Sprite

[Lufia]

I need some advice.


I don't quite know what to do with the face. How should I draw a mouth ? Are the eyes all right ? I know the hair looks a bit odd, I'll correct it. I'm not quite sure about the placement of the arms. I tried marking the shoulders a bit since then, but I'm not sure it's such a good idea.

Comments and edits very welcome.

[Questionable]

Leave it; I love it. I don't think that you need a mouth for a sprite this size (except when speaking.)
The arms look fine and the hair doesn't look BAD, just "a bit odd." My only dislikes are the richness of the jacket and headband, his pants seemed shaded unusually and his face is a bit too red for my tastes. Maybe a darker line to distinguish the nose, though.

At the end of the day though it is beyond satisfactory.

[Stupot]

Very nice.  I love it too.  But a couple of small things bother me a bit:

1) the pixel-wide gap between the legs is distracting against the bright background.  You could probably get away with just filling it balck (or dark).  2) The diagonal positioning of the jacket's buttons.  Maybe you meant to do that for swashbuckling effect but it looks kind of odd to me.

Anyway. If you can animate that I'd be well impressed.

[Khris]

Apart from the general chibi style I don't really care for, there's way too many colors. Looking at each ramp, I see several I can barely distinguish with the naked eye.

Thus the whole sprite feels too smooth and too "gradient-y", also called pillow shading.
It's a good example why pixel art profits from a limited palette.

The shading looks a bit like guesswork, especially the hair's.

Sorry for the harsh words; overall the sprite definitely has some potential.

[Lufia]

Thanks guys. I got some advice from elsewhere as well and here where I'm at right now:

I'm currently working on the jacket, I have to fix its palette and shading.

I'm posting here right now to answer Khris. Don't worry about being harsh, that's usually the most useful type of criticism. But on this particular occasion, I disagree with what you said.

I started shading with 3-4 colors per region, actually, and what appeared quite clearly was that for a sprite this size, it looked bad. For smaller stuff, around SNES size (16 px wide), yes, 3 colors is all you need. If a sprite is larger, I'm afraid you'll need more colours as well or the shading would look weird. I guess another way to go at it is to use textures (that's called dithering, right ?), but the whole point of that was to simulate in-between colours back when technical limitations prevented pixel artists from using more than 16 colours per sprite, or some such. In this 32-bit era, why wouldn't I actually use these in-between colours?

Though, I did up the contrast of the highlights on the latest version, which I think addresses your problem with colours blending too much together.

On pillow shading... Shadows are going to be a gradient from lightest to darkest colour, no matter how many colours you are using ; if they don't, you're doing something wrong. Pillow shading occurs when you don't know where to put the lightest colour and just put it in the middle of whatever shape you're shading. That is, instead of highlighting the top of the boots, I'd have put the lightest colour in the middle then gone in concentric circles. I don't think I actually did any pillow shading here, and if I did, please tell me exactly where so that I can correct it (you'd be surprised how hard it is to see you've done your shading completely wrong).

I'm aware I must sound like a petulant child that doesn't want to listen to critique right here, but that's really not the intention. It's just that if I disagree on the fact that something's a problem, I'm not going to correct it. ^^'
(That post was a bit rambly, wasn't it? Sorry.)

[Jim Reed]

And my bad attempt of an edit...which came 10 minutes late.
I did reduce the colour count...and made it worse! Yay!

[Khris]

Lufia:
The new version is a big improvement, especially the skin tone.

About pillow shading:
It doesn't have to bright at the center; usually pillow shading is the result if one uses too many colors to create a smooth gradient to make up for not knowing how to shade something properly.
In a 2D piece, the shading defines the volume.

His pants, jacket and face still aren't shaded correctly, his left arm being a nice exception that neatly conveys the folds in the fabric using only two distinguishable colors.

Here's a quick paintover, using 16 colors:

       
x2

[Lufia]

Khris: While I can appreciate the exercise of limiting your palette so drastically, your sprite looks bad, in my opinion. So 16 colours, nowhere near enough. Your edit was most helpful to finally make the face look right, though, so thank you for that. And I did simplify some of my colour ramps.



I think the jacket looks alright now. I'm not too sure about the pants. Please tell me he's pretty. ^^'

Edit: The whole point of pillow shading is to put the brightest colour in the middle when it has no business beign there. In my understanding, it has nothing to do with the number of colours you use. There's even a tutorial about it, quite entertaining in a "so bad it's good" sort of way.

[Khris]

Let's not get into a discussion about what constitutes pillow shading; your definition is too narrow according to the talents over at pixelation for example.

If I was a better artist and hadn't just reduced the palette automatically in ProMotion but chosen one specifically for that sprite, 16 colors would be more than enough to turn this into a beautiful, coherent sprite.

Take a look at this:


That's 16 colors, 14 without the animal.

