read the description dude

That's pretty much it but only on mondays. also the lamb is actually a man's scrotum on account of me being a feminist killjoy and all

 no really, I usually start with a sketch of some kind, or if I'm doing a small/simple piece I just rough out a shape in black lines that ends up becoming my lineart. if it's a human i usually do a rough gesture drawing (like this one i found on google) to work out the pose and proportions, then sketch the bulk of the body over it, then rough out a face and an idea of clothing/props/whatever over that. so it's usually about three layers of sketch. i lower the opacity on that sketch, line over it in black on another layer, iron out any issues if i can, then get to work coloring.

as for restrictions, i try not to go over three or four colors for each differently colored part of the piece (ie, three for skin, three for shirt, three for pants), excluding colors used for the lineart or sometimes anti-aliasing. if you use too many useless colors your piece gets muddy and low-contrast, which is a common amateur mistake i see. limiting yourself to only using 3 or so forces you to adjust your existing colors to make them stand out rather than adding extra colors. every color should have a purpose. other people work well with more colors but restricting myself to just a few has helped me a lot!

aside from that i just try to reuse colors as much as i can! it's good to ask yourself "do I really need another color or could I reuse one I'm already using?" do you need a dark purple for the purple earring's outline, or could you reuse the dark blue from the jeans? reusing colors also helps for color unity and teaches you to use more versatile colors (shading red with dark purple, for example). as a general rule I try to stay under 20 colors total for smaller pieces but obviously that isn't always possible, especially on more detailed work.

those are just rough guidelines i kind of follow unconsciously though. i don't usually start out with any sort of restriction in mind unless i'm aiming for a specific palette or making an icon designed to fit a size limitation, but i apparently don't work very well when i lay out a palette beforehand - i always pick colors as i go unless i'm doing a palette challenge. that's just my process, obviously it's different for everybody.

This is a gorgeous piece! The leaves and pose are really clever, and I love the colors. The hair and ruffles are excellent, and I like the shading on the legs a lot. I adore the little bow on the ribbon around her middle. I do have some crits though that hopefully make sense!

Her legs seem a little thin. I guess body types vary plenty, but if you compare your forearm to your leg, the entire leg is pretty much thicker than your arm at any point (for mine at least - maybe I have big legs?) but her leg is still as thin or thinner than the arm at some points (mostly looking at the viewer's right leg and its ankle here). The legs also seem a little long, but maybe that's just a consequence of the dress being empire-waisted and throwing off my sense of proportions.

The hand seems a little weird, too. I wish I could be more specific than this, but it seems to me to be mostly related to the palm (not a lot of definition), the thumb (kind of looks like it's bending in a weird direction), and the fingers (too short - compare the length of the pinky to the pointer).

Her neck is a little weird with how her head is leaning forward but her neck isn't really following it. It's hard to really describe this without a reference, so here's the closest one I could find:

http://www.colourbox.com/preview/4909506-546901-young-woman-playing-on-electro-guitar-and-jumping.jpg

You can see how it's sort of jutting forward along with her head. There's also this which is a bit closer- it's not jutting out as much but you can see that it's a bit straighter. I'm not sure if we would see more of her collarbone or shoulder from this position or not? Her other shoulder also looks a small but maybe it's a trick of perspective making her shoulders look too small for her head.

Anyway, that's all. They're a little nitpicky, but they stood out to me. Great piece!

i told you bro

i told you about gender politics

i warned you dog

 "I would argue that there is a huge difference in terms of mentality between males and females and thus much less interrest into "more serious" art communities from women"

well at least i can take back what I said about having not seen any blatant misogyny on pixeljoint

bro let me tell you, women have historically been disadvantaged and given less opportunities and taken less seriously. see: most things a woman writes being delegated as 'women's fiction' and many choosing to use an abbreviated name (one of the more famous examples perhaps being JK Rowling) or a pen name for fear that they may be taken less seriously, the statistic that there's an average of 20% of women in national government assemblies (20% despite the fact that half of the population is female), women in the US were not allowed to vote for a very long time, etc

women have been shit on for a very long time, a policy that continues today in a lot of ways, judging by the tough entry into 'difficult' fields such as science, politics, etcetera. certainly it's possible to break into those fields, but it's harder and often for less pay, less likelihood to get promotions despite seniority over male employees, etc

the next time you play a video game, or watch a movie or see a great animated film or something, count the male names compared to the women. the reason there's less women is because they have a long history of being fucked in the ass by patriarchy, not because of a difference in thinking

so when you see less women in 'more serious' artistic communities it's generally because they are discouraged from day one, by the time boys are being told "you can be anything you want, an astronaut or a superhero or the president!" girls are already being told "you can be a princess or a model or maybe even a singer and also your end goal is to get a nice husband and pop out babies, here's your handy dandy cooking set little lucy, some baby dolls that cry like real infants, and impossible standards to live up to"

also due to folks like yourself believing there is some fundamental biological difference between men and women that makes us less interested in Serious Art than say, silly japanese mangas and girl shit, I guess, rather than a constructed societal difference that has been around for a very long time

so yeah, are you seriously going to look me in the eye and say I have less propensity for fine art because of my fucking vagina? because if you are then I literally don't know what to say

 tldr: women are less likely to post in communities with an overwhelmingly male demographic even if those communities are not actively hostile because they are used to male-dominated communities simultaneously asking to see their tits, calling them stupid vapid sluts and telling them to get back in the kitchen

if the last 5 swimming pools you jumped into were filled with clear acid that looked like water, you're not likely to think "well, maybe this one will actually have water this time"

It's an interesting point that a lot of pixel artists being male may correlate with how gaming has traditionally been a more male-dominated hobby. The fact that game development is a very male-dominated field may also factor in. However, in recent times, the female percentage of the demographic has increased substantially - women now make up roughly 40 to 50% of the gaming community, believe it or not.

