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[Destral]

I'll be posting here daily or every other day. I'm looking to improve, so don't pull any punches.

Characters:



Treasure:



Edit: Updated the characters. Looking from first to last, I'd say I've improved somewhat in the last 7 months.

[JMickle]

a lot of wasted colours at first glance. for instance the yellow guy's shading is nearly incomprehensible. I'd suggest setting yourself a string low-colour palette for practice. (grab one from one of your favourite retro games :p)

Some cool linework. The purple guy is really cool but the colours muddy the whole thing up completely ('tis on a white background though, which is skewing it)

Love the red-haired girl's hair, but the rest of her isn't so good.

Doesn't look like you spent any time properly shading that fox/corgi. I'd take another stab at him and get the texturing right while you're at it. The head is real cool.


Sorry if this sounds too harsh, I tried to be constructive. There is definitely something to work with, as I said, the lineart is pretty decent overall, but colours seem to let them down.

[Destral]

Made some edits based on feedback:



Is that guy on the right the one you meant by the purple dude?

And thanks, that's exactly the type of feedback I'm looking for. 

[Destral]

Edits to the red-haired girl, mainly the clothes and the face.

[Destral]

Some of you may recognise this guy:

[Squid Party]

you should try pulling a pallet from an old arcade you like so your colours look a 8it nicer

[Destral]

Experimenting with forms/poses:

[Destral]

A goblin. Was experimenting with using a different hue for the highlights (yellow on green).

[JasonPickering]

looks cool. but since you are using a yellow for highlights it might be better to have more blue in the shadows. that darker areas are pretty hard to see. its good practice to think about color temperature as well as hue.

[Destral]

Good thought. I'll make some edits this afternoon at home and repost him.

[caffeine]

The goblin is a big step forwards in terms of color picking and palette arranging.
Right now your sprites are looking rather flat though. I suggest you start looking at things if they where 3d instead of a 2d representation. This will hopefully in terms make your shadows and highlights better and thus your sprites.


Here's a quick "unfinished" edit of your goblin. I hope it helps.

[Destral]

Goblin with updated blue shadows:



@Green: Agreed, will go into the next sprite with that in mind.

[Squid Party]

that looks a lot nicer 

[Destral]

Been crazy busy getting ducks in a row for GDC, but I managed to do a super quick one tonight: A grizzled gunslinger cat loosely based on sundownkid's forum avatar.



Time: approximately 40 minutes.

I made a few versions a while back where he was a tabby, but I couldn't get a good colour palette going, and I never seemed to get the shape quite right. Tonight I tried something different, though: I sketched the outline about 5 times larger than my usual sprites, then shrunk that down and touched up the outline at 32x32 until the shape was readable. Then I went to http://colorschemedesigner.com and picked out a triad pallette of blue/yellow/red. The colours still aren't 100% there, but overall I like how he turned out.

For the next one I'll try to do a timelapse and go through the work process, since I think it might be helpful for others who are also working on their spritework.

[Destral]

A perfectly prim an proper butler, ready to server dinner, no matter where:



and here's the process I went through:

[SolarLune]

Awesome cat. The butler's good, but I think I like the second to last one more than the last one. Anyway, good job!

[Destral]

Been out of it for the last couple of weeks, what with GDC and taking a little trip to Europe with my wife, but I'm back and working on some more pixelling. Today was a warm-up to get back into the habit of pixelling, and a first attempt at a simple animation:



Also, if you've been wondering if the stuff I've been working on was for anything specific, I've put up a devlog for the game where most of these will end up.

@Solarlune: I think I agree on the butler, I made the last one a little wider to fill in more of the 32x32 grid, but that makes him look a little too chunky.

[Destral]

Extra Bonus: Based on a game idea hatched during GDC...

[Squid Party]

Been out of it for the last couple of weeks, what with GDC and taking a little trip to Europe with my wife, but I'm back and working on some more pixelling. Today was a warm-up to get back into the habit of pixelling, and a first attempt at a simple animation:



Also, if you've been wondering if the stuff I've been working on was for anything specific, I've put up a devlog for the game where most of these will end up.

@Solarlune: I think I agree on the butler, I made the last one a little wider to fill in more of the 32x32 grid, but that makes him look a little too chunky.

What did you animate this with?

[Destral]

Graphics Gale. It's cheap, and making animations in it is really easy:

http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/