just something i'm working on..

[Bastendorf]

That's fair! A lot of us here started out by learning on our own and then later learned the correct way to do things.

You're not the bully I first thought you were.

There is a very few number of situations where pillow shading is the correct technique to use and even fewer situations where it actually looks good.

Energy balls - Dragon Ball Z
Glowing eyes
Rotating Spikeballs on a Chain - Lots of games do this, Super Mario World is among them, if I'm not mistaken.
I'm sure there are more, and I could write an article on the proper use and methods for doing this, but that would take more than a single sitting.

I honestly kind of wish you would, just to see what kind of viable explanation there is for it.

Very well, I shall do so at the end of this reply.

That's not really a challenge I can take up, and there's a simple reason why: light doesn't work that way.

Why do you think it looks the way it does? When I had started, he was actually much brighter, and the details stood out, much like they do in his green chest. But I didn't like how bright he was, and though I knew what it would do to it, I tried darkening him anyway. Needless to say, it didn't go so well, so I decided I'd come back to it. Nearly a year later, I have yet to, as I can't find a way of keeping him dark and making him look good.
If you would like to give it a shot, I'll allow you to adjust his brightness and show me what to do with him, as long as you can keep him quite dark. He doesn't have to look like he's absorbing light, as he does right now, but I want to keep him on the darker side of the spectrum, and on the saturated side of things.


Here's the thing about my use of colors: I decided to section this part off so that those who don't wish to read it, can skip it.

As I started spriting and as the gaming industry was evolving around me, I decided to experiment with how my sprites look. I am not an idiot, nor is Zye. We can see the validity of your points.

I'm going to start out by saying it's stylistic. I can switch between minimal 8 bit, and 16 bit styles to suit what I'm trying to recreate with the looks of the sprites, and I can also ramp up the detail on the sprites I make, which usually means, the fully clothed version of my character for example, a large number of colors. I'll admit that I did throw in a few more colors just to piss all of you off, and get a good laugh out of your reaction, but save for two or three colors, the rest was all designed intentionally.

But Why?: Well, I've noticed a lot of you talking about x1 zoom, and how good it looks at x1 over zoomed in. And it's that reason exactly.
Before you freak out, I have a reason for the insanity. In normal cases, a massively detailed sprite would be a waste of time at x1 zoom, and look ugly. However, the only times in which I create a massively detailed, small sprite is in cases where I know for a fact that I'm not going to use x1 zoom.
Let me explain a little. I some times like to have games that are zoomed in at x2, or x4. So when I know that's what I'm going to be doing, I ignore x1 zoom, and ignore what it looks like at that zoom. Over time, I realized that the sprites from the 8-bit and 16-bit era leave something to be desired if the whole game is running at x2 zoom or more.

I'm not sure when it happened, but I eventually started taking existing sprite rips, Kirby's Aventure, for example, and seeing how realistic I could make it, and how it could look if it was touched up to be, in a way, HD. I quickly realized that it looks like crap, zoomed all the way out, but at 200% and above, it looks great.
I mentioned before that the industry was evolving, well, I figured out that GBA games and DS games have a zoomed in quality to them, and that's how I got started. Games CAN look good zoomed in. Nintendo proved that much. And when the sprite is closer, it's easier to make out the details that would normally be impossible to see. And I built on it from there. Learning to make sprites look good, zoomed in, rather than zoomed out.
I talked to Zye about it, and it seems like that's what he's shooting for, as well.

This isn't to say I don't know how to go minimal and make it look good at 100%, as I'm sure you figured out from my sprite, as flawed as it is. This is just a style I practice, and since Zye picked it up, I decided to show him how to work with it.