General Spriter's Showcase!

[Caite-chan]

So I was doing a little messing around. (And I blame Speed for it. :D)


Seatorb - Seadra with Voltorb's colors.


Voldra - Voltorb with Seadra's color.

[Suicune's Fire]

Cool recolours. :] I'd love to see more complicated ones. c:

[Caite-chan]

@Suicune's Fire
Well if you've got any ideas of ones I could try...I'd give it a shot. :D

[Suicune's Fire]

OOO: Maybe a striped one? It can be hard to shape the lines with the shapes of the pokemon. c:

[SassySnivy]

I'm going to move the C+C discussion from WAR here that way we don't flood the actual WAR thread with too much discussion. ^^ As always, guys, I'm better at showing than telling, so if there's anything here that's unclear / inconsistent, don't hesitate to call me out on it. Honestly!

@Pokemon Trainer Sarah

Spoiler:

Not quite finished yet. Still wanna do some dithery shading and fix the lineart colours in some places, but if you're critting... :D

I guess I'm mostly wondering if you think the colours work how I've used them and if there are any particular spots that need work. I decided to look up hue shifting and give it a shot but it's kinda hard. :O Doesn't help I picked a super complicated Pokemon with so many colours! o_o I tried to use as few colours as possible, but I'm not sure if I can get away with the yellow tinged lab coat or if I should just make it white (and therefore add more colours...) If you don't have time to crit, that's cool. I will edit this with my final entry when I'm done :D

WAR Team: Team Trainer

Entry:


Edit: Updated shading!

I told myself I wasn't going to do 100% in-depth crits but I might just have to break my own rule today.

Tried hue-shifting? Great. You also did a really good job at making your color palette universal! The colors on the pants are used for the black on Pikachu's ears and tail; the yellow color ramp also encompasses the hair; etc.
The yellow tint may not have been the best choice for the shading on the jacket, though. The thing is that the yellow is just so light that when used for something that's white, the contrast just doesn't work out. You'd be better off with trying to make a new color ramp for the jacket and make it a really, really desaturated yellow.
Well, at least the first two shades of the jacket, anyway.

I like your use of anti-aliasing between the black tips of Pikachu's tail and ears. It's a small touch, but it definitely shows that you tried to apply a more advanced technique. The only thing about the black-anti-aliasing I'm not a big fan of is the anti-aliasing at the top of the hat. Typically with pixel art like this, it's meant to be just a solo piece by itself, not part of a bigger picture or meant to go with any particular background; you'll likely use a transparent background, instead. This being said, look what happens when it goes against a dark background:

The anti-aliasing defeats its purpose there. But this is more of a nitpick and something to consider in the future than anything else.

Another big problem that I'd like to go over, here: the shading. The shading itself is fine, don't get me wrong, but there's just...so much dithering. Dithering's alright in moderation but if you use it too much then the piece appears to have this rough, grainy texture. You don't have to anti-alias all the shading, either; it's not always a bad thing to have some contrast going on (Trust me, I used to have this problem all the time, except with adding transition colors to keep anti-aliasing the shading until it looked like a gradient).

I hope you don't mind if I edited your piece a little bit to show you what I'm talking about. Like I said, having some dithering isn't necessarily a bad thing, but after correcting this excessive dithering I actually see no particular areas that really stand out to me that need to be dithered to begin with.


You also have a lot of jagged lines in your line art. I'd say to go back and take a little time to fix it up, because I have a feeling that maybe this mistake was just made out of carelessness? Well, not saying that you don't care or aren't paying attention, but...hopefully you get what I mean. xD Not trying to make any accusations. Here's a post that kinda goes over jagged lines, but doesn't really go into much detail. But since I am horrible at explaining things and much better at showing things (especially today; seriously sorry for my lack of eloquency and consistency), I'm going to show you how jagged the lines are by going ahead and stripping this thing down to just lines:

Cleverly enough, your shading hides a lot of that from plain view! But the structure is still a really important part of art; more specifically, the lines, since the line art is a big part of this kind of pixel art.

Okay! We know what we gotta work with; let's see what we gotta do! I'm going to correct the line art in a few areas to hopefully give you a good idea of where I'm going, and I'm going to let you maybe give it a shot with the rest! :o

Let's work on the head, because it's one of the biggest offenders.

You've gotta make sure that your lines stay clean and consistent. The lines were kinda going all over the place on the sides of the head! Also, a lot of these touch-ups are small, but when you add it all together...it makes a big difference! Don't forget that with pixels, every little bit counts. Because it really does! :o
The swirls in the glasses are still a bit jagged, but you can fix that with some well-placed anti-aliasing. No problem!

