i'm a sad individual so here are my not good sprites

[Gors]

what you're pursuing here is a very valid thing - don't let other pixel purists say otherwise.

basically, that's how game artists made portraits and big art in old games. They actually did very little pixelart (in the modern sense of the word). They'd draw by hand, scan the lines, paint digitally and run an index palette to trim unnecessary colors.

And we drool at them, trying to do the same with the lousy MS Paint pencil tool.

We should always aim for prettiness and quality of pixel placement, but you're a human with lots of time to live, too. It would suck to spend all this valuable time just pushing pixels, when a machine could do just about the same with varying (but satisfying) results.

This being said, it's important to keep the basics of pixelart in mind even if you use the indexpaint approach, and try to make sharp and good looking sprites.

for example, your example looks very blurry in both cases, and it would be problematic no matter what. But i like your mindset. You need just some guiding.

First of all, it's good to paint with the fewest shades as possible, with some blurring to smoothen it. Let me pick an example i did, that uses indexpaint



even with the procedural dithering method, you can see that the lines are well definite and the shading clusters are very visible.

if you want more tips on how to make indexpaint pixelart easily, i'll try making a tutorial