Koopalings Custom rpg sprite

[MikeDH720]

It's coming along. I do think that the left leg in the third frame needs to come forward a bit more like the right leg in the first frame. Right now Larry looks kind of like he's limping.

[Catskart]

I upload all koopalings on the side :

[Vipershark]

Your color choices and lack of hue shifting and contrast still all need work.

[Silentdarkness12]

I can personally say that colors are always a giant pain in the rear as far as i'm concerned. I'm sure you'll get it looking nice soon, though.

[Catskart]

Do I still have to work on the colors?

The problems is the contrast ?

[Vipershark]

Do I still have to work on the colors?

...uh, yes?
As far as I can see you never changed them, but even if you did, the colors on the rest of the koopalings need work too.

The problems is the contrast?

Not just that.

Anatomy issues aside,
First off, you've got waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too many colors on this sprite.
I can count 18 different colors in use here, and for a sprite as small as this, that's like... probably more than twice what you need.

You can optimize your color usage better by sharing colors between the face/stomach areas and the arm/leg areas since the colors are so similar.
You can also combine the blue of the hair and shell with the green of the head because the green is in such a small area that it isn't very visible anyway.

In addition, there's banding and pillow shading everywhere which you need to get rid of, and your sprite needs a whole lot more contrast as well as some hue shifting.

Basically every single one of these sprites has too many colors and not enough contrast, hue shifting, or variation in saturation levels.

Every single one of the shells has pillow shading on the back poses, and your shading needs work in general.

[Catskart]

ah ok, It's right than I add too color.
I make it in 16 colours.
like this so ?

[Vipershark]

That's better than before, but still not right.
The body now has no shading whatsoever so you'll need to fix that.
You can also further optimize your colors by hue shifting the darkest shade of blue on the hair to green and using the hue shifted blue/green both for the hair and the green part of the head since that pixel cluster is so small.
You can also probably combine the dark grey and the black into a single darker grey shade.

The hair is also still pillow shaded so you'll need to fix that as well.

[Catskart]

I don't understand...

I must edited The hair and head's shading

[Vipershark]

What don't you understand?

[Catskart]

this part :

"You can also further optimize your colors by hue shifting the darkest shade of blue on the hair to green and using the hue shifted blue/green both for the hair and the green part of the head since that pixel cluster is so small.
You can also probably combine the dark grey and the black into a single darker grey shade."

[Gors]

Vipershark meant that in pixelart, your goal is to represent a character using enough detailing to make it readable, and good to the eye. Therefore, you may want to do away with pointless colors and 'merge' similar colors to optimize coloring.

In pixelart, you can do such effect by hueshifting, that is, modifying the hue, or the tone, when picking a darker or a lighter color. If you are familiar with the color wheel, you'll see that blue is near green:



so you can pick an in-between color that serves both for his head and hair. Since the green part of his head is so small, using a blue-ish tone will not be a problem.

In the same concept, ditching similar colors is a good move, because a color that doesn't really add anything in the sprite isn't useful at all. If you can do a good job wth a shade alone, why would you need to add a secondary color? Notice that for a small sprite such as that, you don't really need a lot of colors.

Finally, I fel that the koopaling looks really thin, you could give him a shoulder and a small neck.

[Catskart]

Vipershark meant that in pixelart, your goal is to represent a character using enough detailing to make it readable, and good to the eye. Therefore, you may want to do away with pointless colors and 'merge' similar colors to optimize coloring.

In pixelart, you can do such effect by hueshifting, that is, modifying the hue, or the tone, when picking a darker or a lighter color. If you are familiar with the color wheel, you'll see that blue is near green:



so you can pick an in-between color that serves both for his head and hair. Since the green part of his head is so small, using a blue-ish tone will not be a problem.

In the same concept, ditching similar colors is a good move, because a color that doesn't really add anything in the sprite isn't useful at all. If you can do a good job wth a shade alone, why would you need to add a secondary color? Notice that for a small sprite such as that, you don't really need a lot of colors.

Finally, I fel that the koopaling looks really thin, you could give him a shoulder and a small neck.

Okay, but in the original design and drawing about koopalings, we can't see neck and shoulder.

I edit this head now :

But wait, because larry isn't only to have blues hairs.

[Vipershark]

Here's an (admittedly pretty extreme) example of what I mean by hue shifting to optimize colors.

My edit is on the left (obviously) and your original is on the right.

The darkest blue shade of the hair and the darkest green of the face are so similar that at 1x scale, you can't really tell them apart. So if you can't see the difference in the colors, what's the point of having two colors?
So I hue shifted them together into one color and it still looks good.

...then I took that a step further and combined your gray and black into the same blue shade since they were more or less similar as well.


As you can see, the only place where the change is really visible is on the teeth and the claws of the toes, but even then it doesn't look bad.

You could probably take this even further and remove another or both of the green shades as well.

You won't always need to make optimizations that extreme (you could possibly keep your black, for example) but this shows you the basic point of what I was talking about.
There's no need to have so many colors if you can do the same job with less. Too many colors just complicates your sprite.

I also put it on normal, light, and dark backgrounds at the top left to show that it still looks fine on different background colors.


Anyway, since you removed the shading on the body, you'll have to put that back.
Also you've gotta get rid of the pillow shading on the hair.