jiyako's sprites (no clever title)

[miyabi95_]

I used to do really bad sprite edits to Sonic sprites, which you can see on my deviantART: http://qwertyabsol.deviantart.com/
I really don't feel like showing them here

Here are some new sprites I've done:






Lemme know what ya think .

[Koh]

Not a bad start.

The girl's skin seems way to yellowish. Also, you're using like 5 shades of red on that first picture of her, and they don't have enough contrast. You could drop that to about 2 or 3 if you add more contrast. The 2nd one sort of shows that, but the lightsource is inconsistent there. If it's coming from the left, like the legs suggest, then the rest of the shading should follow suit.

Sonic in drag....not sure what to say to that other than, o.o.

[miyabi95_]

Oh, fergat bout dese ones:
























You probably don't know by now, but 8-bit games are my freaking life .
(I made these WAAAY before I learned anything about graphic limitations though)

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Not a bad start.

The girl's skin seems way to yellowish. Also, you're using like 5 shades of red on that first picture of her, and they don't have enough contrast. You could drop that to about 2 or 3 if you add more contrast. The 2nd one sort of shows that, but the lightsource is inconsistent there. If it's coming from the left, like the legs suggest, then the rest of the shading should follow suit.

Sonic in drag....not sure what to say to that other than, o.o.

Well, I'll just refer you to my FA page...http://www.furaffinity.net/user/jiyako/
That's who "she" is . Thanks though, I've been looking for more practical ways to add value recently.
Sonic in drag? No, it's just a genderbend. xD

[Gors]

I shall give you more criticism when I'm back from work, but considering your new sprites, you need to get rid of banding and improve on contrast/hueshift.

Banding is when you shade the outline without taking volume into account, and honestly it's as bad as pillowshading because it gives no volume. The washed out, similar colors reek of shades that were just picked by changing the color's brightness. You need to change the hue a little too to give it more organic look.

[Kelvin]

Your Sonic sprites seem to be getting better over time. I'm really looking forward to the Renamon the most; there's barely any custom Digimon on this site. ^^ The shading on your original-styled sprites seem to have low contrast, though. Try cutting out some of the middle shades and see if that helps.

Oh, and I watched you on FA.

[miyabi95_]

I shall give you more criticism when I'm back from work, but considering your new sprites, you need to get rid of banding and improve on contrast/hueshift.

Banding is when you shade the outline without taking volume into account, and honestly it's as bad as pillowshading because it gives no volume. The washed out, similar colors reek of shades that were just picked by changing the color's brightness. You need to change the hue a little too to give it more organic look.

Thing is, I need to start finding my own palettes. I don't have my Adobe CS installed right now, so I've been using the default palette in Multimedia Fusion 2/Clickteam Fusion 2.5 (Clickteam's game-development software, they have a pretty decent image-editor ).

Thanks for the tips .

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Your Sonic sprites seem to be getting better over time. I'm really looking forward to the Renamon the most; there's barely any custom Digimon on this site. ^^ The shading on your original-styled sprites seem to have low contrast, though. Try cutting out some of the middle shades and see if that helps.

Oh, and I watched you on FA.

Aww, well the Renamon sprites are ooold,old, old. Those are all old. I probably won't get back to them, but I'm glad you like them .

Yeah, I've learned in art classes more than enough of the importance of contrast xD. Thanks .

[Sevenstitch]

I tried changing up your palette and shading on your red-haired sprite at the top post



I don't think I really improved it that much; the original palette is very harsh and overly saturated,
making contrast and blending difficult. I added to and tweaked the palette, while trying to stay close
to the original. I also tried moving the shading a lot, and tried following a single light source.
Even with everything I did to it, the colors still just blend in, making it an unreadable mess.

[miyabi95_]

I tried changing up your palette and shading on your red-haired sprite at the top post



I don't think I really improved it that much; the original palette is very harsh and overly saturated,
making contrast and blending difficult. I added to and tweaked the palette, while trying to stay close
to the original. I also tried moving the shading a lot, and tried following a single light source.
Even with everything I did to it, the colors still just blend in, making it an unreadable mess.

