Long time no see! Those are some neat robots! If you are running out of ideas I suggest to add some more asymetry, I need to do that more often my self!
But try to balance it out!
While you have some asymetry it could use some more!

Yeah, you're not the first to compare my earlier work to Guernica, jalonso! :) Thanks for the birthday greetings, by the way.

The mechs aren't my design, you can see them here:
http://mwomercs.com/game/battlemechs

But looking at my work, I do think I need more asymmetrical shading. The first mechs I painted have far worse shading than the last ones. They have that typical noob-like lack of directional lighting.

Some more pixels.


I'm struggling a bit to learn and re-learn how to shade these complex geometrical shapes, when they've got different angles compared to the direction of the light.

For example, the upper part of the thigh on the CN9 Centurion is probably done wrong. I guess the best way to highlight that square is to highlight the left and bottom edges?

Thanks, I will fix all my mechs with that in mind.

I've also been thinking of submitting this to the gallery in the form of a old school strategy game mockup. Some kind of simple animated gif, cycling through all the mechs. I know, I know - it's a crazy original idea, never been done before. :)



EDIT: Of course, I got so excited while doodling this, I forgot all about using a proper palette. So the colours need to be changed. It was just an early sketch.

Edited by CELS - 03 December 2013 at 8:29pm

Good point. How's this? Too much?

And try to use some more of the darker tones like you have in the AWS and the CTF. A lot of the other ones are dominated by the brighter tones.

EDIT:
A quick edit of the Jenner (my fav) to show that you should try to be a little more asymmetrical and use mix the colors up a bit more.



Edited by Mr.Fahrenheit - 04 December 2013 at 2:19pm

By contrast I meant not only colors, but an overall mech volume as well. Here is an example:



1 - highlighted surface
2 - midtones
3 - shadow

I wouldn't suggest to go for the small details straight away. First I'd define the biggest parts of the mech ( cabin/torso, arms, head and legs) with all the shadows and highlights and when satisfied with overall volume make smaller details.

@ADrawingMan: Cheers!

@a3um, Thanks for the example! I tried to follow your advice. I'm not going to post a step by step, but here's what I came up with.



Btw, I really like the cockpit glass highlight, but couldn't make it work with the new colors.

Edited by CELS - 05 December 2013 at 9:02pm

I'm going to do the logo for each noble house in the Battletech universe, anno 3050.

Is anyone having trouble with Imageshack today? Seems like the images only load half the time for me.

Edited by CELS - 08 December 2013 at 1:29pm

You're probably right about that. Thanks! :)

Thanks, I will definitely make a few more this christmas. And I suppose I will need to go over the contrast again. Much appreciated.

Now who invited the spambots?

Thanks, guys!

I kept working on this, but I didn't want to keep spamming the forum, so I haven't updated this thread in a while.

In the end, I posted these on the Mechwarrior Online forum as a christmas present to the community, letting everyone use my pixel mechs for their forum signatures or whatever other purpose they could think of. It was very well received! 120+ likes and 90 replies to the forum thread so far.

Once I finish my Raven light mech walking animation, I'm probably going to try to make some kind of signature animation (400 x 80 pixels or so) with a parallax effect. Should look nice and be a fun challenge.

Something like this (rough WIP sketch)


After doing this 1:1 likeness thing, I have to admit I wanted to try some cute battlemech caricatures. Not all the mechs, but it would be fun to do one or two. When I get around to that, I'll definitely keep your advice in mind, neo

Although I have to say, it would be pretty interesting to see you draw some Battletech stuff in your style too!

Edited by CELS - 08 January 2014 at 5:39am