Two Sprites. Critique needed.

[BoosterBronze]

Two characters from my first game attemp. Worlds better than my first tries, but still needing lots of work.

These are two college students, Welles and Jenkins, and will be at desks the whole time, hence no legs and I need to animate the left arm to be on the desk, which I have yet to learn how to draw, and to do things like raise and point.




Welles (in the cap) is supposed to be in a varsity jacket... doesn't quite work though.

Jenkins (in the sweater) is supposed to be a bit chunky. Something is wrong with his head, but I cant quite seem to get the jawline right.

I'm really going for a early 90's LucasArts/Fate of Atlantis feel with this. I've also been studying "Flight of the Amazon Queen"'s style extensively (evident I think in Welles' ballcap and jacket). Are the eyebrows too much? How's the shading? Any comments would be dug.

[Evil]

The saturations of these characters is really weird. The skin is rather dark, and white of the jacket is too gray. I played with the second characters face, didn't really spend much time on the first. I'd recommend making the colors a bit lighter and more contrasted. There are a few problems with the shading, but once you get shapes right, you can play around with the shading.



Also, when posting images to the forums, try posting in a format that doesn't loose quality. Though they appear to be solid color blocks, when I was tring to change some colors around there was a lot of variation in the colors making the dump tool useless. Gifs are the best. For some reason PNGs can save loss-less or not.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

I think your work is good, but if you want Fate of Atlantis style you're going in completely the wrong direction with it.  For one, you use too many similar shades without enough contrast to stand out, and second, your sprites are just way too large .

I've done two examples that should help you with this.  The first is an edit of your original with better attention to colors and shading.





1.  Edited the colors of the original to make them higher contrast, which helps bring out shapes better.

2.  Reshaded the entire thing with a generic light source overhead.  This allows me to give his cheeks definition and his belly a sense of being round.



For the second example I went ahead and drew this same character with the Indiana Jones sprite from Fate of Atlantis as a direct visual reference, using the pre-existing colors from the game's palette.






As you can see, Fate of Atlantis sprites would actually require much less effort on your part than what you're doing right now because they:

1.  Do not use many colors, allowing you to focus more on design.

2.  Are much smaller and therefore easier to draw and animate.


As for Amazon Queen, as I recall the sprites were about 1.5 times the size of the FoA sprites, approximately, but still quite smaller than your current versions.  I would definitely recommend you get some visual references of what you want your game to resemble and use those as a reference for your work.

[BoosterBronze]

Thanks for the quick and helpful replies.

Also, when posting images to the forums, try posting in a format that doesn't loose quality. Gifs are the best. For some reason PNGs can save loss-less or not.

Gotcha. Gifs it is! (stupid PNGs! Never liked them anyway. I always wanted to call them 'pings.')

I think your work is good, but if you want Fate of Atlantis style you're going in completely the wrong direction with it.  For one, you use too many similar shades without enough contrast to stand out, and second, your sprites are just way too large .

I started by actually doing draw-overs of "FOA" sprites... but looking at them now I realize the images I downloaded were already double sized. Silly me.

Less shades, more contrast.

For the second example I went ahead and drew this same character with the Indiana Jones sprite from Fate of Atlantis as a direct visual reference, using the pre-existing colors from the game's palette.



As you can see, Fate of Atlantis sprites would actually require much less effort on your part than what you're doing right now.

That's great. I'm a bit confused by 'the games palette.' I'll aim for less shades, but how would I make sure I'm using the game's palette?   

Thanks again.

[Snarky]

In fact, PNGs should always be lossless, and are generally superior to GIFs (unless you want animation). If it looks like lossy compression has been used on a PNG file, it's either not a real PNG (but a JPG that has been renamed), or it's been saved in a lossy format before it was saved in PNG.

The best advice is to learn how to create PNGs and use them.

[BoosterBronze]

In fact, PNGs should always be lossless, and are generally superior to GIFs (unless you want animation). If it looks like lossy compression has been used on a PNG file, it's either not a real PNG (but a JPG that has been renamed), or it's been saved in a lossy format before it was saved in PNG.

The best advice is to learn how to create PNGs and use them.

Dully noted. Busting out the old manuals now.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

To get the game's palette just load the edit I posted there for you, that uses a palette taken diectly from one of the scenes in the game.  Bear in mind you don't need to use the palette strictly, and depending upon which art program you use it will be easier or more difficult to even work with palettes.  Photoshop has swatches, so you could just make your own range of colors and place them in swatches to use (if that's what you have).