The important thing though is that you're happy with the sprite, so I'm glad I could be of help

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

The advice Khris is offering is actually very sound and will help you to ultimately produce the best work with a minimal use of colors, which provides many benefits in pixel art, the most obvious being easier to animate sprites.  While I quite like the style you've chosen here, something about the pose and saturated colors just did not look right to me so I did an edit, not only to illustrate more of what Khris is saying about color usage but also to address a few things that may help you in the future.

1.  Moved the eyes one eye apart.  Even though we are not dealing with anatomical perfection here, faces naturally look better when some adherence to natural proportions is observed.

2.  Reduced color count almost by half (from 62 to 32) without sacrificing sprite readability.

3.  Altered hues and contrast of several colors including the skin tones and shirts, pushing some towards red (skin) and others towards green to avoid high saturation and 'pure' RGB colors.  This makes the colors more vibrant and interesting visually.

4.  Adjusted pose somewhat, bringing the right arm out and reducing the size of the left arm somewhat.

5.  While I appreciate the big shoes style, I think there is a more pleasing middle ground you can achieve by showing more of the character's legs, especially for animation purposes, so I reduced the size of the boots and made the legs a bit less stocky, giving the character more of a reasonable shape that matches his torso.

6. Re-shaded the hair in a more typical anime style and reduced some of the 'bulk' of the hair to make it look less like a wig.  Also reshaded for a more or less overhead light source, with highlights on the shoulders and areas that 'pop' out (belly, shirt folds, knees).







Even if all you take away from this is a greater interest in color application (selecting fewer, more vibrant colors) I guarantee your work will improve as a result.  Hopefully this helps!

[Ryan Timothy B]

I like that a lot Progz.  He looks like a little adventurer.

[loominous]

Due to the frequency of these pillow/colour amount comments, I feel an urge to weigh in.

In my experience, unattractive shading has nothing to do with colour amounts.

However, reducing the colour numbers does often improve the looks of poorly shaded surfaces, in kinda the same way that applying grain can turn a boring surface into something passable.

So while it works as a quick cosmetic fix, it doesn't tackle the underlying problem, which is a lack of understanding of how light works.

Working in large resolutions/colour amounts exposes artistic weaknesses like this, so I would suggest that you stick to your large amount of colours for the time being, get those to work properly, and then reduce them according to taste, and in order to make the sprite more easy to animate.

Working in smaller sizes/colour amounts will often help you feel more content with your abilities, which is important to keep up the morale, but going hi-colour/res at least once in a while is a good way to keep track of your current weak spots, and help you improve your understanding in many areas.

[Lufia]

Khris: 14 colours, so... 7 shades of green and 7 shades of blue/grey? Makes me think I didn't go that overboard in my colour picking.

ProgZ: Thanks for your time. There is good advice in your message, like separating the eyes (mine was looking cross-eyed, wasn't he?) and maybe toying around some more with the shading of the hair, but the style and pose you chose really don't work for me.

I wonder, what colour do you use as a background when working on a sprite? I use a medium grey myself, which I'm sure influences some of my colour choices. I comparison to mine, your sprite looks... washed out.

loominous: Which parts still look bad?

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

In my experience, unattractive shading has nothing to do with colour amounts.

I'd say this isn't necessarily true with low res artwork.  I think with pixel art there is a very real color saturation point beyond which things just start to look blurry and unappealing.  Don't get me wrong, I understand what you're saying and I'm also not implying Lufia's art suffers from this; I think there were a few too many similar shades that were being lost in translation visually, but it was more the application of the color rather than the amounts that made the shading on the legs, for instance, look like a simple gradient.

I'm not sure I agree either that working backwards from a lot of colors to a few is the right way to go.  I'm sure it's different for everyone, but I'd see that as learning in reverse rather than forward, but this also depends on what exactly we're talking about (low res, high res).  I certainly wouldn't recommend that someone doing low res sprite art start at the high res spectrum and scale back their quality because it just doesn't make sense.

Lufia:  I always draw with a neutral color, something like slightly blue gray or brown-gray but always a color that doesn't interfere with the overall palette.  A solid mid gray can interfere with how you handle the pants colors, for instance, so a bit of a shift (not much) to a color you're not using much of helps me to keep the composition separated from the background.  I also will toggle on/off transparency and view the result on black to see how it holds up in both cases, which isn't strictly necessary but it helps if you think your sprite is getting too dark or bright.  Also, make sure you find a good color setup on your monitor or things can get really dicey.  There are a few good sites I can't remember for great color calibration, because looking at my sprite it just looks brighter to me overall than yours (unless that's what you mean by washed out?).

[Khris]

Khris: 14 colours, so... 7 shades of green and 7 shades of blue/grey? Makes me think I didn't go that overboard in my colour picking.

