Remember when I made Paper Mario sprites when I joined this site? I do.

Jokes aside, I needed something to do while I wasn't working on my other projects so I got inspired to make Paper Mario sprites. I intended it to become a "Paper Mario in Smash" kinda thing, but, it could go anywhere at this point.

I made two sprites assembled, and one split into parts. Out of the two assembled, which looks better? The plain one or the the one with the outline?

Thicker outline looks better.

But the clarity is sorta lost due to the sprite's size.

(08-27-2016, 11:55 AM)Filler Wrote: Thicker outline looks better.

But the clarity is sorta lost due to the sprite's size.

So, should I increase the sprite's size?

Just by a very bit, but not too much.

Maybe add shading and highlights? As Paper Mario has them on his reference sprite, but they're blended pretty well.

(08-27-2016, 12:12 PM)Filler Wrote: Just by a very bit, but not too much.

Maybe add shading and highlights? As Paper Mario has them on his reference sprite, but they're blended pretty well.

Ok, so I upscaled the sprites by 10%. As for shading and highlights, They probably wouldn't look very good on a sprite this size. Especially since I'm going for a "flat" feel (I mean, this is Paper Mario were talking about).

Oddly, now the thinner outlines look better to me.

If you want to keep it flat, maybe add some anti-aliasing? The way you have it right now is TOO flat, honestly. Sorta like a 1920s cartoon, or the 1st public broadcasted TV cartoons, which the flat style only was done because it was monochrome.

There's multiple ways to make a flat drawing look less flat without shading:


Here's a reference I drew up for all of those:



This is mostly how I sprite, so it doesn't really matter if you do so, more or less some information than criticism.

don't do aa on a sprite like this its not necessary. as far as this thing goes, while you may not want to shade it at all, you can think about how things look aesthetically and how you can improve and enhance the aesthetic value of the sprite

change marios moustache color and dont use such heavy outlines on the inside of the sprite, too

As far as shading goes, on the official sprites, it only applied to the arm behind Mario

Although, I also made hammer sprites.

The handle is a tad too tall? The reference is almost as big as Mario, yet yours is a it taller.

i didn't change a lot but i played around with some color variances and gradients i saw on the original art of mario


another thing i did is change the size of the outline in a few places. you'll notice this actually happens on the original sprite, when you've sort of fallen for instead of trying to make a better sprite, trying to directly translate the sprite of mario to pixelart. i did the same here, but stayed aware of places i thought some techniques would work.

so

-changed the size of the outline to give a better feel
-introduced some minimal shading, you should play with this more
-refined some elements so they weren't black inside black outlines as much