Thanks! It's okay, I should have thought to save the original. There wasn't much critique for that original one anyway.
I put up the lesson a few minutes ago, here: http://www.logbook-project.com/2014/07/pixel-art-lesson-s0mbers-cloak-contrast.html
Thanks for being so receptive this whole time! I'll keep an eye out for whatever you think up next ;)
Here is the second one with 19 colors, the first one is gone unfortunately..
No problem, thanks for letting me! I'll totally let you know.
Actually, for reference, do you still have the files of the original iterations? The one with the really low contrast? If not don't worry about it.
Sure, that would be a great retrospective exercise for me as well; let me know when you put it up :)
Thanks!
Aye, and the latest ones have the best forms yet :) Still a bit of that resolution mismatch, but whatever.
Don't feel obligated to stick onto this one at all. I rarely actually go back to change a piece and just apply critique to the next one. You've made tremendous progress with this piece, and you should be proud of that :) If you're ever stuck and itching for critique, hit me up and I'll see if I can't help.
To help with the tutorial searching, the one I linked in the previous post is one of the best. This one is actually my favorite, though it doesn't go out of its way to explain all the lingo (but has a great explanation of the resolution thing I was talking about): http://www.pixel.schlet.net/. And I'll be a bit selfish and link my own lessons, mostly teaching through observing other critiques to understand what to watch out for: http://www.logbook-project.com/p/pixel-art-lessons.html
If you don't object, I'd like to use your piece and the critiques here as a lesson as well, to share the things explained here so others might avoid the same mistakes. Great chatting with you, and I'm excited to see whatever you come up with next!
Thanks! A couple more iterations. I see what you mean, but still can't get it right in some places.. well, trial and error.. Think I shall switch to something else, read some tutorials for a moment and review in some time, as I feel like I'm out of ideas for this one.. Iterations so far: link
No doubt this is the best iteration yet by a good deal!There's still a couple floating contrast things that could be perfected (using the pant shade on the shirt might be too harsh a transition, and the hair shade blends with the cloak) but the reds are great with each other and you cleaned out the superflous colors.
You've stumbled into an odd situation - you mixed resolutions! Most of the piece (and the entirety of the pervious versions) was blown up 2x beforehand so that each individual pixel was actually a 2by2 square. That's totally fine. However, when you made this iteration, you have those mostly 2x2 blocks but a couple of 1x1 pixels. I'm sure that you wanted the extra room to add detail, but since now the eye can distinguish what a 1x1 pixel looks like the rest of the 2x2 shading seems blocky by comparison. Wherever a single pixel is visible, that provides your resolution.
The other thing would be that I can tll what you were doing with the shading on the cloak, but it seems more like the idea of a cloak fluttering rather than how a cloak would actually fold. Think about it like this: those sorts of ripples, while iconic for a cloak, make the most sense if it's being blown in the wind. If that were the case, it would be blown up a lot more. At rest, it would have a much more predictable shadow, cast simply by the body against the cloak.
A very specific note: you see that shading on the cloak right next to the arm? The way that it exactly mirrors the shape of the arm? THAT is banding. This is the tutorial you want for a good opening explanation, at section IV-4: http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299
I try not to do this with new folks, but I did a quick edit of your piece to show you what I mean. I show you this on a condition: don't just copy what I do. Understand how it works and apply those lessons in your own way.
Hopefully that puts a visual point on the points I was explaining. Keep going - your improvements have been in leaps and bounds :)
Thanks for the pointers! Still don't seem to get it right, but at least the number of colors is down to 6 now.. Need to do some more reading and experimenting and then reiterate :) Getting the colors right is tough, lights and shadows - even more..
Ah, interesting. You've solved the one issue, but stepped into a different one - no biggie, that's how you get better, right?
So yes, you've done a decent job solving the contrast thing. Even at 1x the feet in the shadows can be made out, and the red of the cloak is less saturated to the point that the other bits show through a bit better. Nice job!
The new issue is partially about contrast till (yes, same concept, but in a different way), and partially about the way pixel art in particular works. It centers entirely on the cloak - there's little things you could work on elsewhere, but the cloak is the big deal. In this version, you added some extra colors to the cloak. I can guess why you did it: you switched the dark bits from before to the much darker red, and the change felt too abrupt so you added some intermediate colors. Not unreasonable. However, there's a couple problems with doing that here.
The first is with regard to contrast. While the difference between the light part and the dark part is visible, most of the intermediate stuff fades together when zoomed at 1x or even 2x because the colors are close together. Getting the contrast right here is going to be a bit of a struggle - both solid red and solid blue are hard colors to show the contrast without being too abrupt. But just adding colors in a gradient like that isn't usually a great strategy - it starts doing this thing we call banding (you should look up Banding in The Pixel Art Tutorial in the resources section of the forum here - you do it pretty heavily in a couple places) that we try to avoid.
Another question for you to think about: what's your light soruce for this piece? This is an important question for any kind of art, not just pixel art. Based upon the highlights on the chest, the light is in front of him on the right. Based upont he shadow, the light is coming from right above him. Based upon the cloak, the light is coming from the left, or maybe from above if you're looking at the hood. Pick a light source, and think about how the form of the character would cast shadows over other parts.
About color count: well, a) you don't have 20 colors, you have 19 now! I arranged your palette here: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BtLj8VOCcAAcHEH.png:large Take a look and think about how many of those look similar to other ones you have. An unspoken goal of pixel art is to have as low a color count as needed to provide the impression you want - it's considered good craftmanship. Looking at your palette, some of those colors are really close to other ones - you could just make them the same! When we're zoomed out, looking at the piece at 1x or 2x, the differences are often not too noticeable, so always keep in mind that THAT'S the scale people will mostly be looking at your piece.
A last note: if you have the capability, consider making the background to the character transparent! It's by no means necessary, but I think it might actually look nicer without the box of color around him. This isn't too big a deal though, it still looks fine with it.
Hope this stuff helps! Let me know if you'd like something explained further, and sorry about it being such a dense block of text. Keep it up man, I'm looking forward to seeing your stuff here in the future!
Thank you! This is one of my first creations, I'm fairly new to arts.. Will play with colors, thanks for the motivation.
Welcome to Pixel Joint!
There's a bit of readability trouble. The saturated red distacts from the grey shirt enough to make it harder to read, and the shading on the cloak is really hard to see without zooming way in because of the low contrast. I like the character though!
Needs higher contrast, esp. in the light gray in his foot/shdow and the dark/medium red
Looks nice tho
We can learn a lot from this conversation, everyone.