette, slight structural adjustment of the thumb, stronger shadowing) but it occurred to me that some changes might be a little subtle, and I intend to write up the hows and whys with example images at some point. But not right now!

(edit: added your pic to the left as comparison)

[CrazyMLC]

I messed around with rikfuzz's wonderful edit for practice.

Hope it helps!  

EDIT:

[figurestone]

That helps a lot, thanks guys.
Nice bold colours, they look a lot stronger than mine and helps to bring out the depth.

Not sure why I chose a greenish palette, must have been thinking of zombie hands.

I developed the hand a bit since posting, but I've just seen your posts, so I'll try to take onboard the examples when I work on it further.



I might be going overboard with the dithering.
I like how you've captured the creases in the thumb CrazyMLC.
Rik, I like the highlights but the shading on the fingers make them look a bit too rounded and the knuckles are a bit lost.

[NickZA]

While CrazyMLC & Rik have improved a great deal on the tones and chromas, Will's original hand posture is much better that Crazy's version 2: the wrist coming in from the bottom left gives it real character, it looks like someone saying "Excuse me!" which is much more dramatic and has greater impact on the viewer than the wrist just heading straight up from the bottom centre.

Will personally I like the wrinkles you have on the ball of the thumb and the edge of the hand (opposite thumb). If you could improve the contrast on these as well, they would look superb.

[figurestone]

Yeah, getting the contrast is something I'm working on. Tricky!

Here's a fun little animated Grunt guy I knocked up in between all the stippling and colouring...