The VG Resource

I've already done that. A lot. Is this a bad reference?
I'd appreciate it if you told me what's wrong with the sprite rather than just telling me to look stuff up.
</passive-aggression>

The upper arms on Wario's shirt seems to be too cramped and the shapes on the muscles are too lacking in contrasts.

I'm not particularly sure what you mean by cramped, does the space need to be bigger?
I'm guessing that this doesn't do a much better job of defining the muscle shapes:

Looks a ton better!

You can now see Wario's shoulder, along with this muscle. Going into the right direction, indeed. The vid tutorials above show the shoulder muscle popping over the other, though. While she side muscles are layered behind.

hey, just because I or Fillerthefreak didn't provide a physical reference for a thing that doesn't make our criticism less valid, or passive aggression. You're taking those criticisms way too personally imo. Chill down, we're here to help

ill give this sprite an edit or two later when i feel like it - though keep studying not just muscle, but also animation principles

I didn't tell you to provide a reference and you didn't actually point out any issues with the sprite in your post. By virtue of that, your criticism wasn't valid in the first place. I'm not taking that post personally; it's just not constructive criticism.


Changed muscle detail on these, again.

But... I did tell you, here especifically

Quote:right now it doesn't really look like muscles

if his arm doesn't look like muscles, then that is the problem. Isn't that the issue?

The thread will only 'devolve into nothing' if you take the criticisms as attacks to you in any form. As I said, I'll help you when I can. No need to be touchy.

You didn't tell me why or how, therefore I can't fix the issue (because I don't know specifically what it is), making that non-constructive criticism. Note that I haven't taken any of the criticism as personal attacks; that's an unfounded assumption of your own. Your post was simply just not helpful.
I'm done talking about this.

You know what? It's been a long time since my last wall of text and I've been itching to do this

First of all, this is not an attack to you. For god's sake, you are being touchy for literally no reason whatsoever. Are you really going to flip over a simple issue like this? Really?

No one here is being passive-agressive at all. Stop assuming we are trying to hurt you or something - you are not a special snowflake, we (myself included) are not a special snowflake.

We are not forcing you to remove Wario's arms either - we've been pointing out that his arm just doesn't read well. That's all that it has to the criticisms in this thread. No one said that you are bad at pixelart or anything like that, therefore there's no reason to be "done talking about this".

tVGR works as a community so you can receive others' honest input towards fixing and making your craft better. Sometimes the criticisms will be vague (just like real life!) and might not help you directly - however if many people think that's true, then chances are, something is wrong in your craft. I even offerred my help later to picture the problems better, but if you're taking that way, then it's okay.

I will repeat, this is not an attack to you, there is no reason to overreact. Stop the drama.

For that size you have to simplify the forms/clusters of the arm, otherwise it'll probably end up looking like a succession of lumps and bumps, because it's currently quite noisy. The muscles are anatomically correct, but they risk standing out from the rest of the sprite: think of the consistency of the design when it comes to the style.

I tried(and, evidently, failed) to remedy that with extra shading in other areas. Here's my (noticeably subpar) attempt to simplify his arm:


I'm just not entirely sure how to do that without just losing the detail entirely.
I mainly paid attention to the forearm, since there's not much I can do about his upper arm without just removing the detail, which I suppose could be a more consistent look.

It's better but you're still thinking in lines. At this scale lines take up too much room, so I'd consider suggesting lines through small groups of clusters.
Here's my take:

Oh and he's missing a butt and stuff so I added other things as well. Hope it helps!

Looks like you destroyed me. Well played. I'll try my hand at that in a bit and edit this post.

Well we share a passion of drawing muscles so you can count on my help

After staring at your sprite for a while, I could look at it a certain way and just see a flabby arm, so I tried to indicate his muscles a little more strongly. Also made him not quite as fat.

I prefer the original one with the lines at this point; obviously that one needs some cleaning up. This doesn't seem to show his muscles enough for a man who can shake the Earth with a punch.
It's probably just that I'm used to seeing the other one, though.