But then that circles back around to how male-dominated spaces can often feel unwelcoming to women, especially if they are linked to gaming, if you consider how women in video games are usually treated. Even if PJ as a community isn't hostile at all to women, women can be afraid to enter male-dominated spaces or be vocal inside of them (hence the common opinion that gamers are overwhelmingly male - when about half are female, they're just less vocal, which gives the illusion that female gamers are somewhat rare) for fear of being on the receiving end of that kind of harassment.

It's a self-defense mechanism. If I see a community where men are over-represented as a demographic, I wonder "okay, is there a reason for this, is there something or somebody driving the women away?".

This isn't saying there's something wrong with PJ - again, I'm just pondering the potential reasons behind why there's less women on the site compared to men.

@wish04: Haha, it's certainly been a while since I did. I was looking at my dA and apparently my last doll was something like two and a half years ago, goddamn. I joined a nice dolling community around that time and was getting really into it... then the community got shut down due to internal drama or something. Welp, cue me not dolling for like two years.

I don't even know where to find good bases anymore... looking for bases on dA makes me want to kill myself because of all the fucking tracing and people patting the blatantly tracing artists on their ass for their tracing jobs.

~bow chicka wow wow~

I know that the site is about art and not gender, but I was just thinking about how I see way more men than women here and ruminating on the causes of that.

You can lead a horse to water, etc...

I think pixel art is something that someone needs to be motivated to pursue on their own for whatever reason. It takes some initial patience to learn the ropes, so the tedium of slowly learning basic shapes is likely to put off someone who is new to the hobby if they don't have a dedicated reason to learn it.

As for the demographics of Pixeljoint, I think the large male userbase might have something to do with the weird divide between the pixel art and dolling communities. You have some people who straddle the gap and participate in both communities, but it feels like there's a weird separation there. It creates a strange dichotomy where the dolling community is overwhelmingly female and the PJ community is overwhelmingly male. (As with anything, though, there are exceptions, obviously.)

I've participated in both communities before, and I feel like the dolling community is less intimidating to women due to an overall sisterly feeling, though I prefer PJ ever since I fell out of dolling (again... feels like I go on a dolling kick every 2 years or so and a lot of the techniques show up in my style sometimes).

I can't really guess as to what started the divide in the first place, but I do know that the existing demographics contribute to the separation some -- I know that personally I'm a little more cautious to speak up in male-dominated communities, especially if they feel like "boys' clubs" (a lot of sites do). And men are generally more hesitant to join female-dominated communities for a myriad of reasons, judging by how few male dollers I see.

Thankfully, despite the fact that most of the artists on this site are male, I don't really see misogyny as a regular occurrence or anything. But a male-dominated community can be intimidating to a woman due to the very real possibility that they will receive harassment. Even if PJ isn't like that, prior experience dictates future actions, and many male-dominated communities are not exactly welcoming to women, sadly.

Anyway, that's just my thoughts.

i can't help but notice that it feels like pj is a very male-dominated community, haha

go vote in the public queue!!

 i really dig the style here. very symmetrical without being boring at all.

 FUCK i hate non-black outlines how does anybody work with this shit?????

 haha, my pixel art process used to be so much simpler and stiffer... i used to just take things slow, pixel by pixel. now i sketch really broadly and messily and just clean it up as i go along and it makes things a lot quicker.

i feel like my grasp on anatomy has improved some too.. overall i feel like i'm finally getting to a place where i'm pretty happy with my art, and that's really satisfying.

I dig it. Simple & good lines.

feel like the two black openings on the chin could use work though: 

http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20111205022232/starwars/images/0/0d/Storm-CHRON.jpg

You can see that they're bigger than the two dots you put in, so I think it would look even better if you adjusted that to make them bigger and more detailed :)

 i'd say they both have their merits. i feel like the new palette has more contrast and is probably better for that reason.

 Love this. Super cute with lots of detail that doesn't feel at all cluttering - all the individual elements are very well separated with skillful use of color. It's overall very palatable to the eyes.

 I only know one phrase of Portuguese thanks to Lucas, one that I believe will get me far in this new, Brazilian-populated PJ climate.

Oi gato, mas que bunda linda.

 urrgh I feel queasy as heck. i went to a place yesterday that was packed with kids... if I caught a bug off them or something i'm going to be so so pissed.

also hey everybody, vote in the public queue if you can, there's some pieces that have been stuck in there for over a week!

 thanks! honestly, the best thing to do is to keep an eye on proportions. you can do a lot of hella distorted anatomy and weird short people like this as long as you pay attention to proportions. the fingertips reach about to mid thigh, wrists level with crotch, elbows about level with the waist (belly button), the torso from shoulders to crotch is similar to the same length of the legs, if a little shorter.. proportion charts really help. just keep an eye on those proportions!

 The new trees are incredible. Overall a huge improvement, great job.

I'm trying to stop using black lines in my pieces so much... or to only use a black line around the very edge. But I always start my sketches and lines in black, and it's hard to get away from that. #000000 has been a universal constant across most of my pieces lately.

How many layers do you folks end up using in your pixel art? I end up using a few in NPA but with pixel art it seems like I often end up doing things on one layer, or on like 3 layers tops, with one or two being sketch layers. It's really rare that I use more than that and I try to merge them as much as possible to keep them tidy. But I know a lot of artists work differently, so I'm curious!

 Nice edit bro

 who cares tho, it's not like people can't see it by going to the 'newest pixel art' page??

you know, it just occurred to me that someone could do a funny joke for the challenge with how the Mann vs Machine robots in TF2 are supposedly powered by money. I think pixeling an existing thing is kind of going against the point of the challenge, though, since you're supposed to be creative with it...