The VG Resource

Well I am not the best artist around, and I am fully aware of it, but I decided I wanted to give spriting a real try.

I have made some previous attempts, but they were not really sprites per say.

Here is my current effort.



Comments, criticisms (there will be many of these), suggestions on how to improve?

Looks pretty good for a start.

what you need to work on is the pose. The anatomy is a little off, especially around the legs; and she seems to be leaning a little forward.

In addition to that, why is her leg not outlined? and what's that behind her? When making a sprite, you need to make sure everything can be read easily, and that's not happening in this sprite.

This looks good for a first timer, though. Just listen what others have to say about it and you'll improve quickly.

I couldn't make the skin outlines look good.

There are actually two things behind, one is the muffler ends, and the other is suppose to be a tail, but I forgot it till the last moment.
I think i'll try putting the muffler in front next time (probably shorter), and change the tail tip color to be darker then lighter. Not sure what to do about the skin. But i'll try.

EDIT:

Okay, decided to use a larger canvas. I also throw out the limited palette.

I drew this out at a much larger size first to avoid some of the more painful anatomy issues.

Big problem areas (to me), are the face (the face was impossible, I couldn't figure out how to make it look good at all), the hand and perhaps the pose (feels floaty). Not sure how to fix any of that.



But please if you have any comments, criticisms or suggestions on how I can improve. Please let me know!

It has a lot more detail, but for some reason I don't like it as much as the smaller one (perhaps because the mistakes are more obvious to me).

if anatomy is your problem, you should start by planning ahead your shapes. you do have a rough idea of how bodies are built, but you're a bit off when it comes to proportions.

Well actually my original skeleton looked a bit like this.

problem is, thats an awfully unnatural pose.

Yeah, i'm not good at poses. I'll see what I can do to fix my posing as well.

You shold try looking at photos for refrence to natural poses, not just other games if that's what you are going for. The pallete could use some work too.

I was getting frustrated working on a good pose and getting everything to look right. I wasn't having any fun, so I scrapped that work (for the moment), and instead did this.


The first was me trying to trace the face, I failed horribly.
The second time I eyeballed my original doodle, and it looks a bit better I think.
The third was me trying to go back and correct some of the errors I made while tracing my downsized doodle. Since some things just don't work in pixels.

Here is the outline I drew for it, it is really bad, but the point was to enjoy working on it, rather then work hard trying to get it perfect.

(10-28-2012, 01:40 AM)Chase Wrote: [ -> ]some things just don't work in pixels

its a really bad excuse to blame the media, rather than blaming your own lack of skill.

if you're not here to improve though, you might as well not try, and just stay whenever you feel you are and just keep tracing images from the internet.

I am not going to take your seemingly hostile message too personally. Since I don't know that you are actually being hostile. Nor would I blame you even if you were, since you don't know me, so there is no reason for you to play nice.

But I think you misunderstood. It was not a statement of "No one can draw this with just pixels". But rather a technical observation of "you can't fit more then one pixel in a pixel", due to the low resolution there is a certain limit on how much detail can be represented. Though someone could do a better job of implying a detail (this is a skill thing).

As for tracing images off the internet, I fully admit when I have, and at the moment, I have only done that once (with the image in the title screen). Others I have used 3D models I have done as a base.

Now, yes I am trying to improve. But just because I know when to stop working on something frustrating to do something else for a bit doesn't mean I don't want to. Just means I would rather stop and take a look at the problem again later, then getting mad and slamming on my keyboard like a little kid over it.

that's the point my dear. being able to overcome your limitations involves being able to work beyond that frustration and fully achieve what at first seems impossible. pixelart/spriting itself is a media based off limitations and how you can develop past them -without breaking them.

you'd be surprised to know that in fact, there is an advanced technique called subpixeling that does allow you to pixel beyond the small grid that constitutes your screen. but for you to fully understand how it works, you first need to dominate the most basic concepts. concepts that you do seems to know, but not understand. there is a spriting dictionary up there pinned in the main forum, you should go there and check some of its tutorials about color choices, shading and so on.

am i harsh? yes. why i am harsh though? because it has proven to me that being straight to newcomers makes people realize instantly if they got what it takes to understand criticism, filter what it is relevant(as you apparently did) with a bit of maturity and focus primary on their work and how they can be better at it.

Sorry it took so long to reply, I decided not to check back until I had cooled down over the "just keep tracing images from the internet" comment, which I realized had insulted me more then I had originally thought.

I am going to have another look at the dictionary. I peeked at it for a bit, but I didn't exactly study it in detail. I have heard of subpixeling, but I didn't give it much thought. Since I figured it would generally just produce a lot of aliasing like effect (which I was avoiding).

I don't really know what to say about the lineart right now, but I think you should play with your colors/shading more. The hair is kind of pillowshady. You don't need to have shading on all sides of each outline on the hair. The contrast on the...sweater...shirt...whatever you want to call it, is pretty intense. This is probably a better mistake to make than having too little contrast, but try to pull it back a bit. And play with hue shifting/saturation. Everything's looking pretty gray right now, and not in an appealing way.