Oh, and the "1, 2, 3, 4" are just there to denote the steps. I just figured it would help the GIF be a little more clear since when I first viewed it it was a little bit...confusing.

So with all this in mind, there are two major things you need to work on: your line art, and your shading. Mainly your line art, though! :o This being said you don't have to totally scrap the shading. You can still keep the same shading while having different line art. x]

@Sou Cleife

Spoiler:

I'd certainly love a critique xD

I gotta say, this has gone through some huge improvements since we started, Sou. :>
While there really isn't much hue-shifting in the pink, I totally commend you for just lowering the saturation a teeny tiny bit as your color ramp gets into the darker shades of pink. A very common beginner mistake is to keep the colors super-vivid which can cause some contrast issues...especially with super-bright hues like cyan and yellow.

I don't know what it is with you guys and your fascination with dithering...
jklolloveyouguys
Nah, over-dithering is a super, super common beginner mistake. So it's not biggie! I left Sarah some advice about dithering, but like I told her: you add too much dithering and it makes the art look like it has a grainy, rough texture. Dithering's alright in moderation, but it's not usually needed. I do like, though, how you seemed to take into consideration the light source and shaded Sylveon as if it were three-dimensional...just like you should have done! xD It's really, really hard sometimes to shade in 3-D...your brain usually looks at it and denotes is at 2D and wants to portray it as such. It's just how our minds work, I guess. Though you did kinda fall into this pitfall with the ear on the right (our right): the highlights are all on the outer edge of its ear, making its ear look paper-thin. Last time I checked I was pretty sure Sylveon's ears were actually a little poofy.

Also I love how you didn't use pure gray for the shading for Sylveon's white parts...actually, no, I ****ing love you for not doing that. You used a pinkish, purplish-gray. I love that touch!

I do encourage you, though, to shade in the lines, too, instead of leaving them flat like that. You can really add some extra depth to Sylveon that way. Let me show you!


Take a look at the bust/chest area, there. I got a little carried away, though, so sorry about that.

Did you notice that I also tried to taper the lines at the end? That's a good habit to form. Tapered lines--in the right spots, anyway--usually look nicer than harsher lines.

@lorii

Spoiler:

Ooo I would also love a quick critique if you don't mind!

I'm mostly entering for feedback since this is something new to me. I feel like learned a ton from just those links that I never realized at first.

I also had a question on the colour count since that was commented a lot on first round's entries. Are we supposed to keep shades to a minimum, or just below a certain number, etc?

You know what, did I really make a comment on that? I didn't even notice. Color count is big, but honestly it's less to do with the actual number and WAY more to do with efficiency. Did you use your colors efficiently; meaning that you don't have any redundant colors that you could have gone without? That's basically what I mean. ^^ I guess by "color count" I really mean more like "color efficiency."

By the way, I absolutely LOVE your newest edit of that Hoppip. It looks ten times better thanks to just getting rid of the dithering alone! The hue-shifting is great. The fact that you made the pink actually shift into a warmer, more yellow color on the outlines is actually a cool little touch. The hue-shifting on the leaves is awesome, too, and I like how you placed the highlights because it really shows that "hey, there's this really big crease on Hoppip's leaves." However, the contrast is just...a little too high. Not the contrast between the hues--which is done wonderfully--but the contrast between the levels of brightness. I'd say to just mess with the brightness of your greens (brightness is also known as luminosity and/or value) a little bit.

There is one redundant color still, and I'm 99.99% sure that it was a mistake. No biggie, just want to bring this to your attention so you know!
So you know your 3rd-darkest pink color, right? You have another color that's really similar to it in spots, except it's more of a hot pink. Just replace that hot pink with the regular pink and it's all good

More bonus points for not using pure black, too! Pure white and pure black are...alright, but it's also good to try to steer away from using them, too. ^^ That is, unless you don't have much of a choice (for instance, if the colors are dark). Really just a case-by-case basis.

@TheoreticalSelkie

Spoiler:

Sorry; I owe you this from last night! Just got so caught up in URPG that I didn't open Skype back up. Like, ever.