Not at all. There's 4 shades of green, 4 of grey, 2 of blue, red, yellow, white and black.
The cool thing is that several colors can fit in more than one ramp, and that's exactly what ties the piece together and makes it look coherent.

Having a wide, exclusive ramp for each hue is bad and exactly what bothers me about your piece the most. But I don't want to drift off into color theory stuff.
You have already formed an opinion and seem to not want my help and that's ok with me.

[loominous]

loominous: Which parts still look bad?

Since it's art, what's good or bad is really up to you. My comment was directed at the frequent sweeping advice to "reduce the colours!".

If you were aiming for realism, then most surfaces in the current version reflect the lightsource/s in an unconvincing way.

But for all I know you may have gone for a stylistic approach, in which case realism is irrelevant, and your taste everything.

-

In regards to different approaches to improve shading:

While I do see benefits with both approaches, I think the low colour route brushes the problem under the carpet to a large extent.

I have yet to see a single beginner artist who doesn't resort to overly soft, gradient style shading, when dealing with realism/semi realism, whether on paper or computer.

They look at objects and notice that most have soft shades, and replicate this to the best of their knowledge.

Sure, at this point you could restrict their palette, and the softness will be gone, but if you'd lift the restriction, and have them utilize a full palette again, the problem would still be there, because they still don't know what's wrong with their soft shades. And there isn't anything wrong with soft shades, only misplaced soft shades, and after some practice they'll be gone.

To be clear, I should point out that I don't consider limiting the palette pointless by any means. For instance, when studying light, it is common to limit the value scale to a certain amount of shades, ten for instance, which aids in gauging the distribution of shades in a reference, which can otherwise be very difficult.

At the end of the day, it's all about gaining knowledge. You can circumvent certain areas to a degree, but in the end it will always show to a trained eye, and while ordinary observers won't be able to spot what's wrong, they will feel it.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Perhaps you wouldn't mind providing an edit to Lufia's sprite with the approach you describe, just as a contrast to mine?  I think it would be an interesting exercise to see how each method attacks the problem of color choice and application.  Perhaps afterward I'll go a bit more in-depth with my approach to show my steps more clearly as well and some other low-color tricks.

[loominous]

Suppose I could do an edit when I get some free time, but "my" approach is really just the ordinary way you'd learn this kind of stuff, you simply practice and experiment until it looks right, kinda like you learn colours by using them, instead of resorting to black and white.

So basically it would be like if you had made your own edit with a non pixel brush, though I wouldn't have included all of those charming, but, in regards to realism, unmotivated highlights on the clothes.

-

For the record: I do appreciate the look that limited colours provide in pixel art, and if I dabbled in it I would probably go with very few shades myself. I just think it's important not to skimp on the basics.

[Lufia]

ProgZ: Your sprite seems both brighter and less saturated than mine, which is what I meant by "washed out". I wonder if mine is objectively too saturated, too. I posted it on a forum with a much darker background, the effect was really different. (And hence my little parenthesis about your background colour of choice while working on a sprite.)

loominous: While I'm not going for a realistic style (the sprite is SD after all), I still want the shading to be coherent and believable. If you see anything wrong, point it out.

[Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens]

Aye.  These days I tend to move towards lower saturation, high vibrance colors because in my experience they look the most attractive in a game.  Strong, primary colors have their place but as far as pixel art goes I find balancing saturation and doing a bit of color mixing works wonders.  Since you seem to be a fan of anime style (perhaps the rpgs as well), you'll immediately know what I'm talking about if you play any of the Seiken Denetsu (Secret of Mana) series or the many colorful 2d console rpgs made around that period.  This doesn't mean your sprites always have to be bright and cheery, though!  You can use moderate saturation but employ some color shift so things aren't so 'pure'.  For instance, adding a bit of blue to red makes blood look more 'convincing' to me than otherwise, just as adding a bit of blue and red to green to produce a small range of yellow-green -> green -> green blue can make grass shading look much prettier than just a straight green gradient ramp.  It ultimately comes down to color perception and what you see (vs what I see) and then trying to simulate it on a monitor, so I'm not going to say that high saturation is 'wrong' or pure colors are 'wrong'.  They have their many uses, but in practice I find moving away from high saturation and pure colors to produce the most pleasing results overall; take the example Khris posted, for instance.  It has black (as saturated as it gets ) and a carefully selected range of stone colors that vary in intensity, but what makes it visually interesting to ME is that the stone is not merely a gray ramp but uses blue to spice the image up.

I'm not trying to beat you over the head with this, I'm more trying to offer some general insight anyone could benefit from, but take a look at Khris' example without any color shifting, just pure gradients:



Here we have pure gradients for green and gray in ramps close to the original.  Overall the image looks a bit darker doesn't it?

Now look at the original again:



See the difference some color variation has on the presentation?