Hey everyone,

I'm a newby artist and a new to PixelArt, quite the unfortunate combo. My understanding of artistic principles are basic and my skills very rough, and I've taken a liking to PixelArt not just because of its inherent charm, but also because finding mistakes and fixing them, and throwing ideas at a wall and seeing what sticks is rather straight-forward when you're working on a pixel-by-pixel basis.

With that out of the way, I got the idea of using DAZ3D to pose figures (because for me that's the hardest part when working out a character) and I really heavily on that, because as I said, my skills and understanding are very basic. The first attempt at that turned out rather alright, so I actually built up some measure of confidence, and began working on the second character. And I'm already encountering problems while trying to diverge from my previous success.

This is what I got so far. My idea was for her to be pale and a have a blueish purple light source, but I just can't get her facial features, the eyes in particular, to look pretty. And I'm completely stumped on the eyebrows. If you got anything to say about the hue-shifting and shading while we're at it, go ahead.

I would really appreciate it if you guys could help me out of this mental mud I'm stuck in and give me some pointers what I can fix. If there's one thing I've learned in the last week since I started obsessing over this, it#s that sometimes it's just a few pixels that are wrong, that make the whole thing look weird. Maybe that's the case here too, and I shouldn't CTRL-X This thing just yet.

Anyway, looking forward for what you can tell me.

Hold your horses Greycloak!

I know you don't mean to but if I saw that amazing picture I would lose to demotivation. But of course great advice nonetheless.

VictorianSolution, your an amazing newbie artist and if you stick with it, you'll find nothing to be impossible. Doing pretty good already.

Greycloak made a good point about jaggies. Banding seems to be present as well ; banding is where the pixel lines stack directly on each other in layers, it's only present in the left jaw area. And I know what you mean about mental mud. It's tough. But I wrote a looooong post (as I am in the habit of doing) in the "Can you draw?" thread (under diversions) about how I deal with it. Some of it may help you.

I can tell you a whole lot more but I will have to stop listening to Noriki Dream Cruise and wake up in the morning before I can give you some sensible advice.

Keep it going, Seaman!

my post

some example of how to think about these things

I'm liking the shadows on the left side of the face. However, although you fixed the banding quite well, the right jaw line has that dark stripe on it, even with the light source shining on that side of the face. The highlight is amazing though.

The eyes were pretty good in the first post, but now they seem a little too dark.

Also, the pallette is a little too bright. You have probably heard about values already but it may help to work in a black/white/grays pallette to figure the values out first, and then just replace them with colors when your done.

One last thing: It may help if you post as a .png or .gif, right now it's jpeg and

jpeg takes information out of your art, which is bad for pixelart. It also blew your color count into 1148 different colors!

Alright, how's this?

I tried it, but I found that that colour was way too harsh, but maybe I just didn't have the transitions right, so I can give it another try. I'm still in the experimentation and figuring things out phase.

In regards to the general hair colour, I can always turn the saturation down later since I have the hair on an individual layer, and  I have no concept for how everything will look when it comes together (It's a full model) due to lack of experience with this sort of thing. Also, I actually kinda like the unnatural purple colour of the hair, because it fits what I have in mind for the character.

Basically, it's a sprite for a Renpy Visual-Novel type game, one for a side-character that'll probably appear once, so I'm using her as a lab rat to try all the things that I'm reading and that you're teaching me. She'll appear in a scene with the following background:

So, along with the light colour I have chosen for the hue-shifting on the skin, I think it'd create the atmosphere and appearance for her that I want.

At least that's the plan, I dunno if it'll actually work, I'm treading on uncharted ground here, I never got this far.

I'll work more on the transitions, I got a case of mild insecurity about the shades I went for due to not knowing when I should and shouldn't hue-shift, and just moving sliders around at random.

I'll add some AA to the highlights as well, or try to make them wider, see what looks better. Thanks for the advise here, it resonates with what I was already thinking after looking at it a couple of times, but I'm never certain about these things, or what to do about it.

The reference I am using is from this work I found on DeviantArt, since I found it hard looking at real-life reference and trying to simplify it. I'm simply not that good yet.

Top Row, 3rd model from the left. The curls are much nicer on that than what I did, I think I'll have to put more effort into those as well.

