Character sprite - asking highlight advice

[Disco]

The day has finally come. My first character sprite, ever, is in the works. After a long planning process, from being inspired to make this game during the first OROW competition, showing off concepts at Mittens 2005 and discussing the project during the first AGS Podquest ages ago, I am ready to begin  .



3x


I have no problem shading and highlighting fine art, but digital always gives me a bit of trouble. My first couple highlighting drafts made his face look dirty, and I'm still not convinced I've got it right. Also, I am wondering if I have either too much highlight on his shirt, or if the shadowed area is too wide.

[InCreator]

I suggest a tiny bit more saturation onto skin.  Nobody has skin tone like this!

Also, you could full feet a bit together, by pixel or two.

Otherwise, superb sprite, not much to crit here.

[Disco]

I lightened each of the flesh tones and moved his legs closer as you suggested, I rather like the skin change but I am still deciding about the legs. They look good both ways, the former having more of a superhero stance

Other changes I made were shaping his right (our left) pantleg a bit differently and changed the outline of the blue rings on the shirt to a dark blue instead of dark red, and put some highlights on his upper pockets. Failing any crits on things I may have missed, I think I'm finished.

[Oliwerko]

Great sprite here!

Only thing that catches my eye are his hands.
I don't know why, but they look kinda strange to me.
Maybe the size isn't right. - But that's only my opinion.

[InCreator]

Added 15% of red to edited skin to show you what I really meant:

[Disco]

Ah yes that does look quite a bit better. Thanks. I normally use swatches, and end up picking olive-ish colours for flesh instead of rosier ones    I should practice picking better ones from the spectrum, rather than the default swatch.

[Damien]

Here's another paintover:




-1- Original sprite
-2- New skintones, i edited the midtone slightly increasing the saturation mostly and then took the same color, lowered the saturation and brightness and shifted the hue towards blue a bit
-3- Added the skin highlight by taking the midtone again, increasing the brightness and saturation and pushing the hue towards yellow. The head was moved to what seemed a bit more natural position.
-4-Finally, the body shadow was edited.

The way I edit shadow and highlight is, I move the highlight's hue towards the lightsource color (in this case yellow for sun), and shadow's hue towards the reflected light's color (blue - sky). That depends of the sprite's setting, but I mostly choose yellow-blue combinations with the lightsource above them for sprites that will be reused in multiple locations.

[Disco]

Thanks for the paintover and tips Damien . For the sake of style and animation, I am going to keep just two tones for each part of the sprite. Adding the third as you have changes the style beyond what I am attempting.

However, you have given me a couple ideas on what to do next. For instance, you confirmed my suspicion about the head, and when editing later I plan to take one row of pixels out of his neck. Next I may adjust the nose suggestion to horizontal rather than vertical.

Also, I really like what you did in the second step, with the midtone. I shall experiment with higher-contrasting skintones and see which I like better.

EDIT-

And done:



Shifted the shadow oh his shirt, the head sits one pixel row lower, and I worked with the hands a little bit. I think I will be able to start animating soon