Hi all,

I'm a very newbie. I start yesterday with Pixel Art and need some help. I have read a lot of tutorials about perfect lines and curves.

My first Pixel Art is a smilie to make it not to complicated. By the size, it's not a really WIP I think. I made the outline, fill the smilie with the basecolor, and now I want to AA and shade it.

The question is, how do I do this??

Here is my first smilie:


I'm sorry for my bad english...


Edited by MechVisor - 29 December 2007 at 10:26am

Ok, thank you. I try to make a bigger one. Mhm, I thought about shading, because the emoticons have it too. But they don't have AA.

First off, hello and welcome. And don't worry about your English.

Generally AA needs to have a background, as jal already said this is too small for AA practice.

But it's a good first step on a long road, keep at it.

There is not set way to make a color palette. Do this by eye or use someone else's palette. Many find this to be one of the toughest parts of pixelart. Just keep trying and practicing its all that you can really do except being patient with yourself. Little steps are fine, no rush. 

Nice work, your AA is pretty good! Normally on something like this you wouldn't AA to a background because there wouldn't be any reason to have a background, but it's all good for practice.

A couple of problems with your shading. Firstly, the dark shades you've put southwest of the mouth and eyes loks like a drop shadow, which makes the features look like they're floating above the face rather than attached to it.

Secondly, dithering is tempting, but on a piece like this it's ultimately pointless because you don't really need to create a new shade by blending colors, and you don't really need to add texture.

Thirdly, you need more contrast between your colors. They looked better in the last one because in the latest your dithering has the effect of making them blend almost to invisibility, another reason to remove it. Also, for yellows, I personally tend towards the red end of the spectrum, and also somewhat lower saturation. Pure, intense yellow sometimes looks a little green and sickly.

Lastly, shading just around the edges like you have it makes it look very flat. Always look at references when you're not sure how to shade something.

This is looking pretty good, especially for pixel art by someone who's only been pixelling for a day or two!

One thing you might want to take to mind is that he's not quite circular right now. Earlier, you made an outline with the circle too, and then when you antialiased, you basically got rid of that outer circle. I think that's created problems now because when you floodfill a circle, the outer line is definitely circular, but the inner, filled, area isn't:

 

This diagram shows in pixels you would color by flood filling that aren't in the next-smallest circle. Note how the number of 'em tends to increase as circles get larger. At any rate, your current smiley would probably look fine with just a single pixel of both width and height taken out from his middle.

 

Are you going to shade the facial features or wrap them to the sphere any? Realistically, they'd be warped a bit because they're on a curved surface. Oh, and welcome to Pixel Joint!

 

EDIT: Oh, one last thing I forgot to mention: I think it would look better if you shrunk the bright highlight by a couple pixels.

Edited by Monkey 'o Doom - 29 December 2007 at 2:18pm

I have fixed the mouth (thanks to Lawrence for the tip (next time I use a wider range)). I make a smaller hilight (maybe it's still to big), and at last, the width and height of the outer circle were reduced. Was that the thing what you mean?

Do you mean with wrapping, that I should draw the eyes more elliptical?



Edit: I'm sorry. Thank you all to welcome me so nice. :)


Edited by MechVisor - 29 December 2007 at 6:40pm

I also noticed that you have enough room now for a background. Maybe you'll get that AA practice you've wanted. 

Outer AA never works on all situations.
Some use inner AA, others chose to selout.
Sometimes is better to just make the lineart as clean as possible and if its a little pixelly its cool because its pixelart :)

Alpha channel is used for a transparens look, I'm right? What can I do with it (transparency excluded)? You say AA works only on some backgrounds, but how it works, if the picture should be taken as a sprite?



How you can see, I have made the AA for the different backgrounds. It's harder to make it for colored backgrounds.


Edited by MechVisor - 30 December 2007 at 8:53am

Thank you for your information. How can I do it by hand? Do I choose a color for transparency and save it as the transparency color of my image?

What are Selective Outlines, and why are alpha channels forbidden?

A lot of questions I know, but I want to learn about the rules of PixelArt.

How can you do it by hand? Find a midtone between the yellow and the background color.

Edited by BlackDragon - 30 December 2007 at 1:25pm

Oh, I have always done my AA by hand, but I was talking about the transperency of the background, because a sprite hasn't one. Ok, I learned alpha channels are forbidden and I accept it. ;)

I look at the selective outlining technique, (holy sh*t!) it looks like AA but it isn't, I don't understand this yet. Now I'm confused.

This is the final result:



I know, I'm a newbie, but I will still working on my painting skills. I have learned a lot about pixel art these few days, spheres (or circles) are not the easiest, anyway, more complex figures are even harder.