No worries on not selecting mine Ben, as I mentioned to skittlefuck on dA I really don't have time to play prizes at the moment
Was enjoyable to take part in it, nothing quite like pixel robots.
@Thomas: your contrast is really lacking here; i feel like you could have left out the shading completely and the image would be more or less equivalent; you're also not really shading the forms of what you're trying to draw - this would be fine if you _were_ going for flat colour but considering you've got the shades there, I'd say you want to do some lighting studies. render things like spheres, cubes, cylinders for various materials to get a feel for how each lights and how to preserve material identity - and definitely don't work on that type of lurid pink! a middle grey with a slight tinge of whatever colour your environment will be will give a much better working background to keep your colours in line (see Rakugaki's piece above, or even mine; though I worked on a pure middle grey for that)
Edit:
- shading moves more than 10 rgb values per step
- shading focusses on form, not on pixel clusters - you should be shading the actual object, not your separate "colours"; the shading coming down into the top of the nose should be quite smooth, compared to the sides where there is more of a physical separation between textures and forms.
- shading cross-ramp - mixing some of the brown in with the white helps things like fur feel more homologous; on the same animal this helps it feel less like a patchwork and more like an actual animal.
- shading uses hue shifting; as it gets darker, tend towards cooler colours, as it gets lighter, tend towards warmer; this is a common trick in both painting and art to help convey a warmer feel to the piece; if you want cold lighting you can try the opposite (and keep the darks even more desaturated)
- added ears; turns out cows have those!
- modified horns to be lighter; couldn't find any cows with this fur colouring that had very dark horns. They could probably be even lighter.
- added more "realistic" mouth structure; from ref looks like cow mouths are pretty well separated into 2 "bits", the nose and the bottom lip. shading around this divide ensures that the forms remain separated.
MAIN TIP - Get reference: one thing I noticed is that various parts of your cow face don't actually look like an actual cow's face. I mostly used
this for my edit, among other google image results for "cow with horns".
hope this isn't overwhelming!
Developer
