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[Ramivacation]

This topic has been pretty interesting, actually. I posted this on, of all places, a Cincinnati Bengals' forum I visit and got some very different, though surprisingly valid, opinions.

Of all the info and opinions I've gathered, it seems the end result is that the style is fine and works well for the game, but small tweaks should be applied to her face in order for it to work. She's not as pretty as she could be, but switching to anime or 90's Disney doesn't need to be the answer.

Thanks again for your takes on this, everyone. I'm going to -carefully- broach the subject with the artist and see what he thinks. If all goes well, I'll have an update for you in a few days, hopefully.

EDIT:

Oh, and as for using over the top anime expressions with western/hybrid styles... I absolutely HATE that. Despite how good Avatar and Teen Titans are supposed to be, I just can't force myself to watch it because of the abuse of crazy anime expressions. Things like that definitely won't end up in this game.

EDIT 2:

I'm not a great artist myself, but I tried modifying the face as per some of the suggestions. Nothing major, but I actually think these few changes make a big difference. I moved her eyes and eyebrows down a bit, tilted her nose up a bit and shortened her neck. It turned out a lot better than I expected...

[moi]

I think some people want you to turn this more or less normal face into a typical anime face, be careful of people and thier ideas.

[Ramivacation]

Thanks for the heads up, but actually... the harshest criticism I got was at the Bengals forum. And these people have generally -no- interest in anime. There are definitely going to be people who would prefer traditional anime and I'm just not going to ask the artist doing these to work outside of his comfort zone.

http://mbd.scout.com/mb.aspx?s=117&f=1756&t=4583770 <- Surprisingly interesting Bengals' fans critique!

[Loren Schmidt]

Though I'm not personally a fan of this kind of cartoony artwork, it's a pretty high quality example. I don't think it clashes with the game, particularly.

I would consider converting the antialiased vectors to palette based images with little or no antialiasing. Simply switching to indexed mode and reducing colors, then doing a pass by hand to correct artifacts should do it. I think that would retain the style of the original, while making it fit much more harmoniously with the pixel art. Anyway, that's my feeling.

I'm sorry to hear you've had so much trouble finding an artist. As someone who's done some contract art in the past (and, to my embarrassment, flaked out a number of times) I know how hard it can be to establish a good working relationship over long distances. That said, there are definitely a lot of talented, responsible artists our there.