Paper Mario animations

[E-Man]

It's not that people aren't interested in your art, it's just hard to give any meaningful commentary until everything's assembled. You're also attempting simple characters in a simple style so there really isn't much room to make mistakes. 

What you have here is pretty nice. The goomba has a lot of personality and the shoe shading looks OK.

DragonDePlatino, I don't appreciate you drawing attention to yourself in a thread where I ask for...

Nah! I'm only kidding! I'm glad that you gave me that feedback! Since it doesn't appear that I got any additional feedback for the shoes on this site (besides what DarkGrievous mentioned before) or MFGG, I guess it's safe for me to produce the recolors for them.

Anyway, since you put it that way, it does make sense why not that many people seemingly appear to pay this thread not much mind. Regardless, even if it is a simple style with not much room for error, it's not going to hurt me to seek out as many suggestions as I can find in order to make my work look appealing within the best of my current abilities. Besides, it beats using flat shading or simple gradients and calling it a day. Also, even though you guys could judge the sheets better once everything is complete, I find it a bit more convenient to have suggestions given to me earlier than that. It's not that I'm all that impatient, but it's just that I'd like to stomp out any problems as early as humanly possible to prevent them from breaking a sheet (i.e. creating new parts based on one somewhat flawed part). That way, I'll be able to take care of it before it grows into a major deal that I'll have to hunt down and fix in a potentially laggy file caused by the absurd amount of layers I use.

[Virt]

Alright.

Let me preface this: I acknowledge that you are going for a different style than the original. I acknowledge that you are going for your own artistic direction.
For the duration of this, when I refer to the "Paper Mario style" I will be referring to primarily the style present in Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door, but also SPM and Sticker Star. However, many things I bring up will also apply to the style of the original for the Nintendo 64.

However, I am not of the opinion that the choices you are making are successful.
One of the things that makes the original Paper Mario games visually striking is precisely the visual style they had. Their sense of proportion, space, color, and value are what make them appealing.
By creating purposeful variations from this style, you are removing some of the charm the original designs had.
Many of the drawings you've done thus far are chunky, blocky, and muddied up by an overuse of hue shifting and shading in general.
The originals had bright (save the first game), clear styles with a lot of contrast between the colors and the outlines, and shading only where it was necessary.

You've been messaging me a lot asking me to tell you what to fix, but there's not much I can say beyond "go more towards the original style." And that's simply because the originals look so good and work so well with the style.

But if you don't want to 1.) Start Over or 2.) Just use the originals
Simplify the shading. Mess with the colors. Work on some more interesting, appealing shapes throughout. Make the eyes less soulless.

Hopefully you get something from this.

[Red Haired Bastard]

I can't believe this guy made a tumblr post to complain about the criticism he got. wrote an entire novel and posted it on his tumblr. smh...

[DarkGrievous7145]

I was unaware of this...

Decided to read them, at least to best of my abilities with the present time, and make my own opinion off of that.

I think I can understand more or less why such rants were made.

Especially as far as the style is concerned.
There's no rule saying "all art for x must be done in the original style of x"
The cool thing about art is you can do it in any style you want. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes it doesn't. Also important to note is how different people like different things. Some peoiple may hate E-Man's style for this project, some may absolutely love it. But, when someone is asking for feedback on the art overall, nagging on and on and on about the style isn't particularly helpful.

To be honest, this kinda reminds me with the last few posts of the 2d higher resolution zelda project. People are more interested in pointless bickering over the "right" way to sprite, or to increate the resolution of an existing sprite, rather than to criticize the work as a whole.

I'm too tired to think much more, so I'm off to bed. Maybe I'll clean or reply this post later, but right now I shouldn't be awake, and the onlt reaon i am is because an annoying bug that bites has been terroizing me.

[E-Man]

So, I spent the previous week developing a new art direction for this project with the help of the guys over on MFGG (including Mit). Here's what I got:

[Hiynastrike]

Wow, that actually looks very nice Eman

[Garamonde]

Definitely a step in the right direction. Keep it up!

[DarkGrievous7145]

Very nice!

That's really all I have to say, sorry

[Virt]

A lot of the shapes are much better in this one and the colors are more appealing overall. Making the eyes thinner was definitely a good choice.
I'd suggest making the arms smaller and/or shorter and maybe try the hands bigger?

[E-Man]

I looked into your suggestions and this is what I came up with.



The middle has the smaller arms, while the right one has larger hands. Maybe pushing the hands up would do some good, too?

[Virt]

Yeah, try using the larger hands and moving them up.

[E-Man]

By the way, I'm also working on the bases for the Goomba and Koopas. The former is nearly finished, while the latter has yet to be fully "sketched" out.

[Hiynastrike]

You can probably make te goomba's facial features larger.

[E-Man]

All of them, or can I leave certain parts alone (i.e. the eyes)?

In any case, this is what I came up with.

[Hiynastrike]

I was thinking of the Mario 64 style goomba


Alternatively


I just feel it would fit with the style better