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[sonder]

To imply shifting line weight, the outline is better shaded closer to the "base" colour to appear thinner, or even simply broken, for a less jarring effect.

imho

what you call jarring i say adds some interesting texture.  but, to each their own

[Kvasir]

Let me preface this by saying that I'm no master artist, a lot of the points I'll make are quite subjective but I noticed a few things in your animation and also in this image that could use some improvement


All the small stuff aside, one of the biggest things that could significantly improve your characters would be to spend more time on the posture and draft. To me her upper body posture says "I'm in a fighting mood" and her lower "I'm just chilling".
If you look at the shoulders of the character you can see that they are quite straight, this is not a problem in itself but the left arm reaches further down then the right. This could not happen if her shoulders were straight so instead it look like the left  arm is broken.

Same goes for the hips, the hips are tilted which they need to be for the character to stand with one leg out like that. However its tilted the wrong way making one leg (the one she stands on) look shorter than the other.

The head also looks like it is pulled back, this is because the neck is attached under her jaw and not to the back of the head. Moving the skull to the right would fix this since it 3/4 view.

You should focus more on building your character in a simple draft where you can work these kinds of problems out before you start rendering, I would recommend doing this for animation aswell.

Animate a simple character with shoulders and hips and then redraw the character again when you render the animation using the animatic draft as reference.

Here's my version of the character with these chink's worked out(Sorry if I could not match your style precisely xD I tried).

Some things about color!
You seem to have colors and contrast down pretty well, I love the shift to warmer hues in shadows however you did not stick to this rule, the skin goes colder in the shadows and so does the hair. With skin especially I would walk toward the red hues since there blood under the skin, even if I work with cold shadows. I made corrections to the palette in my rendering concerning hues.

Looking at the contrast both of our renders are quite flat, since we both used the same pallet and only a few values that is not surprising. I quite like flat designs in pixel-art personally so I don't have a problem with it, stops things from getting too noisy IMO

if you want to build stronger silhouettes that read well, I would look more into The Thicks and Thins.

Finally your character had a colored outline around it, this again can make pixel-are look a bit noisy, so if you want to use an outline I would stick to a solid color that contrasts your character.

Both yours and my renders have both shoulders and hips tilted the same way, if you want to add more interest introducing some asymmetry could be just the thing! Like the draft on the right.

I'm sorry I essentially wrote a wall of text but I hope you can find at least some of it helpful.

[Lee]

I agree with the points that Kvasir was making, however his post focused on the design and his approach was to start again with a new pose. And that is often a perfectly fine strategy. But I think with the imagery that he produced it may feel like watching a master chef make a perfectly cooked meal with great presentation; the vast majority of people couldn't replicate it just from being shown it once. So I thought I might point out some of the technical problems and show you some ways that you could fix it by working with the character that you have.

I drew the character on a flat virtual plane to show off how I think it reads as a 3d form, showing some of the perspective oddities:

The cyan and blue lines are visual cues that suggest the character should line up pretty well on an orthogonal plane. The green lines show the perspective skew that is coming from the right leg and left arm. If the character lines up in the same depth plane then there shouldn't be this kind of disparity.

Based on this I will technically disagree with a point that Kvasir said which was: "the hips are tilted which they need to be for the character to stand with one leg out like that". I would say looking at the image that the hips themselves are actually flat but based on the high slope of the right leg you would expect the hip angle to be as Kvasir drew. And the characters anatomy is broken because the hips are not at the angle Kvasir drew.

The back arm is a little awkward and doesn't read at all, if she's doing the hand on hip thing then the hand is placed too low. From the angle that you drew this the perspective makes it difficult to draw due to the foreshortening. If, however, it is supposed to be hanging naturally or even slightly raised up to give the character a bit more energy then the hand is too high and should be lowered (should more or less line up with the right hand on the grid, could offset this by a pixel up to give it more depth).

Her head and neck also seem pretty far back. Her head is somewhat thin horizontally, almost squashed.

Although it's not perfect, this was my attempt to fix the perspective issues:

[Ahr Ech]

Arm length got a little over-corrected here. For a relaxed arm with an open hand like that, the fingertips should be about halfway down the thigh. I took a crack at adjusting that on the third figure there. Other than that, these are all fantastic pointers!

[Amorph]

Some great critique in here right now! Good reminders for designing characters.

Very nice

tbh I couldn't even do this if I had the entire spectrum of colors at my disposition lol

Thanks a bunch, ProgramGamer! I'm sure you're underestimating yourself. But you bring up an interesting point, too; I'm actually not sure if larger palettes are necessarily easier to use. On the one hand, there's more freedom, but it also takes more attention to manage the colors well (a skill I haven't quite nailed down). Anyway, here are some more:

[Cobralad]

Aside from animation, that one was the best in terms of videogame asset.

[Shirsh]

Thanks guys, that what I roughly had in mind but failed (not to mention that it wasn't right as perspective):



Yep, standing on the tiptoe at right leg (or not making heelpiece for left leg) is totally wrong idea since start. And I didn't drawed guide lines at all.
Left arm is forever staying for "one of next things to do someday tomorrow" >_<.

Cobralad, maybe, depends on game I think, lower resolution gives more space for imagination, but in my opinion it's not fit fighting game much. Different target in mind. My main inspiration is Comix Zone, (though if imagining game for what it could be a mockup, it shifts to Maximum Carnage and Power Blade, ie with addition of platformer, so a perspective is a thing to think about).

Kvasir's comments are fantastic, thanks for greatly visualizated guides.
Other thing that I should have been done to see mistakes (like thin head, you right Lee), but forgot, is to flip image horizontally.
I'll go read perspective-related materials for now =)

[Kvasir]

Arm length got a little over-corrected here. For a relaxed arm with an open hand like that, the fingertips should be about halfway down the thigh. I took a crack at adjusting that on the third figure there. Other than that, these are all fantastic pointers!

Haha, Yeah that's a common problem of mine thanks for the fix-up it looks a lot better Tbh I had trouble figuring out where her thigh started once I added the coat xD shows what I know of character construction

[maruki]

Light rock tiles


Dark rock tiles


I may make these available as public domain soon.

[snarlydawg]

[sonder]

it's a d-d-d-d-d-deeeeeeeeAAaaaaAAAAAlllllLLLLLLLL   

[Raku]

carnivore mushroom

[Arafuin]

<3

[Artifice Machine]

Ha!! That's just great. A good way to start the day. Reminds me in a way of Cactus' artwork.

[littanana]

Little tiny furniture for a 64x64 project I have.

[dT_]

Cans from the game that maybe will out this year.

[Raku]

vent art

[fskn]

I don't know what this is but I want it to be turned into a TV series.

[Feenicks]

Some stuff I drew last month.

[chriswearly]

Oops, forgot to post week 5 of fonts yesterday.
11 this time! Most in one week so far :D