The VG Resource

What if his characters are meant to be nonchalant?
Maybe he just doesn't really care about beating people up ya know?

Funny, I'm getting a mix of 1up/hunter and alphasix/tyvon's styles reading these.

I get the feeling you don't like drawing hands. I would probably suggest as an exercise drawing your character poses in a way that they would read really well as a silhouette.

here's one good example that comes to mind
http://conan777.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/1.jpg

(04-01-2014, 03:14 PM)Gwen Wrote: [ -> ]What if his characters are meant to be nonchalant?
Maybe he just doesn't really care about beating people up ya know?

I don't think that applies to the top right one, which is the one he was talking about, eheh

The character is meant to be a non-caring guy that is shy and has his hands in his pockets a lot. But I am trying to apply new poses, fighting stances that stand out the skeleton and show better character traits, though I think I should had tried that wit ha different character that is suited to fighting.

I was trying to move the spine in a more curved, defensive way, not entirely happy with it, so I will have to keep working on it, the lower right sprite is a test I was making of a better suited character that is meant for fighting, I think it's spine is much more better and actually feels ready to fight, any thoughts on that one?

way dirty edit



I shifted him around a little, lowering his stance by crouching him slightly while spreading the legs

Gave him a bit more of a defensive posture i think


this is by no means the way to do it, you can see that the arms in my edit are a bit noodly, but the concept stands

I am going to try a new approach for the upper character, a more relaxed, stance that is not too defensive, but it's still not as relaxed as I started out with.
And on the bottom I felt the need of trying an actual fighting stance with a traditional boxer, I feel like this one has a better stance when it comes to defending his face.

The top right's closest arm looks pretty weird to me. At first I thought it was the shoulder being too low, but I messed with it a little bit and its seems that the elbow is what I found too low. I'd show the edit, but it's not worth it. Also, the same arm could be less bent -relaxed. Try opening up the forearm so that the hand points more towards his left/closest foot. Hmm...It might just be me, but the further arm seems shorter compared to the other?

With the bottom guy, you need to work on showing depth better. Both of his gloves look like they're touching his chest. Or maybe the real problem is due to the posing? His arms seem to be fully bent and pointing back instead of out in front of his body. The gloves are below his chin...but aren't they supposed to be more out and in front to defend his face?

For the boxer guy, I think you need the bring out the arms more-- at the moment, it kind of gives the impression his hands are growing out of his underarms. For the arm on the left, his hand is at a different angle than his forearm, which is generally not the case. The arm on the right is way too foreshortened. These references might help you: 1 2 3

Alright, I think I sorta worked around on the upper right character with a better pose, somewhat relaxed but still more dynamic. And the boxer well I extended the arms more from the chest and tried to give it a more defensive pose, not really happy with the arm in the foreground (His right arm) I will give it another go later.

Yeah, the boxer looks WAY better. The right arm does look a bit weird, but what do I know, I can't do pixel art to save my life.

(04-02-2014, 01:22 PM)FinalSmash Wrote: [ -> ]Yeah, the boxer looks WAY better. The right arm does look a bit weird, but what do I know, I can't do pixel art to save my life.

Don't lower your skill, any help is always welcomed, besides, you don't have to know how to make pixel art to have an opinion. I am probably going to edit the character all together since the hair, and clothes remind me too much of the upper character. I feel like it needs that confident smile back.

Their hair does look similar. Maybe change his legs and shoes a bit. He would look better in shorts.

Well I shaded a bit of Scarf's right arm (Yeah I will probably name him Scarf for easy identification) I feel actually kinda happy about his stance now, and it matches his personality.
I changed the entire look of the Boxer, he now has a new hairstyle, better colors, and he has that grin that says "Dude, seriously? I will knock the pixels out of ya". I sorta felt like he looked a bit Irish, so I might implement that into his character. I also tried that idea of the shorts, and well I feel like this looks much better.

Okay, this is…going to get uncomfortable for everybody but I can’t just let this go.



I’m not going to start accusing you of trying to do something malicious on purpose, but you’re committing several big art no-nos right now. You’re lifting things from Hunter’s work to the point that it’s unreasonable and well beyond any claims of “inspiration.” The fact that you’re implying in your posts that the style similarities are something you want to avoid association with makes this whole thing rather…suspect. But I don’t want to jump to conclusions. If possible I’d like to give you a chance to learn about the many, many reasons you shouldn’t do these things and what you can do instead.

Maybe you are thinking to yourself, “here we go again, people are focusing on the style instead of C+C.” But it’s worth your time to listen to these concerns. It really IS valid C+C. I’m not sure if people just haven’t been willing to take the time out to explain why it’s valid. So I’m going to! In a huge essay! Because I’m just that kind of person or something.

