Custom character trying to gain his wings!

[Gwen]

Illustrator sucks, just letting you know that now. It's definitely not the program for me at least.

[Geou]

As expected, I'm going to need to do a perspective shift. I'm going to make the guy face forward instead of frontwards like in the original post. Right now, I've only got the basic pose that was drawn up and filled in that I'm going to convert the guy to. I figured before I spend hours trying to make my guy fit the pose well that I should post it here to so I don't waste tons of time on something that's awful.


The rightmost doodle is the pose I'm going to try to fit my guy to. Looks okay, form-wise? Of course, being a doodle just to visualize the form/position of the final sprite, the colors and shape aren't anything close to being correct or aesthetically pleasing.

Anti-aliasing was one of the biggest problems of my old sprite, along with shading, so I'll be sure to keep those in mind when drawing the new sprite. Appreciate any advice.

[Hoeloe]

I don't know if you noticed this, but he seems to have shrunk drastically in that new pose you've drawn. You can use your own sprites for reference, you know. In fact, you be insane not to. Make sure you match up the scales.

Other than that, his head is incredibly flat and looks deflated, and he appears to have feet on his arms.

[Geou]

Alright, finished the first attempt at his flying pose. See him on the right.


The jaggies are giving me a lot of trouble. I can't seem to get the anti-aliasing right, especially on the arms and hair. Also, I'm new to quality shading. For this one I just imitated the previous version's shading, but I'm not sure if I got it right for the new perspective, especially with respect to the horns.

Again, any help is greatly appreciated.

[Cobalt Blue]

i dont really see any antialiasing on that.

[Geou]

It's a problem. I'm still new to all this, and anti-aliasing is topping the list of problems.

While I work on that, are there any other things you guys see that I should put my attention to?

[Cobalt Blue]

besides the lack of contrast, poor desing choices, low quality shading and what seems ragdoll-like anatomy?

[Bombshell93]

by the looks your still not doing things pixel by pixel, which is leading to inconsistently shaped outlines.
as mentioned by Meta, you have little contrast bad shading and a very floppy anatomy.

I'd advise you start again by first planning out your proportions, you wont need to do this with every pic you do, but as long as you get some practice with it your following works will show.
while doing this, remember to zoom in and use a single pixel brush anything more and you will get jaggies and mess everywhere.
Also remember that a jaggy can be avoided by consistency, which is easy when you give your lines patterns,
E.G.
down 3 across 1, down 2 across 1, down 1 across 1, down 1 across 2, down 1 across 3, etc. for a curve ofc.

after you have your proportions begin the outline using those proportions, also outline any outstanding forms, such as the spikes, eye brows, pelvis, knees, elbows, fists etc.
purely for reference when shading, try not to get jaggies here either. I won't advise on shading just yet, getting the characters overall form is most important right now.

[Gors]

Geou, I understand that you're using a different approach for sprites, but in my opinion, you need to know how pixelart works to try other styles.

If you want to keep with raster work, I suggest pixelart. If you aim for a smoother work, then go for vectors completely.


Since you appear to be working with raster graphics still, then I'll judge as sprites: you'll need more definition (readability) to your sprites, and that includes doing away with those 2-px wide black outlines, as it kills definition. Also, for the 2px outlines to work correctly, you'd need knowledge at anti-aliasing, which you don't have.

Also, regardless of what visual you're going for, a completely red guy is not striking at all; it looks uninteresting and boring. There is no rule to make interesting characters that I know of, but using complementary colors, clothing, facial features and posing are all good points to make an interesting character.

[Gaia]

May I suggest trying something simpler? Vectors (sprites like DKC) are kinda hard to pull off, so what I suggest is shooting for something simpler, if not, try listening to Gors, it might help in the long run.

[Sevenstitch]

Everyone's suggestions and critique are entirely valid, and you should heed them.
To add to those, I would say that I don't really for the All-Red approach of the character.
That is a astetic choise though, not a design flaw. I think breaking the character up with
more color may help to define his features instead of him seeming to be a flying huminoid blob.