I love what you did with his hair. Very SNES/Genesis-ish.

[miyabi95_]

I know it's not relevant to this topic, but I think it's pretty important.

http://fav.me/d7s48me

[miyabi95_]

Here are some stuff from earlier this year. A Konami platformed style and a sprite of an older design.

Funny thing, to make these I opened a small document in Flash (like 32x32), drew them out at a magnified level, saved as unrasterized image files, and fixed the colors in Photoshop. It seemed like a lazy technique, so I abandoned it.

[miyabi95_]

Started this fighting game-esque sprite, not finished at all. It's kinda like a first frame to those KOF intro animations.

I have a legit question...Why is it that pixel artists choose to avoid using FFFFFF white and 000000 black values? It's just something that's been on my mind for the passed few years.

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Here it is finished, pretty much. I took advantage of darker values to create more contrast, and used anti-alias filling to create in-between values. Whadayathink?

[Virtuaboy123]

I use it, but only when I'm going for a more retro(nes) look. (or forget to change the colors)

People don't use because those are the base MS paint colors.

About the sprite. I think the base design needs work. The legs look strange. The hair as well. The arm looks small too.
Here's my edit

The shading on the other hand is also strange looking. Seems almost pillow shaded. It messes with the readability of the sprite.

[miyabi95_]

I use it, but only when I'm going for a more retro(nes) look. (or forget to change the colors)

People don't use because those are the base MS paint colors.

About the sprite. I think the base design needs work. The legs look strange. The hair as well. The arm looks small too.
Here's my edit

The shading on the other hand is also strange looking. Seems almost pillow shaded. It messes with the readability of the sprite.

Ah, okay. Thanks .

Looks awesome, what you did. My mouse-drawing skills ain't the best, so it normally takes more time to tweak the lines and whatnot. This was made on a whim, to be honest.

...Excuse, excuses, geez. I'll just shut up and take your advice xD. Thanks again !

[Vipershark]

I have a legit question...Why is it that pixel artists choose to avoid using FFFFFF white and 000000 black values?

A couple of reasons.

The main one is that pure black and pure white don't play well with MSPaint. Paint doesn't support transparency and turns all transparent parts of images to pure black. If your sprite has pure black in it (on the outline in particular, this will cause the outline to become part of the background) when you go to use the paint bucket to remove the background, any black parts of your sprite will be removed as well. As you can guess, this is really annoying and highly unnecessary when a simple fix is to just use a similar-but-not-pure-black color (and turn off transparency).
White has similar issues and it's a good idea to just not use it.

As far as a technical answer to that question, I can sorta explain it but you probably want to ask someone more art-oriented to explain it better. Basically, pure black is so dark that it "eats" the rest of the colors in your sprite because it sticks out so much. On outlines in particular it's pretty much always better to use a darker version of the color inside the lines. White has similar issues on the opposite end of the spectrum because it's so bright.
It's usually better to use a really desaturated blue for blacks and whites but someone else can probably explain that better than me.

[miyabi95_]

I have a legit question...Why is it that pixel artists choose to avoid using FFFFFF white and 000000 black values?

A couple of reasons.

The main one is that pure black and pure white don't play well with MSPaint. Paint doesn't support transparency and turns all transparent parts of images to pure black. If your sprite has pure black in it (on the outline in particular, this will cause the outline to become part of the background) when you go to use the paint bucket to remove the background, any black parts of your sprite will be removed as well. As you can guess, this is really annoying and highly unnecessary when a simple fix is to just use a similar-but-not-pure-black color (and turn off transparency).
White has similar issues and it's a good idea to just not use it.

As far as a technical answer to that question, I can sorta explain it but you probably want to ask someone more art-oriented to explain it better. Basically, pure black is so dark that it "eats" the rest of the colors in your sprite because it sticks out so much. On outlines in particular it's pretty much always better to use a darker version of the color inside the lines. White has similar issues on the opposite end of the spectrum because it's so bright.
It's usually better to use a really desaturated blue for blacks and whites but someone else can probably explain that better than me.

Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks, Vipershark !