Spriting practice - school uniform

[Snarky]

I've been working on my pixel spriting, which I've never been much good at. After a lot of effort I've come up with this. It's for a game set in a boarding school.

I haven't finished the shading, but wanted to see if I should make any further changes to the pose or proportions first.

(The anime-look is intentional.)

[Anian]

First of all, I like it, except 3 minor things:
- the hair color (especially the darker tone) is very similar to the skin tone so from a far it looks a bit weird, I don't know what you should do about it, just noticing, it's one of the reasons I don't like going to those 320px game sizes - some things are very hard to decide.

- stuff like shoulders being 1-2px too wide (they should be around the width of the hips, but since the skirt indicates narrower hips, shoulders/collar bone might look a bit manly), I'd leave as a style choice, even though if you're going with anime eyes, shoulders are even narrower in anime. If you choose to correct it, I'd make the collar of the shirt a bit narrower and keep the rest the same

- the rather bigger issue with the pose - the legs are placed (noticable on the length and the position of the feet) to look like she's facing at an angle to our left, but the rest of the body (and eyes kind of make the feeling stronger) is facing us directly or even kind of to our right slightly. Again, I think what you wanted to do is make the pose look more feminine by crossing her legs slightly? I'd keep the leg position, but make her right leg longer so they're both even in length, I think it'll still look good, plus if you make the shoulders narrower that'll help as well

[ThreeOhFour]

The first thing I noticed was the arms - the way they hang doesn't look natural, and in editing the arms I ended up editing other things that caught my attention as I went.




I tried to keep palette additions/modifications to a minimum, but changed the outline colour for the socks/shirt and the shadow colour for the shoes.

Some things I changed:

-Used hair outline colour to add volume to the hair.
-Added a hopefully more natural pose. You should be able to get away with having this sort of pose as a standing frame and going straight into walking frames, I'd say.
-Made her skirt a bit longer like the prude that I am.
-Made her shoulders a bit narrower.
-Other minor things like mouth and tie adjustments.

Hope it helps

[Snarky]

Ben, that is perfect. It's going to be a struggle not just stealing it directly!

Thanks for the help, both you and anian. I'll try to follow your advice and example and see what I can do with it.

Edit: This is obviously closely based on Ben's edit. What do you think?

[ThreeOhFour]

Looks better, although I think the way her waist goes in now makes her look a bit too skinny!

Generally with smaller characters, especially when trying to avoid giving them too much femininity for their age with wide hips and breasts, I prefer to leave the midriff straight and merely imply that there is a narrower part there with the use of shadows:





But it looks good, and you avoided my unintentionally noodle-esque arms.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

The arms are a bit long when you consider:

1.  The elbow should be roughly at the middle of the torso.
2.  The total length of the arm should reach no farther than mid-thigh.

Her somewhat shortened legs contribute to the overall ape-ish look to the arms, so you'll want to reduce
their length so the hands just pass her skirt line.  Also, they could do with more 'form' since right now they're completely straight and you can't see the natural bend in the forearm or wrist.  Otherwise I think it looks fine for an anime style approach, though the head might look better one pixel lower.

I made an edit to address this as well as some problems I found with the shading:





For one, you were sharing the same background color for her outfit (white) so I changed that and made the background color more neutral so we could properly see how the values look.  Once I did that I noticed several of the colors were so light as to be almost unrecognizable under normal conditions so I darkened them and removed some others that weren't really adding anything.  With her forearm I gave her flared cuffs and bent her arms out slightly so I could work on her torso, giving her a slight figure.  I also went back and added a color to the vest as the other key areas use 3 colors.  I also brought her knees up to just below the skirt line.

[ThreeOhFour]

Some good points there ProgZ! I especially like how you did the arms.

[Snarky]

Thanks guys! I've made another, tentatively final version that incorporates elements of both your edits. (Though looking at it now I don't like how the skirt came out in this version...  )




I'll probably also use some of ProgZ's other changes for other characters in the game. This is kind of a template sprite; I'm going to need a bunch of different students for the game.

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The Critics Lounge comes through again!

[cat]

Yes, I think the skirt in the previous version looked better. Maybe you can just change the seamline of it?

[Snarky]

Probably, but I don't know what a seamline is... ?

[cat]

It's the bottom edge of it. Try to make it look like a pleated skirt again.

[Snarky]

Digging this thread back up again - yikes! - five months later. I've been working on other parts of the game, but I finally got around to the side view.





It's not finished; the hair, hand and V-neck in particular need some adjustment, but I wanted to check first if there's something more fundamentally wrong that I've missed.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I think it looks pretty good, though the posture is a bit too wooden (straight).  What I've done in this edit is bent her lower back forward so her hips come out a bit and her leg tapers down.  This gives a better representation of form and posture since nobody is going to stand perfectly straight unless forced to, and we tend to let our center of gravity drift forward a bit to bring us to a relaxing position.

1.  Adjusted posture to be more relaxed.
2.  Altered shape and shading of hair.
3.  Altered shape of face slightly and added a tip to the nose.
4.  Made the arm bend forward slightly to get rid of the 'straight' look.




I've placed it next to your version of the front view for comparison. 

[Snarky]

Thanks ProgZmaz! Always interesting to flip back and forth between the original and your edit and try to figure out what it takes to make it look better. I particularly like the improvements to the arm and vest (I knew I'd screwed up the shoulders somehow). With the posture, I think I'll try to find some middle ground, maybe moving the hips forwards without moving the leg back, and use my pose as a base for the walkcycle. I see the point of your changes to the chin and jawline (among other things, it creates a better separation between jaw and neck), but I'm concerned that with the stronger jaw, the face doesn't look as childlike any more.

It's hard at this scale to do a shoe with a regular heel. It's either flat (like my version) or looks like a high-heeled shoe.

Edit: OK, here's an update without changing the pose (I'll get to that later).




Edit: And here's the slouchier pose and some minor edits:

[Khris]

I saw this in the other thread and did an edit; didn't realize it was already final.

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I reduced the color count to 19, revamped the palette a bit and pushed some pixels around.
(Most noticably our right eye, which was further from the nose than the other one.)

[Snarky]

Thanks Khris! Nothing is ever really final until the game is released, right? I just meant that I was happy with it for the moment and was going to move on to other parts. (It'll also be embarrassing when this one sprite looks like this and the others look like the first version in the thread.)

I particularly like the skirt, you fixed it in the way I never got around to. I also think shifting the legs a pixel to the right like you've done is better - though annoyingly, since the upper body is symmetric with an even number of pixels while the legs are symmetric with an odd number it can never align perfectly.