Galactus 'pixel-art' CnC needed

[StevenB]

Why hello, I'm back because I need some good critism on something I've been working on lately:



I'm a sucker for Marvel Heroes, so I made this to express the intense feeling of joy that is Marvel vs Capcom 3.

That aside, you might see that the shading on the sprite/pixel art is increddibly bad (too 'dirty' looking in my opinion), but I have no idea in what direction I should take it in order to fix it. I'm still used to smaller sprites wich I can stuff full of details, but I want to move more in the pixel art-genre of spriting. I hope you guys could give me some tips and critism to help me fix it.

Foremost, I'd like to know how to shade the top of the helmet correctly, because I think it looks really horrible right now, but all the attempts I made to improve it didn't go so well.



P.S. I just arrived here after some time, and some of the forum has changed. Since I'm not the most intelligent man to walk on earth, I assume that you post custom sprites you want CnC for here, right? Please correct me if I'm wrong.

[Hoeloe]

You need to select a definite lightsource. Find where the light is coming from first before trying to shade. Most of this sprite suggests a lightsoure from the front, but the face section of the helmet suggests otherwise. It should be easier to shade the helmet once you've worked out where the light is. Be careful not to just pillow shade it though. From the angle the sprite is at, it seems that very little shading is needed on top of the helmet, if any at all, and should probably be focussed around the side of the top section to try and convey the shape.

Also, you're using far too many colours for the shadows. I can count four on the top of the helmet, but only two are really visible. Another thing is that it looks as though you are just decreasing luminosity to get your shades. While this does work, you should try hue-shifting a little.