Random skull from a professional newbie

[-W3s-]

So I've been doing this for a while now. but I'm not that great IMO. I could use some c+c on this, and tell me just what I've done wrong on it. And don't get me wrong, I'm not really in to dead stuff, but I thought this looked cool so I decided to draw it and put it on here.





What worries me most is the right horn. It wasn't in the pic so I kinda had to do it from scratch...and it looks it too lol.
Any thoughts?

[MARS]

The horns can be made to look rounder by adding some highlights. Contrast is a bit low. Some colours are quite similiar, wich makes the palette cluttered and adds a lot of difficulty when picking shades...

Another tip: try and make the hue of the shades contrasting to the hue of the lightsource - and by that I also mean you should use different hues for different shades in general. (:

I wish I was 1337 enough to come up with a decent edit. If what I said sounds like gobbledygook just let me know and I'll gladly destroy my reputation by showing what I mean.

Cheers, mate!

[micintexp]

For me I think these type of objects could use a bit more of dithering it would look perfect with it.

[-W3s-]

Thank yall for you posts, I tried to address both of them by darkening the shadows, lightening some of the highlights, and dithering where I needed some in-between shades. The difference is subtle, though I do feel it improved the image in all. I'm surprised no one had gripes with the horn's modeling; the shades were exactly like the source image, and although I darkened a few parts, I was going for as close to original as possible...so I think that part is better left alone, if you get what I'm saying. The rest, though, is subject to change. So anyway, here is the edited version, I hope you can notice the difference:



Too subtle?

[Tourist]

I think the piece looks great, but I think one of horns is not in the correct place.

The left (larger) horn starts just behind the eye socket, the right (smaller) horn seems to originate on the side of (behind) the skull.  At this view angle we can see behind the right eye socket, but there is no horn there.

I'm not sure which one you want to keep.

Oh, and I like the newer version better, the stronger contrast is good.

Hope this helps,
Tourist

[MARS]

Contrast looks somewhat better...

Could you please post the ref? That'd be very helpful for critique as you seem to be striving for fidelity.

[EyeCraft]

Three things are holding this back from being a really great piece:

- Lighting is very washed out, obscuring the form, lowering the contrast and reducing visual interest.

- Palette is too messy and monochromatic. You have a tonne of similar colours that could be unified, giving you better control and more potential for visual impact (see 1. and 2. in my edit)

- On a pixelling level, its extremely rough and jagged. This is actually a rare case where I recommend you read up a bit on pixelling tutorials; mainly ones dealing with what kinds of patterns of pixels come out really rough, and ways to make contours smoother.



Here's a bit of an edit I did on a section addressing these three issues. Use shadow to really carve out the form (see the horn, for instance).

[-W3s-]

There's the original, it's in some Riply's Believe-It-Or-Not museum, the other horn actually grew in to the animal's skull and killed it (ow). So as you can see, I had to make that horn from scratch. And looking back on this, I saw numerous problems that I had made and decided to further accentuate the shades. And it wasn't the horn that was misplaced, rather, it was the rest of the skull around it. So here's the once-again updated skull:



Kinda embarrassed to show the original, 'cuz mine kinda doesn't look like it.

EDIT: Just noticed EyeCraft's post, and dang it looks like I have a looong way to go. :/ Looks like I need to work on some anti-aliasing too, I guess. And maybe try and be more dramatic with my color choices.

[ptoing]

Welcome to Pixelation

This is rather nice, but there are a few things that could be improved.

To show some points I made a rather extensive edit.



You have 28 colours in this, I edited it down to 12. While this is excessive it shows that you by no means need 28 colours. Something like 16 would be fine and you would get more control.

The dither was a bit random in places and I removed all your dither and then in the end reintroduced some in places that I thought benefited from it. With dither you have to always think about what you wanna do with it. Do you wanna blend colours or create texture. Also it is important to not have too much single pixel noise.

That brings us to single pixel noise. With pixelart every pixel counts. If you have single pixels which jut out of an area it can look very odd unless you know exactly what you are doing and trying to achieve. Clarity is important, don't obfuscate your surfaces with needless single pixels. Think of your shapes as planes which are hit by light.

I also did rather extensive antialias which not only helps to make things look smoother, but it also increases the percieved resolution.

Some things I did not edit, like the front of the mouth, mainly because I have no clue what is going on there, so I left it instead of googling for a reference.

I hope this helps. If you have any specific questions to my edit, just ask.  

EDIT: Hah, that reference would have helped me with editing this, if i had it earlier. If you do something from ref please always post it. It makes giving critique a lot easier.

[-W3s-]

Thanks to all of you for your critique! Ptoing and EyeCraft, I took both of your edits and studied them extensively, and I now think I have a better grasp of how I'm SUPPOSED to be doing it, lol. So I completely revamped mine, tell me how I did: