Character - First attempt at a new sprite (WW2 Soldier)

[ManicMatt]

Erm.... that's sarcasm, right?    

What I meant was that up close a low resolution sprite just looks like a mess of random colours and I have trouble understanding what I'm looking at unless I zoom out!

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

As a learning tool, painting over sprites can be very helpful, but only inasmuch as it can teach you (depending on the source) good color usage, interesting character postures, and pleasing proportions.  When you strip away guybrush's coat, the shape of the character looks wrong because the coat is so large and baggy.  The way to fix this is to fix the posture of the character.

Also, if you really want help, you absolutely need to spend more than 10 minutes on a draft.  Set a target of 30-60 minutes just establishing line work and colors, and if you are still not pleased with where it is going then post your work here.  Many of us do not have time for people who are not truly interested in self-improvement, and spending just a few minutes on a quick paintover shows us you don't really care about your work and want instant results.  Additionally, don't post images in an over-scaled format because it makes it daunting to resize and do paintovers for you, as ManicMatt discovered.

Taking this in mind, I did a 4-stage paintover of a guybrush sprite I found on google, working him gradually toward a posture and shape that seemed fitting for the George Stobbart reference I found here.

1.  Prep Work.  Removed Guybrush's jacket and examined his posture, which seemed all wrong for a confident, more stylish character like Stobbart.

2.  Started to adjust his pose and establish the color scheme of his outfit from the reference.

3.  Adjusted posture and gave him his massive trademark blonde hair.  If you don't want to add highlights and such, this would not be a bad sprite.  I also adjusted the skin tones because I was never particularly fond of lucasarts fleshtone color choices, though this is purely preference.

4.  Finished reworking the pose and added highlights.  Also brought his left arm out a little bit.  His head was reduced in size by a couple of pixels since his arms and legs were reduced in size.




As you can see, there are pretty extreme jumps in detail from 2 to 3 and even 3 to 4, and that's where just working on the sprite and focusing on what you want it to look like comes in.  There really is no substitute for spending time on your work, so please invest more than 10 minutes on your future sprites and you will be glad that you did.  Hopefully this helps.

[Layabout]

Progz, great as always, but with the proportions, your sprite of george looks wrong. In a 12 year old boy wrong kinda way...

Which, as Progz did say, paintovers are a great learning mechanism to sprite lovelyness, but paintovers generally always look like paintovers. The number of times i've seen indiana jones or guybrush threepwood in fancy dress and a wig in an ags game makes me think that 1. the 'artist' can't be arsed to learn the skill to create their own original sprites, or 2. they don't spend enough time on the sprite.

You can always tell a person who has no artistic talent whatsoever by their crappy mspain sprites, but they are rarely paintovers.

Oh, and by the way supersheep, you havent got that bad an artistic eye, you just need to work on shading and what not. Why not try getting 20 random pictures of real people off google images, lasso tool all but the figure, delete, reduce to 80ish pixels height, and paint over that. Look at the original, pick similar colours to the colours used, fill in, then outline. Instant cartoon sprite. If i can be arsed, I might do a tut on this technique...

[edit] And I sort of have!

So we start with this image. One randomly pulled off google images.



Nice isnt he. So we used the polygon lasso tool in photoshop. If you don't have photoshop, The Gimp is a free, very similar program. So get it. Or you can use Paint shop pro, which is also similar.

Anyway. So did that, selected his outline, deleted it.

Then I reduced the size of the image to scale, having 80 pixels as his height, as very standard and nice size for pixeled characters in 320 x2xx...

which gave me this...



Basically what i did now is select similar colours to the original image, but decreased the lightness to get a nice darkish outline. Then i went around the main details of the image, filled the spaces with a lighter colour, one similar to the actual image and got this:



Details are there, he just seems a bit boring doesn't he. I now select an inbetween colour and make some shading. I'm not going to go in depth when it comes to this part, as I use my eye and think where would the dark bits be. It's somewhat clumsy, but it is how i like to work. I could go into light theory, but loominous has gone into this many times before. If i ever have lighting doubts, i search for his threads. He is a much better artist that I.

Anyway this is the end result!



Done in about 15 mins using photoshop. Obviously this is quite rough and could use some refining. If you repeat using many images from google, different poses and whatnot, you will find spriting easy and pain-free (relatively) Animating is a whore though hehehe.


The technique I used is a crude form of Rotoscoping, albeit without animation.

[Supersheep]

Taken a lot of info form you guys and have come up with this guy. Soldier from WW2 having a break and a quick smoke. Its a working progress. Thought i'd post this seeing as though i'm just setting off to work and wanted to see what you guys thought. (This ISN'T a Guybrush paint over by the way but a copy of a ref image)

I originally had him without the backpack but thought it would add some character if he had one on so i just quickly drew a rough backpack(The peach line going from his belt through the backpack was to get position right must have forgot to take it out ) . Also thinking of making him a medic. What you think? 
He has very little details at the moment but i will be adding more when i get back home:


Things i need to do

1. Change the shoes ( they look awful)
2. Clean up and add an extra pouch to the belt.
3. Add details to the backpack
4.Shadowing
5. Add rank on the right arm (not sure if it'll clog up the area or not, thoughts?)
6. Change the frontpack
7. Add details to the face and make the smoke more visible.
8. Add extra details to the jacket
9. Alter the rim of the helmet.

So there you have it. Let me know what you think and if i need to alter anything.
I'm using a 80x high picture. What should i be using cause you keep saying i shouldn't up scale it but i don't know what you mean.

BTW- Took me aaaggeees! Im not even done yet but I'm really happy with the progress.

Every time i look at it i notice more and more things that are wrong and feel like its not as good as i first thought it was....ah well, hopefully i'll have him done and looking better. I also thing my proportions are a bit out. His legs look too long and his arms too short.

[Sparky]

Wow, that's quite an improvement. Keep up that rate of progress, and the rest of us will be asking you for advice pretty soon.

As for suggestions, The colors are pretty good. I like the way you are using a variety of related colors for outlines, instead of just using black everywhere. The overall pose is good as well. Most people (myself included) automatically draw characters with completely vertical spines. I like the way this guy is leaning forward- it makes it look like his backpack is really heavy.

I think the biggest issues are inconsistent resolution and areas that could use a bit of reshaping.
His waist seems to be a bit high, and his right elbow could use more definition. As for the outlines- it's fine to use double-width outlines as a stylistic choice. But it will always look awkward if you scale up a smaller sprite. If you want to paint over a smaller sprite at a higher resolution, you really need to completely repaint all the edges or you'll end up with jagged chunky effects everywhere. For instance look at the line running from his right shoulder to his elbow, and compare it to the outline of the hat. Do you see how much chunkier the first line is?

I'd also recommend not getting into details like the belt or the highlight on the hat until the sprite is much further along. If you get into details too fast you can easily lose sight of the big picture.

Overall this is a really huge improvement, and I for one would be happy to have made so much progress in such a short length of time.

What I meant was that up close a low resolution sprite just looks like a mess of random colours and I have trouble understanding what I'm looking at unless I zoom out!

I have that problem too. What program are you drawing in? If you use Photoshop or the GIMP, you can actually open multiple windows for the same document and have them at different levels of zoom.

[Supersheep]

Thanks a lot Sparky you've given me an extra boost. I'm working on him when i get back from work. I'll try and figure out a solution for the double lines and work on proportion. I just realized i was working in a different resolution. The guy isn't in fact 80x and recently tried to downscale him and come into the problems the other guys have so it looks like I'm going to have re-do him all over again. Ah well, least thats my Saturday planned Will try to post the updated version later this weekend.

Oh and i'm not sure if my lines are correct because Layabouts look alot smaller than mine do and it looks better too.

[Supersheep]

I've scaled it down, re drawn him and used really thin lines. ( might change that yet ) Moved the hips down and given his arm a bit more length. Also added a bit of detail to the jacket and added a new backpack for keeping blanket his blanket in and added smoke from the cig.

Taken out the highlighting from the helmet and details from the belt also taken out. Though about adding a gun but i think it might take something from the picture, make the soldier seem less relaxed.

Still have to shade him, eep! Thats going to be a huge trial and error.

Also not happy with the helmet, keep changing it but can't seem to get the shape i did before.






EDIT: Added a really simple gun just to show you the look :



The way i had the hand holding the bag really makes it look like he should of had a gun.

[Khris]

At first I thought you finally got the resolution issue. Unfortunately, I was wrong.
Look at the first picture: it is 33x80.
Now the second one looks like a x2 version, but it isn't. It's 64x155. I mean, come on, it should at least be 66x160, right? So you've again scaled it up using Pain(t) or whatever. DON'T DO THIS.
Edit only the original, small 33x80 picture. Then upload it and show it using

Code: ags

[img width=66]

so it gets displayed at twice the size.

The gun in your recent edit uses "quarter pixels", pixels that simply aren't there unless you decide to completely redraw the character at 66x160.

Here's the char, converted to a gif, 30x74, displayed using width=60:

[Layabout]

That is an excellent improvement. Did you use a reference photo. I'm proud of you, you took your time, and came up with a simple but very effective sprite.

It does take a long time when you are starting out pixelling, but if you keep at it, you will be able to knock out sprites relatively quickly, or create more detailed shaded sprites.

i would say to improve the helmet, draw the 'brim' at a 5-10degree angle. I'd make the bag at the front lower, and probably half the size. extend the upper arms slightly, unless he is sticking out his elbow to the right. And animate him

[Kweepa]

Here's the reference image:


Based on this, I made a few changes to your sprite to give you some ideas:


* changed helmet shape
* added stripe on shoulder
* changed hands
* recolored front bag (I'd probably remove this though - it's confusing)
* added wrinkles to trousers

Things that I'd still change if this was my sprite
* belt could be more detailed
* shoes
* some details to the shirt
* make right arm bigger

[Supersheep]

That was indeed the ref image. I tried not to copy it exactly how it was but add my own style to it by removing the gun and the background. I have to admit the gun does look better and adds something to the whole image.. I think i'll give it another go before the weeks out and post it.

I was a bit reluctant to add the stripes as he is not a private ( which is one stripe as my memory serves me, but a Sergeant, which is three ) but thanks Steve for showing me how he'd look. I might just stick with him being a private as three stripes may clog up the area. Originally i tried to create the guy from scratch and ended up with some of the above images which looks completely wrong but then changed to paintover and it looked alot better. I just have to learn to shadow and hopefully i'll soon be drawing then creating my own sprites. Next step is to change the WW2 guy and then work on a new paint over. Thanks for the positive comments and new ideas each one really does help me. I have to admit, this has taken up so much free time it seems like im drawing then going to work, coming back then drawing again but i suppose thats the path i have to go down if i ever want to create something good.

[Sparky]

I'd actually recommend drawing regularly, but limiting your sessions so you have plenty of time for other activities. (The same goes for learning any new skill). If you begin and end in a good mood, it will help you enjoy drawing. If you get frustrated or hungry just save and quit. It should be fun, not feel like work. Granted this will slow you down a lot, but I feel it's better in the long run.

Hurrah for Pavlov .

[Darkshine]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v333/stifane/george.gif
Hey now it's George Stobbart from Broken Sword 2 !

I couldn't help my self to retouch ProgZmax's sprite, removing a bit of his hair makes him less childish. ( I think ? )

Sorry for this little interruption