No sooner did I say I was bored with pixelart did I get asked to draw character portraits for a friend. This is more of a color test than anything.
Any thoughts?
(http://www.penguinx.org/old.gif)
His beard seems to end VERY suddenly. It also seems like it is all made up of 1 line of hair coming from directly under his chin.
Other than that, it is a great piece.
* too bright(saturated) skin palette, almost orange
* too heavy beard shading, there's not much places/occasions in the world where light can shade so little thing from black to bright white, especially in this way
* left eyebrow looks a bit weird
But apart from that, extremely lifelike. I love it!
I think the beard is very plausible.
I'm trying to find the balance between over-saturation and rich color. Desaturated colors are nice and all, but I really want to have the characters pop against the backgrounds. This level of color might be too much, though. I'll mess around with it tonight and post the results.
I think the features of the face seem like they bend towards the right side of his face and his left eye is too low. Also the wrinkles in the corner of his mouth look too dark for my taste.
(http://marcus.krupa.se/AGS/om.gif)
I've found that you can usually use very highly saturated colors, if you limit them to the lit up parts of the objects.
In my mod the brightest skintone has maximized saturation, however the darker ones have somewhat lower, which makes it more realistic and pleasing on the eye.
I also made the darker tones more pink while letting the brighter stay yellow. This is to simulate it being lit up by a yellow lightsource (like the sun for instance), lending a yellow hue to the lit up areas.
On the same note I gave the the white tone a yellow hue to simulate the yellow light once again, which also cools down the darker parts, creating some minor color variation.
I changed the light direction as well to provide more shadows which increases the depth and makes it somewhat more interesting, and added a rimlight on his right side for the same reasons.
Another thing is the usage of darker lines with darker areas around them, as in the forehead in the original. In my opinion this never really looks good, and I'd replace them with a single darker tone, skipping out on the lines. Lines in general looks bad in my opinion but that's just a personal preference.
His face anatomy was somewhat distorted, where his eyebrow line was tilted in one direction and his forehead in another. I did some other mods in the face which I'm not sure are correct but looked better in my opinion.
Anyway, I liked the original and this is just what I would've done.
Loominus, I dig the edit. Your coloring, while much more technically sound, seems simpler in execution. I often can leave things alone long enough to achieve such an effortlessly nice looking result. In essence, my stuff always looks stacked together if that makes sense.
Lighting and shadow (and how they define form) are my biggest weakspots. Thanks for the pointers.
L, I can't tell you how much that edit has helped. I realize now that because I am inexperienced at using shadow and highlight to define form, I tend to rely on lineart to define objects still. Take, for instance, the wrinkles of the forehead and the cheek bone.