Piles of Pixels [Selkie's Sprites]

[TheoreticalSelkie]

I keep looking at these new updates but always forget to post wtf

Your Lupin-mice-creature-things are cute. There's just something bugging me about the mouth area, though, just because it looks so plain in comparison to the rest of it. As if the lines weren't finished / finalized around the mouth. As for the color palettes, they're alright, but there's so much more you could have done with them. :> Remember when I said the other day that 100% perfect color optimization isn't always the most important thing? That's kinda what I mean. You used few colors, yes, but you used the bare minimum...or, at least you didn't get very inventive with your palettes. Using few colors is nothing if you don't try to experiment with said colors in a less...mainstream(?) way.

I love what you've done with your Tamagotchi-styled animations though :D The first one looks a lot better now because it doesn't look like the leaf is getting longer by a pixel in one of the frames. I think that's the big challenge for these Tamagotchi-styled sprites; you have to be careful not to make too big of a change or else it could throw the whole thing off, since you're doing it at SUCH a small scale. Also readability is super-important and difficult to achieve for more complex character designs. I love that little propeller...dolphin-thing, that is adorable xD

On the Lupin thing, I'm going to go back to them later this week and see if I can fiddle around with shading a bit more. Well so far I have every color indexed so I can always fiddle around with them when I have time, but I suspect my issue may require me to just rehaul parts or all of the whole thing. And that's fine! Trying not to go too crazy yet though.

As for the Tamagotchi, they're adorable >w< I learned a ton with animation too since you can only do so much in that constrained space.

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And since it's Wednesday, it's time for another WIP Wednesday! This time...

WIP Wednesday #3: On Work Processes

Yep, it’s a bit of an look into my work process. Which is about as fickle as a devil, but this is generally what I went with for this sprite.

So usually I start with a sketch. Pixel art is one of my favorite medium for this because I can be as scribbly as I want and carve out the details later. So as you can see, it’s pretty messy. But the general shape of the object is there. Inspiration-wise, I don’t think I really had anything to inspire me here other than “I want to draw a smiling cat”.

Middle image is something that’s sorta unusual for me as of late. Nowadays my stuff is more blobbish like this one:



And I’d be left to figure out what the heck I was thinking while I opened up the file at a later date. Usually I’m really good at figuring this stuff out, but in this sprite, my overarching intention was to make something with just three colors: black, white, and a color of some kind. So this called for an outline so I knew where stuff and details would be going first before I started blacking stuff out for shading.

Stuff happens between the second and third picture – I eventually figure out shadows and how to set details apart. There’s not too much in ways of struggling with color other than making sure it’s not contrasting too much with both ends of the spectrum.

As for the effect itself, I think it’s pretty cool. My friend on Tumblr, theinexplicatorium, told me it does look like something out of an RPG and I have to agree. Perhaps I may make a mock-up or something in the future with this included :P