Character Help!

[Danman]

I need help improving my character 
I am not a very good artist. I maybe need some tutorials on shading or something. I have tried reading lots of tutorials.




this one is worst i draw this one first. :



Please Help Me realize what i am doing Wrong? Maybe i am just a very bad artist :o

[Matti]

Always avoid BMPs, use PNGs instead. BMPs are ridiculously large, while PNGs are smaller with an equal quality (unlike JPGs).

Note that you can modify your first post to update the images. Also, welcome to the forums.

[Danman]

Always avoid BMPs, use PNGs instead. BMPs are ridiculously large, while PNGs are smaller with an equal quality (unlike JPGs).

Note that you can modify your first post to update the images. Also, welcome to the forums.

Yea i just realized thanks. i changed them to .Gif now.

[Lufia]

The only way to become a good artist is practice. A lot of practice. Reading tutorials will give you basic rules about perspective, proportions, anatomy, various drawing techniques, but the only way to produce anything remotely good is to invest a lot of time in practicing your skills.

Of course, some people start with higher base skill than others when it comes to art. On the other hand, if you start from very low, you'll improve faster. :p

[Kastchey]

It doesn't look bad at all, unfinished maybe, but not bad. Indeed some shading would make it look better, take a look at this step-by-step tutorial for example.
You're more or less at point 3 of the picture included there. Try to shape the folds of your character's clothes, add some highlights to her hair, make her face seem less flat. Add details if you can - that's the tricky part, but can be learned too if you study other people's sprites careful enough.

By the way, is your character a child? Body proportions would suggest so.

[Danman]

This Character meant to be my sister it is a game I am making her for Christmas. She is short that's one reason why she looks like a child but redraw the body a little i think its a bit better. Thanks for the shading tutorial I will try that when i have more time seems like a lot of patience but i guess that's pixel art : . Still need more idea's to make it better thou.

[Wonkyth]

It doesn't take long before you can do shading in your sleep.
The only thing is deciding what kind of shading to use for the surface.

[cuestaluis]

Alrighty, you have a very long and exciting road ahead of you!
My biggest tip would be for you to start drawing big, pen & paper. Get some reference (photos for example), look at how things are placed, where, how far apart from each other. Then sketch on top of the pictures trying to find the basic shapes (circles, triangles, etc) you wouldn't believe how much that helps understand how we are built, it's actually a lot simpler than trying to decipher an anatonic drawing book, although once you get the basic shapes you should check out one of those books to try to refine your basics. THEN get into detailing stuff, like those nails, for example, at your drawing's resolution they look huge!
Once you know the basics it will be A LOT simpler to copy that into a sprite as small.

In the meantime you may want to keep things simpler for your game, shade with one color only, don't try to show every detail, just suggest it's there.

Practice, practice, practice!
Good luck!

You may find this helpful (even if the pose is really stiff):


Just for fun (I'm not trying to be rude or offensive), this is what the drawing made me think:

[TerranRich]

My God. That image will haunt me forever, cuestaluis.  :o

[Danman]

Thanks I can see my problem I am not making details stick out enough. and I did think my face was bit funny
But not that funny. But ur right looks a bit creepy.

This remake is not cross eyed and tried to add has much detail has i could but I had try to make the picture look like my sister too.

[Lufia]

A that scale, a pixel of difference in the eyes' height gives the very creepy drawing cuestalius did. The shoulders are too large, the arms too far apart from the body, the legs look too wide...

cues started by correcting the pose, which you didn't do in your remake. Then he didn't add details but shading to give some depth to the sprite.

There is a slight improvement in your latest attempt, though. Keep practicing.

[Jim Reed]

2x:


When you strip the image to the bare esentials (1), you see that the proportions are off. The eyes should be in the (vertically) center of the head, females don't have wide shoulders, females have wide hips, females also have narrower waists and so forth (anatomy class).
I made you some proportions that could probably fit you(2) Those are not realistic proportions, btw.
You should use thoose to come up with (3). If you examine 2 and 3, you'll see that they are not exactly the same in some aspects (the head is a bit smaller, waist is a bit higher etc.), but tweaking the pixels is what pixelart is all about =D. Just follow your "nose" and try untill you get it to look nice.