I honestly don't see any major problems. Maybe your darkest pink (not the outline color, the color just up from that one) could be just a smidge darker. And maybe since the color scheme is pretty dark, you could stick to Scolipede's outer line art mostly being the darkest color, unless the light is hitting it directly, like right on top of the head. The feet will probably look better if they're only outlined with that darkest color. Since that pink color (the one that I said needed to be a little darker) is used mostly as a shading color, it doesn't look right when used so heavily with the lines. Even when I darken it I can't darken it too much because that will give the shaded areas too high of a contrast. Plus, no real point in adding a between color, either. (Though using that color to outline the little light-pink-claw-arm-things work perfectly fine) So yeah! :>

Maybe you also don't need quite so much anti-aliasing around the edges (on the inside) of Scolipede's lines. It makes it look a little bit...dirty, if that's the right word?

@Suicune's Fire asked for a private critique, and @Caite-chan asked for some shading help. I just want to let you guys know that I'm going to start working on those now, this just took such a long time x]

[monkeybard]

Oh damn all these last minute submissions are really good; I feel like I should redo mine or something D:

/does this instead


Decided to try my hand at those HD Pixel Overs because they seem like a lot of fun and I haven't done much Pokemon related spriting lately! This is the happiest (and therefore the best) sprite of Slowbro I've ever seen so I knew I had to do this one first. GAME FREAK made some really weird decisions in the shading of the outline which I ended up emulating, but I might redo it someday because I don't know if I agree with it or not; especially on such a large scale.

[Suicune's Fire]

I like it, but why did you use the shell's colour as highlights? xD Looks very out of place. I also think you could taper some of the lines a bit more to soften it up.

A good, cheater-like way is to look at all of Speed's pixel stuff and see what she does to make hers look amazing. xD Sorry I can't be of more help. Lol.

[monkeybard]

I like it, but why did you use the shell's colour as highlights? xD Looks very out of place. I also think you could taper some of the lines a bit more to soften it up.

Whoops. I must've used the shell colour by accident at one point and just kinda ran with it, and I couldn't tell because I'm colourblind haha.

[SassySnivy]

I really like how that turned out! To be honest I had no idea that you were colorblind. Or are you just figuratively? x]

While Slowbro's eyes were fine in proportion to the size of its original sprite, sometimes when you do these you have to readjust things according to the Pokemon's actual proportions, since you have more room to work with. :> In the new one, its eyes are HUGE. xD I would probably try making them more ovular; I think the problem may have to do with the width!

While this patterning does exist in the original sprite, this little detail here doesn't translate all to well when you make it bigger:

It ends up looking rather banded.

The head slopes down just a little bit too much at the back; and funny thing is it's really only caused by the absence of a single pixel! :>


Also, another thing I noticed on the head: the third pinkish orange down Slowpoke's color ramp (RGB of 231,82,41) is used to shade the outline where the light hits it directly pretty sparingly. Again this is only a matter of a couple of pixels, but I suggest maybe limiting the usage of that color (on the outlines) just on the few pixels that directly touch the lightest orange-pink.

And the last thing I noticed is your use of anti-aliasing down on the bottom of Slowbro's belly. I know that the original sprite also has this (though one pixel of it), but try not to AA outside of the outline too much, or else this will happen:

Just something to look out for! If you plan on adding a background to the pixel art then AA'ing outside of the main outlines is acceptable. Try to be careful about it for singular pieces of pixel art, though! Especially game sprites, since they're intended to be placed on several different types of backgrounds. :>

That's really the only big errors I noticed about this, though! Those things are a lot of fun to make, aren't they? :D You did a pretty awesome job with this one.

Xanthe, you be so silly

[monkeybard]

@Speed-X Ohh, good catch on the head; I also didn't really realise that it was sloping right down at the very back because it just made the Slowbro feel a little chubbier (its head is actually more distinct from its body compared to Slowpoke)! I might actually prefer it that way, but I revised it a little anyway.

I also cut down on the AA on the bottom of the sprite to about the same amount as it was on the original sprite; I don't think it harms it much on a white background (or on the neutral grass, water or stone battle bases that these sprites would be placed on) so I didn't take it out completely. Also made the eye smaller, looks much better.
As for the shell line, I did my best to transfer the depth the line gets from the original into this one, but as you said, when it's at this scale it looks a lot more like banding or pillow shading than anything. The linework there was also a bit more sharp of a curve than I wanted it to be, but I couldn't figure out how to AA it out too well. I might re-line it sometime, but for now I think it's looking pretty good. I'll definitely do more of these; very fun!

Also, I was actually born colourblind, but that hasn't stopped me from drawing and spriting for the past 10 or so years c:

EDIT: I don't know how often people even look at the GSS but I done made this!

Precious big muscle baby, in three fantastic flavours.