I’ll start with the fact that nobody’s going to take your work seriously if you continue this, unless they’re just ignorant of who Hunter is. Then I’ll explain why you shouldn’t want to do this, even if you don’t care about integrity, because you’re only hurting yourself as an artist. And you do seem to care about skill, given that you’ve showed an honest interest in receiving C+C with technical problems.

1. It’s dishonest to your audience.

People notice stylizations that are this unique. People are impressed by it! It’s part of the value. When you take so much of another person’s stylizations for your own use, you’re taking their value as your own.

I’m not saying that Hunter’s style doesn’t have similarities to other styles or that it’s wrong to do things similarly to other artists, but your work doesn’t just have similarities to his style. It’s a strangely active attempt to BE his style. There is almost none of your own personality in here. The parts that are different from Hunter’s seem like they come about due to not matching his skill level rather than attempting to make your own artwork.

It’s not just any one thing individually. It’s that you took A LOT of the things that are rarer in existing art outside of Hunter’s. For example, those bigger sprites are not even a common size to sprite at, and yet you emulated even that. Honestly there are a lot of examples, but I don’t want to have to point them out one-by-one unless I have to. Though, I’m not sure you’re even aware of just how many things you’re lifting. The point is, anyone who knows Hunter can only see his work in yours. Do you really want to live in his shadow?

Furthermore, when an audience sees these types of strong, unique stylizations, they assume that they came about from the work of the artist. That’s the implication, because the audience trusts you to be honest. They might suspect that there are other artists who do some of the same types of things, but not THIS many of the same things. If you’re taking this much from another person’s work, the audience expects you to mention it. When you don’t, it looks like you were creative and skilled enough to come up with these stylizations on your own, when you really weren’t. Stylizations don’t come up out of thin air. They’re not some free, easy commodity. They take work. Work you didn’t do.

It’s not the same thing as emulating, say, extremely common anime stylizations, because everybody is going to know where they’re coming from and that you didn’t do something really special. I’m going to steal a friend’s wording and say that, if you take certain features that you can’t find reference for on anybody but that person’s work, it’s like taking someone’s “signature.”

It’s sort of disrespectful to Hunter himself, too. It’s obvious by the quality of his artwork that he’s put in a lot of effort to learn about art. To be honest, the quality difference between parts that are clearly “you” (e.g. the clothing folds on the bigger sprites, the arms on the boxer, to an extent the proportions on the brown pants one) and the parts that are heavily based on Hunter’s work kind of show your lack of skill, and most of the appeal from your artwork isn’t coming from you or your own ability. Basically, to any trained eye, you’re coming off as a serious one-trick pony who’s leeching off someone else’s success. I don’t know a nicer way to put it while maintaining my honesty.

2. It hurts you as an artist more than it helps you.

Even if you’re unconvinced by ethics or integrity, this is still definitely valid C+C. By learning someone’s style and not learning art, you’re hurting your growth, big time. Big, big time.

First of all, if you can’t tell the difference between stylizations and reality, then you really don’t know what you’re doing. And when you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re going to make mistakes. Knowing some style tricks isn’t going to help you with the basics. You can make the same pose 1,000,000 times and impress people with it every time, but when you go outside your style tricks and try a different pose, you’re screwed. Don’t stunt your growth by only learning style tricks. Impressing people feels nice, and all, but being able to impress them with real skill feels better than impressing them with a few glittery tricks.

I highly suggest you read these because they say what I would say anyway. Plus they have pretty pictures and are probably more interesting than me if I reiterated the same things. Seriously, not optional, read them for goodness’ sake:
http://heysawbones.deviantart.com/art/UN...-169660607
http://heysawbones.deviantart.com/art/UN...-169660702

I sort of get the impression that you’re not even doing it on purpose. I just get the impression that you’re just taking Hunter’s work as a reference way, way too seriously. I strongly believe that a key to being a good artist is to learn from reality. When you learn from reality, you can adapt your understanding of reality in various different ways. If all you know is a certain symbol, it’s like you’re caged. You’re stuck to that symbol and you can’t manipulate it in very many ways.

Basically, here are my suggestions for you, all of which I think are outright urgent for your improvement:

1. Learn from reality
2. If your work is too similar to a reference, use more than one reference
3. Learn from more styles than just Hunter’s
4. Use photos or even other artists’ work as reference
5. Read/study some resources like:
http://www.anticz.com/drawing1.htm
http://nsio.deviantart.com/art/Nsio-expl...-408201339
http://www.scribd.com/doc/255814/Andrew-...re-Drawing

After reading this, and a lot of the documents for self-teaching I say that you are 100% correct. I will scrap the newest sprite and start from scratch. And I appreciate the fact that you went out of you way to actually not just bash me for this awkward "inspirational" problem I have, and actually teaching me from it.

With that said, I will restrain my work from the new sprite to the old one, since that one has had references from the other sprites shown by other users. I will move from that to another project and, hopefully, step out into a more unique style that I can finally call my own.

Now that that is done and dealt with, any suggestions on how to start animating the Scarfed character?