Some of my work and some help.

[Alcala]

First of all I'm Alcala or David for a better pronusiation, I'm not very new to pixel art, in fack I'm working in learning in geometrical desing in pixel art.
And second of all here's my work.

The right one is the original I made, and the left one is another copy of the original but with colors, I need some help with the eyes, the glasses and the hat.

This one is a little thing I'm making for a little practice with my shading, and so far I'm not very good at it, I'm still missing the buttons and I'm not very comfortablewith how it looks like.

Any ideas and opinions ?

[CrazyMLC]

Pillow shading is the scourge of the universe. Along with Obi-wan, of course.
The hat's shading seems to be coming slightly more from the left, and the shading on the not makes it look like light is coming from the sides, and then the shading coming from the mustache is coming from the viewer.
The shading on the GameBoy/calculator thing makes it seem like a cylinder.

The point of shading is to suggest shapes.

[Alcala]

Any way you can show me how?
I'm more of a watch-and-learn guy.

[CrazyMLC]

Yep, been working on an edit on the gb thing since that seems to be the easier one, just to be able to give you something to see ASAP.


See how I use colors to suggest the shapes of arrows on the d-pad, and the A and B on the buttons?

[Alcala]

what did you saved the image from ?
I can barely see the colors right, it looks blury, try saving it in GIF or PNG files.

[CrazyMLC]

stupid photobucket...
Just a second.

EDIT:

Keep forgetting photobucket compresses bmps to jpgs as a 'feature'.

[Alcala]

Ok I'll wait.
I can kind of see what you mean by the shape.
What I made was more circular then it should and less square then a handheld game console.

Edit.
I see...so my problem is the shape isn't it? well, I'll see what I can do about that. now into the top hat sprite.
Any help on that ?

[Ultimaodin]

Hello, nice to meet you. Well I ain't a professional at pixel art, in fact this is my first post, however I have been observing for quite some time.

I tried what I thought it should look like. Now that I look at it I think the hat should have more of a slight curve in the lighting.
Anyway:

Alright for the top hat I adjusted the light source slightly so it wasn't a straight line down and gave it some dithering.
On the moustache I altered it completely thinking of the light source comming from the left. I imagined how it would bulge in and out and lighted the sections I imained would catch the light from a said angle.
I did the same with the nose as well as altered the glasses.

Before you take example of what I did you should probably wait for someone else to comment on what I did as I may be wrong.

[Alcala]

I must admit I like what you did.
The mustache's middle part looks kind of funny but I think I can fix that. Athe glasses bother me a bit.
But other then that i looks way better then how I started it.

[ptoing]

Welcome to pixelation.

I just made a very quick edit to give you some ideas.



Look at simple objects like boxes and balls and look how they really get shaded when light falls on them.
You can use highlights to give things more volume and pick out edges.
In my edit I made the buttons and dpad look bigger to give a cuter effect.

I did also some stuff with the scanlines and such to make them look more like real scanlines.