Thanks for your input so far, don't think I would've gotten this far, it's one thing seeing what is wrong, and another knowing how to fix it.

Alright, with the help of your picture tutorial, I managed to get this:

Now this is still very rough-looking, and I absolutely hate the jaggedy, blurry mess that the mantle brooch is, but I'll definitely need some help in figuring out how to fix these things, because else I bite my teeth out on this.

Well, about the proportions, since I'm pretty bad at art and my understanding of anatomy is basic, but I do so much enjoy making character art, I took a model I posed in DAZ3D and traced it in an attempt to compensate for my lack of skill, and maybe even help me practice. Maybe I did something wrong during the resizing and cropping, but I had a similar issue with an earlier attempt at another character, where the model looked fine but the head seemed just that little bit too small compared to the rest of the body.

Here's the pose I made and what I used to draw over:

Yeah I do the poses myself, it helps a lot in understanding and visualizing how body parts interact and where they are positioned in a pose, and how it looks from different perspectives.

Although it isn't particularly difficult, DAZ3D has a variety of sliders to individually move body parts, as well as locking those you don't want to move in place, so it's very easy. I also usually take a look at some stock poses(of which there are tons) and decide which already has a somewhat similar line of action and movement going on that I'm looking for, and then I work from there, rather than starting with a T-Pose.

It's proven to be incredibly useful and I'd honestly recommend it to anyone wanting to improve their anatomy skills, it's like having a live model except you can make it do whatever you want. It's free, too.

Well, you say that but I can't spend 5 minutes in front of a piece without already stretching the limits of my understanding.

For example I tried my hand at AA but I just can't seem to get the right colours to AA with, or how I should AA the outward facing parts when I also want to add a black outline. And I have no clue how to fix the Brooch.

I desperately need some help with this.

Ok, have you seen RankarchVoid lately? they've been doing similar to what you're doing. I don't think you need to AA the outline of the dress like you've done. Umm, dude I just googled "facial expressions" or a keyword that I was looking for. I'd get on my tablet (an Ipad 1st gen) and proceed to save and save and save photos in the Images tab of the browser.

Basically, I'd see something that would teach it to me visually, or I'd find a face that I liked (or an arm, or leg or whatever lol) and I'd save it. I would do many variations on a keyword (example: expressions, facial emotions, facial expressions, emotion, faces,facial reference, expressions drawing tutorial) and I'd spend lot's of time just gathering reference for everything you think you'd need. I'd love to put together a guide. I have a sort of "motivational story" in the  | "Can you draw?" thread ; I'm the bottom post. I'm sorry, that's not super helpful but I'm going to bed now    __

It's really just combining keywords, like "face" and "tutorial" and then variations on similar words that mean the same thing. using descriptive words (i.e. Good, vibrant, positive) can really bring up some posts as well. That's just how browsers work.

Does Graphicsgale not have an outline function? It looks like that outline was manually pixelled...I guess I'm a bit spoiled with Aseprite.

Anyway, that outline should also go around the single strands of hair. Right now it doesn't go on the outside and inside of the single strands of hair and it's a bit distracting.

About the jaggies, they can somewhat be smoothed out by using AA. The jaggies are made when pixels go from 2-1-2-1 etc during a line. In this case I don't think you can completely solve that without changing the angle of the arm, but I'll show you my attempt at fixing it using AA. It could probably be smoothed out further, but would likely require more transitional shades.

Alright guys, next step.

I think the AA is alright, I played around with the colours a little and ended up turning the saturation up as I found against the background she looked too much like a ghost, and I am actually, dare I say it... happy, I guess? with the way she turned out.

Now we get to facial expressions. Boy oh boy, another thing I have never done before. I found a reasonably helpful guide online, but that's for general drawing and not pixelart, so I take whatever I can from that and the result is a bit underwhelming but at least I'm getting there.

Here's a few I tried:

Now, as you can see, the expressions are not very... expressive. It's really fine detail in the eyebrows and moving the corners of the mouth, mainly because I am afraid to do anything with the jaw and mouth. I tried, but everytime I did it looked like she had the gaping maw of the void sucking in every atom in existence, and when I tried to give her teeth it looked like I accidentally erased some pixels.

So if you got any tips to help push me along, do provide them, I'd be much obliged.

Hey!

Here is an image of the underlying skull to help you out with that.