._. You must have been really bored to write up such a huge wall over a small piece.
(cont from previous) Now, I'm going to draw your map a little differently. This time, I'm going to show the map of each part of the piece. LINK. This shows us a couple of interesting things. First is shows us that there's no rhyme or reason to when you used the brighter colors vs the darker ones - you obviously had a lightsource, from the left, but the intensity of that lightsource appears to change from piece to piece. The skirt has it going at a medium strength, the gems and lighter-grey band thing have it very strong, and the arms and face have almost no effect from the lightosource. So there's that - a lack of consistency with the lightsource can make pieces look separate and un-unified. Also, from this map we can clearly see that you never integrate colors from certain ramps into other ones. See, that's the real TRICK of palette optimization. This one makes it clear, but look back at the first map real quick, the one that doesn't separate the parts, just the colors. The goal of Palette Unification is to make those color ramps link up as often as possible while still remaining sensible and usable. Look here, at the Commodore 64 palette. See how strange and different the colors are, but one can still make ramps out of them in almost ANY combination of colors, even purples and yellows and greens making ramps?
Essentially, I'm saying that you can put colors that don't SEEM alike into the same ramp and it can still work. Look at any entry from the week's Weekly Challenge and you'll see people doing this like crazy. For your piece, some re-working of the palette will probably be necessary to do very much unification, but here's an easy few: merge the two similar reds in the shoes, turn the browns into dark greys, use your hair colors as accents within the exisitng red ramps, and use the brightest skin tone in place of that bright grey you use - it gives a visual splash of color without making the image look too skin-like. If your palette across the piece looks unified, the piece itself will appear more cohesive and drawn-together.
My third thing is banding. This is not about making it unified. Banding is a pixel-level error where you make a row of pixels "hug" and exactly repeat another line of pixels of a different color. For example, the way your bright highlight on the legs hugs the black outline on the left. THIS is a tutorial I wrote for my blog about what exactly banding is, why it's a problem, and how to fix it, in the simplest terms I could come up with. You have banding on the legs, the gems, the sleeves, the sash/band, the hands, the horn, and the red bits of the dress around the neck, to name a few.
My fourth thing is a type of line we call "jaggies", which is pixel artist jargon for "unsmooth curves". It's caused by abruptness in curve angles or inconsistency in a curve. An example of the first is the top-right part of the hair or the legs, and an example of the latter would be the way the skirt seems to bulge out on the right side. It can also be caused by a curve being too straight on an object that is otherwise curvy, such as the left side of the skirt (which is a straight diagonal line on an object that should be curved and flowing, making it appear uncharacteristically stiff). THIS is also a tutorial I wrote for my blog on how to fix things and understand>*** Message truncated (4000 chars max) ***
(cont from previous) My last thing I want to mention is lightsource again. You see, lightsource is important. Along with the shape of an object and its pixel clusters, it's the single most important thing to make an image look consistent. And you HAVE a lightsource, as I mentioned, at the left. The problem is that it is unevenly applied. Not even just in the way I talked about above, where it's stronger in some places than others - there are places where it literally makes no sense. I'm talking about the skirt. There are two main issues with it. One is that you don't seem to understand how light hits folds like that (not an uncommon problem). Second is that you treated the red and grey on the skirt separately, probably because they had a black line breaking them apart, but the light should follow the two colors exactly the same way. Here, I have more visual aids. LINK This is the skirt reduced to its simplest forms, an up side and a down side to every fold. Where the fold faces the light source it is bright, where it doesn't it is in shadow. Let's add a little curve to those zigzags: LINK. The primary difference here between my drawings and your pixels is that on yours, the greatest highlight is on the very tip-top of each curve, but it should actually be the part that faces left - the top should be where it transitions into shadow! Let's add that second section to it and see how the light changes when it hits it: LINK1 LINK2. (note: my point is that it didn't change by splitting off another color)
So here's the wrap-up: For a more unified piece, you should do away with black outlines where thigns aren't actually separated (and might do away with them entirely), unify your color ramps across the whole palette to a greater degree, and establish a consistent lightsource not just for direction, but also strength of the light. Also design the character in a way that makes sense to the viewer and doesn't break the laws of reality unless you intend it to do so (and even then it should LOOK intentional, not ambiguous or indistinct). Pixel-wise, you need to smooth out your curves and avoid both banding and gradienting (where you shade by just using a darker color as you move in one direction without real concern for the way the light is actually wrapping around the object - this is very evident in the legs).
Also, I left out the obvious one: finish the piece! Shade that hair. But WIP, so not too big of a deal.
Well, this is kind of a beast of a post, so I'm going to stop there. This should give you some serious stuff to think about and work on, but if I said ANYthing that didn't make sense or you want additional help on a specific section, just ask - I check back on pieces I critique frequently, and am always up for a follow-up post. Good luck! (I'm finally done posting now)
(cont from previous) That's the design side of things. How about the pixel side? Well, there's a lot of stuff actually. But I'm going to focus on three things, and touch on a fourth and fifth. Three of them have to do with presenting a more unified image.
