------# First post ##------
Hey!

First of all, i'm happy that communities like this do exist.

I love pixel art from the bottom of my heart since I played beautiful videogames in my childhood - Kirby's Adventure, Secret of Evermore, Street Fighter 2, [...].

I wanted to draw an isometric building. I read a lot before, I checked many pieces from good artists, then I started to draw.
I'm not very familiar with theory (palette, dithering, anti-aliasing), so I really need your help to show me what might be wrong with this piece.

Honestly I'm happy of what I have done, but I'm pretty sure I can improve it (or at least to not repeat the same mistakes with the next one :D)

Here it is:


(Here is the model, I don't know if you can see it too... )

tl;dr: This is my first serious pixel art, gimme some advices plz

Thank you for reading

------# Update: 06/19/2015 #------
Hi!

I followed your pattern Jalonso... (but I did the roof a little shorter than yours)



I think it's ok now :3


------# Update: 09/22/2015 #------
Hi!

here I come again with the ISO thing...

Long time no see, I was working on my project and the ISO perspective is just a part of it.

Well, I did a tileset to generate a random town:


I'm happy with the design, and I guess I did the ISO the right way, what bothers me is the palette.
I found that it's hard for me to start a new palette from scratch, so I used a palette I found here, you can see it attached to the tileset (if you remember from whom it comes, I will give credit to him for it), then I modified it.

So I started with this palette because I needed colors to draw a sample, but now I want to improve it.
I see it too bright, not realistic (as far as a low scale pixel art can be^^)
Here is an example of a random neighborhood:


TL;DR: What do you think about the palette?

------# Update: 03/03/2016 #------

Hello community!

Long time no see! (Actually I was here, but didn't post anything here for too long)

Well, recently I had time to work on my iso city project.

Therefore I finished the first version of the tileset.

Here you can take a look at the result:




As you can see, I added some shops and I worked on the "palette" of the buildings because it was too orange!
Now it looks more like stone or ashlar.

The whole color count is really bad but I don't know if I can do something about it because there is a lot of different things in the tileset (buildings, roads, grass, shops...)


tl;dr: I hope you like it.
Thank you all, especially Jalonso and DawnBringer, you helped me a lot!!

Wow, just... Wow!

This is exactly the kind of tips I'm looking for; thank you very much!

At first, I thought isometric projection was just about to do not apply perspective but...

(Wikipedia -> Isometric [...] is an axonometric projection in which the three coordinate axes appear equally foreshortened and the angles between any two of them are 120 degrees)

I noticed that artists used the 2:1 line thing for a while, but I thought they did it that way just because it's easier.

As I told you via PM, I will redraw it with the isometric proportions ASAP and post it here, so we can see the difference...

Is it commun to use axonometry in pixel art (instead of isometry) or is it forbidden for some reason?

Hello community!
I took my time but I did a new version of the house in isometric perspective:



I had lot of trouble to convert the proportions from axonometric to isometric but here is the result!

(I'm still not happy with the roof position)

Please, feel free to comment :D

Edit:

Thank you Jalonso for your answer, it helps me a lot.
Maybe I will join the project, it can be motivating :)


Edited by AKA_Mathieu - 18 June 2015 at 3:14pm

Try make the room a little more down, in order to fix it.

I do not understand what you were trying to do with the front of the roof which looks architecturally impossible :/
This image just shows that sometimes when you get stumped the solution is so grid things out so you can see where your lines start and end.



You have here an iso that uses 2px ends which is the normal and should almost always be used.
However, if you need a point or if you were drawing a church and needed a steeple, for example, then you could force a 3px corner so the tops are centered even if you find yourself having to cheat 1px somewhere close to the ground to get back to 2px.

Oh. I don't think I've seen roofs like that.
That's just mixing 2 roof styles and the same method applies except here you would start the angle right at the point were the front wall reaches the roofline then cut where my light blue line is.
Try it :)

Terrific job. Looks great now.
Hopefully you did not just follow what I said but understood what you were doing :)

Hi!

here I come again with the ISO thing...

Long time no see, I was working on my project and the ISO perspective is just a part of it.

Well, I did a tileset to generate a random town:


I'm happy with the design, and I guess I did the ISO the right way, what bothers me is the palette.
I found that it's hard for me to start a new palette from scratch, so I used a palette I found here, you can see it attached to the tileset (if you remember from whom it comes, I will give credit to him for it), then I modified it.

So I started with this palette because I needed colors to draw a sample, but now I want to improve it.
I see it too bright, not realistic (as far as a low scale pixel art can be^^)
Here is an example of a random neighborhood:


TL;DR: What do you think about the palette?

