Female Character Sprite

[adcrusher524]

I've been working on her for a couple of days now, and I would like to receive some crit. I would really like to change her eyes, but I don't how to make them look good with low res.

Please C+C  

[adcrusher524]

Well she doesn't have a pony tail anymore. I think this has much improved, but theres still room for more! Please C+C   

[Tourist]

Here's what I see.

The good:
The basic red-yellow-blue color scheme is a solid choice.
I like the choice of shoes.
The new face and hair are significantly better than the previous version.

Minor tweaks:
Consider moving the facial features (eyes/nose/mouth) down 1 pixel so that they are centered on the head.

The lighting on the face and hair doesn't match the lighting on the rest of the figure (from left vs from above).

I pulled the features down 1 pixel and tweaked the hair so it flows from the top of the head rather than just the side.




The harsh:
From the neck down ... ouch.  The basic proportions are significantly distorted.  The latest version has a lot of noise in the jeans which doesn't look good.  The toes are pointed at a wider angle than looks comfortable.

Google offers some great links to drawing human figures.  I searched for drawing+proportions+body and guide+drawing+body and found some good links. 

I started an edit, but it became less of an edit and more of a total reconstruction.  I'm not that good of an artist, but I'd say put this piece on the shelf and start from scratch on a new version.  Don't give up, keep practicing.  Come back to this one in six months and marvel how much you've improved.

Hope this helps,
Tourist

[Accident]

an attempt to make her face look more feminine.

[adcrusher524]

Okay update!
 I followed Tourists advice, and started from scratch. This time, i was smart and used a reference - http://www.posemaniacs.com/?p=115
This time, it turned out larger than before, but I have no restrictions so that's Okay.

I can't get the hair to look right its supposed to be blowing in the wind.
I still have to do the face, legs, and shoes. I just wanted to know if i was heading in the right direction.
 C+C please!

[iggybork]

First: hello Pixelation! I have been admiring you from a distance for awhile, and honestly, I have learned more from reading critiques here and at PJ than I have ever seen or heard on any website or from any artists. You could say I was stalking you, but in a very endearing way.

Crappy edits:



Be careful with your shadows and positioning. That little strand of hair looks like it's trying to pop her like a balloon (owwwww   ). I'm sure you meant it to be sexy and show off her curves, but if you really want the wind to be sweeping her hair, then all her hair needs to be windswept.

Now, as for the windswept hair itself, I'm not really sure what angle it's coming from. First glances make me think the wind is going straight from left to right, but if I look again it seems like it's going from back to front. Either way, her hair looks funny to you because you forgot the whole chunk behind her head. As someone with long hair, when the wind gets your hair, it gets ALL your hair. And it never goes just in one direction - near the base of the scalp is usually normal, but the tips tend to fly in every direction. Sometimes the edges fly backwards - it all depends on how strong the wind is. At the angle you have her right now, I feel like some of it should be flying in front of her face, but that sort of destroys the sexiness. Her scarf is billowing way too much and too fast considering how tame her hair is, so I stuck in edit #3, which is about how much her hair should be flying considering the scarf-flapping frenzy.

[adcrusher524]

Thanks for the crit Iggybork!
 another update!


I still need to work on the jeans, I can never get those right. Please C+C!

[Chis]

As well as shading the wrinkles, think about the overall form of her legs. Without jeans on, where would it be brightest, and where would it be darkest?
Speaking of which, her lower legs look a lot longer than her upper legs from the extra height of the shoes.
It's not exactly the same pose, but the rightmost jeans in this picture might help.

Also, in the area that iggybork squared, her leftmost breast looks mucho bigger than her other one.

Nice fix on the hair! Although, there's still a strange dark patch at the top of her head.
Have you considered decreasing the wind factor on her hair a little? I know her face has to show, but the hair nearest the viewer is looking shorter than the hair in the back, and maybe if her hair came a bit lower you'd be able to see her entire face without that happening.
Or you could just make all of her hair blow out from behind her.

The last thing is that she looks slightly off balance and leans too far to our left - if you draw a line from her head to the area between her feet, it's going to be slanted. Consider changing the position of the bent leg?

[adcrusher524]

thanks for the reference! I think it really helped.


Okay, I tried to make the shins shorter, like you told me. Also changed the position of the bent leg a little bit and decreased saturation on jeans. I pulled the hair down, does it look like there's less wind now? Please C+C!

[Helm]

Here's an edit.

And here's a video of me doing the edit in real-time.
(the video is still uploading, check back in an hour from this posting, or just stream it as it goes if you're feeling lucky) video is up

It's about an hour and 165 megabytes in size, it uses the techsmith codec and is a bit over-bright/over-saturated for some strange reason but fairly clear. The music is the amazing 'Epilog' record by Änglagård, along with a couple of tracks from their past work, 'Hybris'.

This edit captures a lot of methods I use in my pixel art. Take of them what is useful and disregard what is not, but keep in mind the overall theme of the exercise which always is about optimization. Optimized placement of pixels, optimized color count, optimized mixing, optimized everything.

Looking back, I'm not happy I lost the blond hair, but I wanted to have a clothes tint with that color instead, heh. Probably a bad call. As I said, take what's useful and disregard the rest.