Self Portrait

[SpacePirateCaine]

Arright, so I'm trying to improve on my pixelling skills, and I've done just about everything I can to finish this piece. It started out as just a 60x60 avatar (Seen on left), but today, since I had some free time, and was bored out of my mind in the evening of my birthday (Go me!), I thought I'd try and expand upon it.

I'm attempting to keep the pallette to 10 colors (11 if you include transparency), but still keep it as realistic as possible. I'm quite proud with it as it is, but I know that there's always a lot more that can be done to make something look good. I'm trying to avoid dithering, except perhaps in places where it'd look natural (Like on my stubbly cheeks and chin). Just wondering if anyone can give me any pointers on how to make it look even better? Should I expand the light areas a bit? Maybe do some dithering? I kind of suspect that I'm not using at least one of these colors to the full extent of its usefulness.

This is the sprite:


Based on this photograph I took of myself.

I could tweak it 'til the cows come home, and every little tweak has been an improvement (in my own humble opinion), but I'm willing to bet some of you could put this to shame. So please, help me improve myself. Thanks!

[Jens]

Awesome conversion! Motivated me to try to work further on it.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

The main issues I see with it is the jawline, nose and lips don't really match your photo.  What I did was shrink your photo to the same size as your image with the same set of colors and then edit yours with the photo as a reference. 

1.  Made highlights more pronounced.
2.  Lowered right eye slightly.
3.  Made mouth less curvy.
4.  Rounded out the jaw.
5.  Shaded it similar to the photo.



Hopefully this helps.  The best advice I can give if you are using a photo reference is to reduce the size and colors to what you intend to use for the portrait and then use it as a reference rather than the original photo, that way you get a better idea of how the colors look.

[SpacePirateCaine]

Thanks a whole lot, guys. The advice is certainly welcome. I'll take a closer look at those two edits, and see what I can do to improve the piece I've already got. There are a good number of changes that need to be made, it would seem, so I'll do what I can to fix it up and post the results here later on.

Cheers!

[SpacePirateCaine]

Alright, I made an effort to fix my facial structure - opened the gap between the eyes, and made my schnoz a fair bit bigger. Widened the chin a few pixels, allowed my hairline to recede even further and fixed some of the collar on my shirt, as well.



I'm attempting, if possible, to accentuate the 'wild eyes' look. So even if it's not a perfect representation, I like them that way.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Looking better Luke, but the jawline still looks like it plunges right into the lower throat area.  Round that sucker out with a darker shade like the reference photo I posted.  Raise the leftmost eye a bit and move the pupil left a pixel -- wild or not it's making you look deformed, and you aren't deformed!  Also, why take away so much of your hair?  You've got more hair than you're giving yourself credit for.  Reduce the number of stray hairs sticking all over (it makes your head look like a brillo pad) and give it a rounder form.  The rest looks good!

[loominous]

I think one of the problems with sticking close to a photo reference in these cases is that you'll most likely just end up with a bad photo emulation. If you want realism, just resize the photo, and voila.

Another problem is that you won't really learn anything.

I think it's way more fun to instead use the medium for what it's best at: interpretation.

In this version below, I did a sort of caricature to emphasize the unique elements of it, by turning the lens more into a fish eye, and exhaggerating some features such as the eye, nose n chin. I kept the photo beside the canvas, but instead of copying lines and shapes, I analyzed the individual features, and then painted my understanding of what I had just seen.

I think one good way of getting around the tendency to simply start copying the photo (which is easy to fall into), is to rotate the head slightly in the Y or X axis, or in this case, use a different lens. This will basically eliminate the risk of merely copying, since the lines of the original won't apply in your version, due to the different angle.



Dunno whether it came out very much like the original, but I think it has quite much personality.

As I can't stand the chores of pixeling, I'll just leave it as is, and hope you'll find some part of it useful.