I really like the composition and the idea behind this piece. Its major issue is readability. It's hard to identify what exactly we're looking at. First of all, the blue creature isn't a very familiar shape. Second, it's unusual to show a forest from this perspective, so the green field could just as easily be seen a green slime bubbles in a big cauldron, at a glance. Third, there's no horizon. It's as if the whole world stops right after the last trees. Fourth, the shadows (from clouds, I assume) are very small, with sharp edges). If each tree is 10 meters wide, that gives the shadow a radius of about 20 meters. When have you ever seen a dark shadow that size move across the landscape?

If the green surface is not the canopy of a forest, but rather giant, grass covered hills, then we're suddenly talking about a vast scale, and you run into other issues. At day, hills and mountains that are far away tend to blend with the bright blue sky, so they're generally brighter and more blue in colour the further away they are. They also have less color / saturation. (Google "distant mountains" and look at some pictures)

All these factors, combined with a few general pixelling issues (light source, use of colours, etc) result in low readability.

It's a very tiny picture, so you've really got your work cut out for you when you're trying to cram so much into one scene.

Here's my advice.

1) Increase the size a little bit. Right now, it feels a bit cramped with the image cutting off right above the head of the character. If you increase it to 100 x 62 (golden ratio ftw!) it makes it feel more open, and the head of your character falls neatly right about 2/3rds from the bottom. Search for "rule of thirds" on Wikipedia and learn why this is a good thing.

2) Work on making the scale more easy to identify by working on the background. At this scale, it's probably better to draw a few big hills / mountains / trees, rather than a bunch of them that are only a few pixels wide.

3) Look for some of the color tutorials in the forum to help you decide what colours you should use for shading and giving everything more depth.

4) Use references for everything. When shading a tree trunk, look at pictures of tree trunks. When drawing mountains, look at pictures of mountains. Also, look at pictures in the PixelJoint gallery to see how people actually draw these things in small scale pixel art! No need to reinvent the wheel, look at how other pixel artists do it.

Hope this helps.




Edited by CELS - 27 December 2013 at 7:27pm