WIP (Work In Progress): Vasily needs help in shadowing and texturing

Vasily needs help in shadowing and texturing

Printed From: Pixel Joint
Category: Pixel Art
Forum Name: WIP (Work In Progress)
Forum Discription: Get crits and comments on your pixel WIPs and other art too!
URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=26586
Printed Date: 11 September 2025 at 8:44am

Topic: Vasily needs help in shadowing and texturing

Posted By: Vasily_Kukushkin
Subject: Vasily needs help in shadowing and texturing
Date Posted: 12 April 2019 at 4:05am

Hello!

I decided to improve my pixel art skills, especially in texturing things and laying shadows on them. For my first drawing theme I have choosen old TV set.

Anyway, here it is:

This is like detailed view of an in-game object, which player can inspect.

I reworked the concept a little and did a front version:

I very don't like audio speakers texture, that I done on it, also I'm not quite pleased with wood texture and shadowing on metal TV-box.

After a while I thought that isometric version could better perform function of inspecting a object, results of this you can see below:

In this version I am concerned about the same as in first, also, it looks a bit messy to me, but I don't know - what to do.

I used great 16-color palette by aamatniekss:

Maybe, I should have used more colors from palette?

Hoping on yours help and advices,

Vasily.

P.S. I probably did a lot of grammatical mistakes, sorry for that.

Replies:

Posted By: StoneStephenT
Date Posted: 12 April 2019 at 6:19pm

Try replacing the lighter color on the speaker/lid texture with a slightly darker color and see if that works. The brighter color pops the contrast perhaps too much for it to read as the wood texture I believe you're aiming for.

Posted By: Hapiel
Date Posted: 21 April 2019 at 4:08pm

Great stuff!

I like the non iso better. In the iso one you stuck closer to the reference, but actually having a slightly larger screen, and having legs, works nicer for this cabinet. Also in the iso a lot of space is 'wasted' for the wooden sides, whereas the interesting part is clearly the front.

You can compromise a little bit by making the cabinet a few pixels less deep, so that you have more space to show the front side, if you really want to stick to iso.

Also, an isometric design becomes more interesting if there is more depth to play with, make some parts stick out or go inside a bit more. You've already started to exagerate the design from the photo, but I think the iso version could use more.

With a frame around the picture, the box sticks strangely to the frame outline. Perhaps make the iso version slightly too large for the canvas, so that it sticks out on the top and the bottom, but the width matches the canvas size? This also gives you more room for details on the front panel, and cuts off part of the 'boring' top side.

Good luck!