Thank you Jalonso for your time and your support, you always give valued advices.

DB32 Palette... you mean this palette? (click)

It's a wide spectrum palette, I think it can help me a lot.

But there is something I don't understand:
DawnBringer talk about DB32 Neutralizers
What's that?

There is some talk about neutralizers in the "COLORS" I Don't get it thread.

There are definitely opportunities to reduce the colour count here. For example, there's no reason the green roof and the grass can't share some colours.

The "duller" building colours look good! However, the scene overall looks a bit gray. Even the bright orange wouldn't help. You're using the "true" hues of things (e.g. largely-neutral gray for roads, true green for grass, etc), which have no harmony with each other, and look like a dull gray day. Harmonizing your colours will also help you make yours colours more reusable, which will reduce your palette.

To harmonize your colours, choose two hues, which should be either analogous (similar in hue) or complimentary (on opposite ends of the colour wheel) Shift your lighter colours (the ones used mostly for light) towards one, and your darker colours (the ones used mostly for shadows) towards the other. There are other ways to do it that you'll see as you study colour more, but this is a good method to get started.
Do not be afraid of making things not be their true hues. We hardly ever see the true hues of things! Human brains are good at "white-balancing" and calculating the true hue which is why we think we see the real colours of things, but we don't. This applies to depictions too, not just reality, which means that properly hue-shifted colours will read as "normal" colours in interesting light, rather than as "weird" colours.

I recommend giving this tutorial a read, it talks about light and colour and has lots of information that I think will help you with the colours in this scene: http://www.itchy-animation.co.uk/light.htm


And now some stuff about your tiles/pixelwork:
The scale on the grass doesn't fit the rest of the scene. Since it looks like each bit is meant to depict a blade of grass rather than a whole clump because you built the grass largely of small vertical clusters and some v-shapes, it looks like the grass is as wide as an arm. At this scale, you'd probably be better off focusing on larger-scale features like dead spots, puddles, tall/short clumps, etc, because you don't have the resolution to have grass blade-level detail at this scale.

It looks weird that the tan buildings have a dark outline on one side, even though such outlines are found nowhere else. All your other outlines are in places where deep shadows are expected, but no such shadows are expected on the edge of those buildings. My guess is that you did it because otherwise the tall building's corner blended with the corner of the building behind it?
If that's the case, it was a poor solution - you're applying a bandaid to a gunshot wound. The real problem with those two buildings is that they are tangent - touching each other's edges in the image, even though they're not meant to be touching in the "reality" of the scene. This looks bad even with the outline. The solution is to shift things over so that you have no such tangents. That way, even if the buildings were both identically colours (which won't happen since you have shadows and lights against each other), they'd still read as separate buildings because the overlap would be clear.

The overhang little house's roof looks like it sticks out too far in the front. I'd push it back a couple of pixels (one iso-step). That might not be as true to the design you're going for, but I think it'll read better. As-is, it sticks out so far in the corners that it looks like it should have support columns xP

Some of your lettering doesn't look iso, especially the "UB" in "CLUB". Remember, vertical iso circles are a bit weird! They're not just a vertically squished circle, they're shifted just like the horizontal lines are. This applies to text too.

Hi!! Thank you for your answers!

@Limes:
Do you suggest I use Night's palette?
Colours are interesting but I'm just bad when it comes to use a palette. I tried with the DB32 palette and it went wrong...

@eishiya:
Wow! I wasn't expecting a long, complete and deep answer to my work, I really thank you for that.



#You are totally right. I did a lot of painting when I was younger, so it's hard for me to choose colours from a wheel (Probably I don't know how to use properly the color picker from photoshop...) I need a model!
For example, I used this picture to draw the chinese restaurant.

But here it's pixel art, I get what you said and I will try to harmonize colours thanks to your advices and the tutorial.




#The scale of the grass is wrong but it's hard to go smaller with this way of drawing grass. Again you are totally right, I should add dead spots, rocks, instead of plain grass and I would like to do it, but it means a lot of work (to draw the tileset then to generate the map) I'm afraid but I can't spend that amount of time on this part right now. Certainly in a "V2", but I have to reach a "V1" before making big changes.


#About the outline: I used this picture as a guide and it use a dark outline, so I did it without questions but due to spacing problems I had to erase it on the right side of the buildings and now it's weird...


#I feel the same for the house roof and the "CLUB", I will fix it!

Thank you for your feedback!!

BD32 is a lot better.

Nights pallet just worked well for my image.