Help with Character, Color/Composition.

[None]

I really need help with colors here, I'm color blind. Mostly Blue/Purple but some Red/Green.
I'm getting there but I'm not satisfied with my skintones, or with any of the colors really.

This is two variations of the color scheme represented here, with the higher contrast one on the right being my last attempt.

Some Help Guys? Huh?

-SAG

(AC: I hate the resize blur on firefox, have they found a cure for that yet?)

[Babar]

The second one is definitely much better- much clearer, and the individual shades can be made out. The skin colour there might be a little pale, though.

[Buckethead]

I would try to get rid of the straight V shape of the legs.

To get rid of Firefox' blur, get rid of the program all together and start using Opera 

[SpacePirateCaine]

Since you weren't really asking for anatomy questions, I'll leave any of those aside (not that there's much to be said, mostly just dynamic posing, sort of things). I'd say the largest issue you have is a whole lot more colors in your palette than you really need. Especially for the character that's using mostly blue/green tones to the right, your color count is up around 20 right now, when it could very easily be reduced to around 12.

Also, though it's not a huge issue, you could probably simplify the shading a bit in places using, perhaps, a top-down light source, which will make it much easier to animate in the long-run and probably help to alleviate some of the issues with shading.

And regarding the Firefox bilinear filtering issue - it's actually becoming a big problem for pixel artists, because it's slowly becoming a standard. I actually wrote a blog about it a few weeks back here, if you want to hear my own personal opinion on it. Basically, it's an issue caused by the mozilla team implementing an image processing filter developed by cairo graphics that smooths images using bilinear filtering when rescaled. It helps a lot of images when scaled down, but when scaling up, it can cause images to appear blurred (at least when you expect to see the pixels up close and personal).

Fortunately, it looks like the problem is very close to being resolved. You can keep an eye on the actual 'bug' itself on bugzilla via this link here, if you're interested. It's seen a lot of action recently, and it looks like it should be fixed relatively soon.

Until then, I'd suggest backing up your favorites and downgrading to Firefox 2 (which is what I did), or using a browser that doesn't support bilinear filtering yet, like Opera or Internet Explorer.

[SpacePaw]

I use opera and I recommend it to everyone. After few minutes of personalization (search keywords, main page 9 sites etc) it's much better than the FF (And it's not like I hate FireFox or something. I used it for years and switched to opera few months ago)

[Takyon]

I used fire fox for years but I've been using google chrome now for ages and I highly recommend it.

[SpacePaw]

I used fire fox for years but I've been using google chrome now for ages and I highly recommend it.

What is so special about it? I havent used it yet

[Takyon]

Just feels really clean and uncluttered. It's feels quicker than most browsers as well (as it claims).

[Layabout]

The temporary solution for the blur filter thing is just to manually resize in photoshop and save. yes you do have to save twice, but at least those who have got firefox, ie,chrome etc can view them without their eyes burning. I really don't understand why more people don't do this. Almost every browser fucks with your images now, it's really the only option.

I did try using opera, but while it's faster, it crashes so often. Loved the no pixel blurring thing (well it got it right most of the time...)

As for the image, the skin tones are a bit too lobster on the first one and a bit too pale on the secon. Somewhere inbetween would probably look better.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

You can disable the blur in Firefox with the IETab plugin and just switch certain sites (like this one) to the IE renderer.  Also, there's a fix in the works for Firefox to enable/disable bilinear filtering of images, and by some of the code posted in the bug report database it must be more or less just waiting final approval, though like some of you my patience with Mozilla is running thin.

With the anatomy, try reducing the torso height somewhat and widening the shoulders and legs.  This will give the sprite a more masculine appearance.

As for being colorblind, I'm not exactly sure how drastically that affects your perception of contrast and saturation, so I can only recommend that you try and pick your colors 'lighter' or in the mid-high palette range.  The left character in particular is so dark I can barely make out any of the detail you put into it, which is a shame.  I realize this is not your fault, but I've seen some great work by other colorblind artists so I'm sure you can work around it with a few tricks!

[Arboris]

Using opera myself 99% of the time, it has most features onboard (things like the 'fabled' noscript) right of the bat. Also less people use it which means less a big of target for exploits, because no program is truly 100% safe.

Going back to the coloration, the right one looks alot better. But the left one could work just as good with a bit more brightness on his blue stretch suit, It is rather dark.

 

There doesnt seem anything really wrong with their skin tones. Left one has a nice tan, while the right one is a bit pale.