pixel robot (you know those are the best kind of robots!)

[FruitTree]

here he is in all his mechanic glory!

(he's highfivin everyone that thinks quantumphysics is cool)

he's supposed to be cute and sturdy and aged.

now I'm not much of a pixel artist so you tell me what needs fixin!
is he cute enough? is he still kinda realistic lookin? I tried to get some depth in the eyes did it work allright?

gimme crits! I'll save a urangatang for every  crit I get!

[Jakerpot]

is he a washing mashine?  how did he moves? wheels or walking?

[SpacePirateCaine]

He looks great - there aren't a lot of things I can think of to really improve the actual outline or anything of the sort on the sprite itself. If anything, I'd give the usual rule-of-thumb to never use 'pure' black on a sprite. It's not the be-all-and-end-all rule of art, but black just is a little over-stark. You could also push one or two pixels on his dome head to make it a little bit rounder.

If you want to smooth out the outlines a tiny bit and give it a less 'flat' look, you could use one of your other tones to outline the lighter areas. Also, if anything, you could round out the bottom of the head so that it looks like the base is round, at the moment it's a bit sharp.

Finally, you could optimize your palette a little bit by using the same dark tones for the arms and legs as you do for the front of the body.

I've done a very minor alteration to illustrate the points I just mentioned:



I didn't change a whole lot, but I'm using the same dark tone for everything that you previously had as black. Added only one tone (a near-white pink) to avoid using pure white in the image, and pushed one or two pixels around to make the head look a little rounder at the base.

Also, added a little more 'wear' to the 'bot around his joints and edges, as you said you wanted him to be 'aged'. If you have any questions about what I did, or if anything doesn't seem to make sense, let me know and I'll be happy to elaborate.

[FruitTree]

thanks so much!

like I said I'm not much of a pixel artist I'm just learning as I go!
I love what you did with the eyes to make the 'shiny' curve with the glas, see thats the stuff I forget!
and re using the same colours (even in the little bulb on the spring) I really learned a lot from this!

I edited the bot (his name's Lenny btw) with your edit next to it as an example a lot of it looks just like your version but I really wanted to do it myself so I could learn
I might've added some shade or light and different aging around his feet and such
hope I didn't over-do things:


thanks a bunch! YOU saved an urangatang!

btw next up is animating! and I'm totally new to that, what is a good (not too difficult) program to use for animating these kinds of sprites? thanks in advance

[SpacePirateCaine]

He looks great, and I definitely think it's a good idea to see what others do and then attempt it yourself. Glad to see you managed to fix it up. Lenny's lookin' sharp.

Reusing colors in your palette really helps, honestly. Even though we are working in an age where palette size honestly doesn't matter, as a sprite artist, it's always a good idea to 'use your palette smartly'. As a rule of thumb, if you have two colors that look really similar in different places, you should be able to reuse them (This includes things like if you have a Caucasian character sprite with blonde hair, you can use the lightest skin tone for shading in the hair, things like that.

But I'm getting a bit off topic. If you hadn't said you were doing spriting for the first time, I wouldnt've guessed. The composition is strong, and despite a few minor issues, Lenny there reads really well.

Where animation (and incidentally all sprite work for me) is concerned, I personally use GraphicsGale - It's a program designed exclusively for low-res pixel art, so it's got a lot of the features you need, without getting too, too fancy. Some of the other folks on the forum use Pro Motion, though I can't vouch for it's usefulness since I've never used it myself. But any program with a pencil tool that supports individual frames and can output an animated .gif file will do, honestly.

[cosmicr]

man, if it werent for the uprising popularity of flash and mobile games, then half of these fantastic applications wouldnt be available to us!

[Jakerpot]

you could add more shades to it, you know, add a lighter or darker color on his body,    
particularly on the right.