The VG Resource

I sure know how to take 50 tries to not be completely horrible

I know his foot's messed up and his legs probably need to be longer and positioned differently



And here's some doodles I don't care about and am probably not going to finish just to have something else to look at (no need to comment on these)

shouldn't you be making them in parts?
there's a shade you probably don't need, the second darkest shade of blue. it's too similar to the darkest shade.

awesome, btw, pls finish

By parts, do you mean am I making underlying anatomy sketches and all that? I am, but I do it in another color and then erase it so they're not shown here. I end up redoing everything 1000 times so it gets super different from my figure drawings, haha. I guess I should put more thought into those but I don't realize how much they need to be fixed until way later or I mess up when I try to put stuff on top of them or something. My inexperience kills me~

Thanks, shawn gave me an edit that should help me make better proportions among other things. Time for body #242

no, like, make the thing in parts. arms, hands, upper body, etc.
i don't know if you are, but i'm just thinking that would make animating this a hell of a lot easier.

i like the size, btw. it's not "wussy." :-D

i'm posting this just to show you up how i would have done the body and face.

x is more clunky and less baby then how you did it. idk how to explain it better than that.

i really like how youre doing so far though. this size sprite is always super cool.

I'm loving how X is currently coming out, but I have to agree with what shawn said.
the other sprites are pretty good as well.

keep it up rep bud.

Liking Shawn's edit, except bring his umm legs closer. His groin is hueg

Shawn's edit's fixed up the shape, but it's also introduced some other problems with flatness - so don't just copy him outright, k?
Overlapping body parts are a good thing- because there's barely any overlap between bodyparts, and because the legs are now on the same plane, it makes it look more flat.

Also in both your original and in Shawn's edit, because of where the hand is, it's creating a pretty bad tangent, which can also make things look flat; if you have the edges of different things lining up with each other, or if their edges overlap but not much, it makes it difficult to read which is actually closer, and also makes it difficult to "fill in" the hidden shapes, which kind of breaks the viewers suspension of disbelief - you don't think "I am looking at a guy" you think "I am looking at a sprite of a guy".
Shawn's edit's better in that regard though because there's a gap between the shoulder and the torso; what you had initially turned the torso into kind of a continuous lump.

Voila: http://designlesson.blogspot.com/2010/10...llels.html
(This also goes into parallels; I'm not seeing any severe parallels here and it's not like you have to absolutely avoid them, but it's important to know what parallels do, so read that too)

I'm also thinking that you need to keep balance in mind- in your original pose, although the way his leg is bent seems a little unnatural, his weight's not distributed evenly - and that's a good thing. It's rare that you'll ever stand with your weight balanced perfectly between both legs, unless you're making a conscious effort to do so.
Do however pay attention to what he's done to the left (our right) leg - it's further back which makes it look much less stiff than what you originally had, because there's less of a perpendicular line (using more curved shapes also helps this!)

To summarise, because I've wall of texted again:
Pay attention to the shapes Shawn's using; they're smoother with softer curves which makes them look prettier.
Also pay attention to how he's redone the upper arm - it makes the pose infinitely easier to read. If you want to check how easy your pose reads, copy it and colour it in solid black - a good pose should still be fairly obvious even in silhouette.
Disregard how Shawn's changed the far leg, and also avoid putting both the legs on the same plane.

I'd do a redline or something, because I really think it'd be more helpful but HURP NOT A SPRITER, working at a small scale absolutely kills me.