Future Sprite Endeavours

[kidicarus29]

*shoos away tumbleweeds*

I was bored and played with a colour palette. I'm undecided if it looks good or not...does it work?
(It isn't for the hummingbird project)

It's a nice design, but the palette itself needs some work. To help you understand what I'm saying, I made a palette and used it on the V design you had:




Besides the changes in "dithering"/color form, only the colors themselves were changed.

The reason the palette needs work is because there are excess colors. Not only this, but the colors are bit muddy and bland for such a piece. To really point out what I mean, I'll zoom in on some of the parts of your V and show you what I mean.



If you look closely, you can see there are actually four yellows used. You don't even have to look to know this due to the palette on the side, but imagine if one were not given the palette and only had their eyes to distinguish between the colors. To be honest, most of the yellows would merge together at first glance. This is something you want to avoid at all costs as a pixel artist because color conservation not only preserves the style of pixel art, but it unites your piece. Two of those yellows could be removed and the V itself would barely look any different. That is a good sign that those colors can be removed and is something you should be testing regularly while you create pixel art.

If you look closely at mine you can see I only had to use one yellow, and there is a good reason for this. Instead of using a darker yellow, I used orange as not only its own color, but a darker yellow itself. As you may already know, this is a technique called hue-shifting in which you change the hue as well as the darkness/saturation of your color. I can see you attempted to use it in some of your palette but it is not very pronounced due to the fact that it only exists at the very end of the grayscale (whites, grays, blacks, etc.) and somewhat between the main colors. If you plan on hueshifting, I also recommend you learn to build you palettes in a more color-friendly way, instead of one that accentuates flat inclines in color. There are a few ways to do this, but I personally like connecting my colors by branches. A few examples:



You need to understand the interrelations of colors and how they can be used.

Another note that can be made is that I changed your style of color on the V from muddier, less saturated colors to more vibrant colors. Generally, only darker colors should have lesser saturation. The darker a color gets, the less the saturation. In a spoiler below you can see the stats of the colors in my palette, outing the grays. You can see how the brighter or higher up the color in the palette, the more saturation there will be (the more to the right it is.)

Spoiler

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It is important you understand this fundamental part of choosing colors.

Finally, I would like to point out that the style of pixel groups I used made the V seem more as if it were made of a rainbow metal, instead of a melting rainbow. This was purely stylistic, but the reason I did this was not to make it look metallic, but rather to blend the colors better in a way that didn't end up make it look sort of droopy. Metallic materials are noteworthy for their extreme changes in color and brightness, which is why the lines bleeding into each other may give it that look. Other than that, there were purely color changes.

Sorry about the incredibly long post, I just wanted you to understand why colors play an incredibly important part in pixel art. Good luck on whatever you're working on, and you're free to use the design/palette/colors/whatever from my V if you would like.