I suggest you take a peak at some basic anatomy books and try to think in three dimensions, and that should make a huge difference.

Anyway, I don't know what your sister looks like, so I probably drawn something that doesn't resemble her much. If you are trying to make the drawing look like her, try to higlight her prominent features (eg. hairstyle, tone of skin, posture...)

I hope this helps.

Edit: Hmm... (3) shoulders still look too broad, or is it just me?

[Danman]

This remake added quite a bit more detail a few little shadows  8) . It's getting better but why i don't want
extreme detail is cause i have to animate her. More detail means more difficult. But what does everyone else think about this remake??

[Anian]

That's quite better, you still have a bit of a pixel detailing problem (on the left side of the neck there's a pixel the colour of her skin that's kinda sticking out for example, and in some other places), but you'll get the hang of that with experience.
Also maybe change those retinas (the black pixels in the eyes) cause she looks kinda like she's making a sad face.

About anatomy details - maybe make the hair line in the center a bit lower (1-2 pixels) and the lips are not so visible anymore (maybe even keep the hue of the lips but make it a bit darker).
Also make the torso shorter for more natural look (although for a style, this doesn't have to be that important. Usually my guide is that lenght of the legs is half the whole body lenght, but again these proportion details are not that important if you have a different style in the whole game).
Oh, and I'm glad you changed the nose, looks much better now.  

One more thing, I suggest you copy one half of the body to the other (make it symetrical, see Jim Reeds or cuestalius post - there the sides are identical, except for the face), then later you can make details. For now her limbs look shorter on the right than on the left side. Plus that way you get 2 more things - less drawing and prettier looking character (symetry is beauty).  

Hope that helps, you're definetly improving, might wanna try drawing it like cuestalius did (just with more narrow shoulders and less crosseyed   ). Before the woman looked like and alcoholic, now she looks like a soccer mom, so at least her lifestyle has improved.

[Danman]

I fixed the eyes
The lips
And little bit of anatomy
fixed the hair.
I thought symmetrical would make it too alike.
Would like more ideas though. And some comments on my remake  

[Jim Reed]

Well, comparing your first and last image you're doing pretty good.

I think maybe you should change the colours a bit, making the pants a bit more blue and make the skin more redish (a tiny bit). But that's just me being picky =D. Also maybe put in some minor details like a bracelet (if she wears one), earings etc to spice it up a little.

[Danman]

The latest remake I added a bracelet,earrings and changed the color of the jeans and skin.  8)  8)  8)  8)          ...
But still open to more suggestions. And thanks for all the Hints & tips so far. 
I am sure i will be satisfied soon with my pic.

[Jim Reed]

2x:


A is the original image. To fix the neck (it looks like C.Ronaldo now) I pushed a few pixels on B, and brought the shirt collar up and moved the head down a bit to shorten the neck  on C.

D is what we have from the previous correction. I fixed the arm (it looked skinny there) on E, and made the sleeve more 3D-ish on F (also fixed the other sleeve to match)

Using the corrected image G, I moved the nose a bit down, added eyebrows and fixed the lips on H.

Your waist on I was looking mighty wrong, so I corrected the shape on J and also made the shirt overlap the pants and not the other way around.

On K you can see that her ribcage is too big and long for a female, so I hugged her =D tight till I came up with L.

On M, I just recoloured the whole image with some brighter colours, and also deleted about 8 unnecessary colours. I've redrawn the shading to give it more depth, too. If you're going to animate, try using as little colours as possible. So she has now 3 colours tones for skin and shirt and 2 colours for her pants.

On second look, I think my colours are bad =(, but you can find someone with better colour sense than me allmost anywhere.

Anyway, I'm getting to carried away in this...Cheers!