Here's my big one for unification: the black outlines around everything. See, solid black is a very hungry color. Weird sentence, huh? But it's true. Black eats everything around it. Unlike off-blacks and off-whites, true black (hex code #000000) and true white (hex #ffffff) act like totally saturated colors in that they are extremely bold and attract the eye. When you put a highly saturated color next to an unsaturated one, the saturated one can be so bold that it overpowers the other color and making the fine detail harder to see. (I refer to this as the saturated color "eating" the other color, hence the hungry thing). Now, some piece have it where they put a big block of bright cyan next to some grey, and it's obvious there. But the black outline is the trap - black doesn't seem like a saturated color, and doing it as an outline isn't very much there, so it's not a problem, right...? It is a problem though. When you have a black outline, it actually eats up the detail of pretty much everything that comes right next to it. Fine detail gets lost to the black. Using black on all the internal lines as well (such as between the red and grey on the skirt) means there's black all over the place. However, this is only one of the problems of the black outline. The other problem is much more straightforward - black breaks the flow. That's why we use it as an outline, it defines the edges of things, right? The problem is that too often in spriting we get caught up and make EVERY line a black outline. You should only use black where you want to imply real separation - black along the bottom of the skirt, or around the legs, is fine. However, some areas, such as red-to-grey on the skirt (and near the neck) definitely don't need it. Sprites are small, every pixel is a precious space for you to flesh out the detail of the character, and to lose all that space to just separating things is too costly. This is the #1 reason, in my opinion, that it doesn't look unified - your black lines took the piece and split it into a bunch of spearate pieces that we perceive as distinct and isolated from each other. I could go on about why black is awful for outlines (for example, it doesn't assist in relaying the properties, such as color, of the object it's outlining), but I'll stop there for now. Just look at the skirt here and tell me it doesn't look more like one object because I removed the line: LINK
Unification point 2: The palette. First, this is a thing you should do on every piece: construct a palette map. A palette map is an image that shows each of your colors, setting them side by side in their ramps (or strings of colors that go from light to dark on the same structure), with maps sometimes branching out if a single color is a part of multiple ramps. I made one out of your image: LINK. What do we see? I see five ramps: a long bright red ramp and a long grey ramp, linked at the brightest color. I see an offshoot on the red ramp where you have what seems to be a nearly identical color (this is from the shoe btw). I see a duller red ramp of the hair, a brown ramp with almost no purpose (eyebrows and two pixels between the arm and body outside the black outline), and a yellow ramp of the skin. Black is both the end of every single ramp and not really a part of any ramp at all. All and all, plus transparency >*** Message truncated (4000 chars max) ***
Well, if you word it THAT way I'm totally in for helping and feedback and all. In the future, keep in mind that the PixelJoint gallery isn't supposed to be for WIPs, but for finished pieces. There's a forum here for posting WIPs and getting feedback just for that purpose :) Also, there are other forums (such as Pixelation) dedicated to feedback and the like, and I'll open the door here as well and say that if you ever want some feedback you can message me here and I'll help out as best I can, any time. And if you DO just post to the gallery again, put a message like "really would like some help figuring out how to do x/y/z with this piece, please help" in the description or something so everyone knows you're not putting this forward as something you're done with.
Alright, to the piece. Now, you have two types of issues going on it seems, pixel-errors and design-errors. Both have elements that are playing into the "not unified" thing, but I'll start with the design.
Design-wise, the character is pretty okay, but some parts don't make sense to me really. That's acceptable to some level (crazy fashion is the norm in a lot of stuff), but not when the fashion isn't quite understandable. Here's some of the points where I notice that: the, um, horn I guess doesn't make any sense to me and the belt/sash thing seems a bit loose. We can obviously tell that it's a separate piece because its edge sticks out on the right side, but if it were actually holding something together it would cinch in together. Here, check this picture: http://www.bridalwave.tv/ForeverYours12Nov.JPG You can see how the sash is at the thinnest point cuz it ties it together. Here's a drawing I made illustrating it for your piece: LINK.
What does the basic sensibilities of her outfit have to do with unity? Well, in this case it's mostly about removing distraction. When I see a piece like this, even if I can't put my finger on WHY it looks weird I'll be put-off by how her outfit makes no sense. I once did a piece with a mayan pyramid in it, but I forgot how those are 3d and so left off a side, and despite the pixels being fine it made the whole thing just look, well, wrong. Fixing some design elements like that can go a long way to making the piece look good.
So what else do I have design-wise? First, I've got the pose. I can't quite tell if those are just very high heels or if she's floating with her feet pointing down, or what. Also, choosing to go with that style of face (very stick-figure-esque) makes it kinda confusing on the eyes.
So what can you do on other pieces to try and tighten up that design stuff and not hit the same pitfalls? Well, think about where things would realistically lie. Even in a totally fantastical piece, think about the reality, then make the conscious decision to deviate from that reality - just make sure you know you're doing it. That's why it's so important for even moe anime artists to understand anatomy, because in the end everything is based off of reality (even if the piece doesn't look realistic). The difference between stylized design and laziness/ignorance is deliberation. The most helpful tricks to getting your head around a design when you're pixelling is a) look at references - pose, material, anything and everything, and b) draw a sketch beforehand of how you want the pixel-art to be shaped. Like, pencil on paper. Even if you suck at drawing, just use it guide your thoughts and plan your piece beforehand. (cont in next)
Hence the WIP, I started with a different coloring style when she was still without a head...but when I made a head things started to take a different shape. I'm trying to parse out how to make the entire thing more unified and was hoping for some feedback by putting her up as is hahaha...
Nice design, but the banding is seriously killing this.
This is quite a mess in comparison to your 2 nice and clean and well designed gallery pieces.
I actually do this pretty regularly. I got kinda wordy cuz I'm trying to be very precise and explanatory (as I post my critiques as tutorials over on my blog so I want them to be understandable even by amateurs). Also, doing it so in-depth actually lets me exercise my pixelling muscles even when I don't have much inspiration.
Besides, I like helping people :3
(I grant, this particular one is especially huge, but that's because this piece was a marked drop in quality from Kits' other pieces so I knew she had the ability to excel if helped out)