Speed's Pixel Cluster v2.0

[SassySnivy]

Thanks, Sarah! Finally finished it (though I'm 100% sure I'll make several tweaks to it later). Now I can sleep yay
Maybe it'll get me a Snivy for URPG, who knows lawl

25 colors, so it isn't all that optimized :x

[monkeybard]

Thanks, Sarah! Finally finished it (though I'm 100% sure I'll make several tweaks to it later). Now I can sleep yay
Maybe it'll get me a Snivy for URPG, who knows lawl

25 colors, so it isn't all that optimized :x

Man I keep remembering the brief glory days of Project Mutation activity, where there were a few sprites every day and I would churn out (hopefully good) CC like there was no tomorrow. How did I do it?! Your pixel art looks great as always (I really admire how you pursue it as a serious art form, at a deeper level than just a simple hobby) but something didn't sit right with me for this one, and I've been mulling over how to write the CC since before I joined! I've also not delved deeply into the art that is pixel art for a while, so I don't think I'm the most authoritative or knowledgeable person on this, but I'll give it a shot. As always when I talk about left/right it's in the perspective of the subject, and I hope what I write helps.

On first glance I think what strikes me as the most "off" about this piece is that Snivy's proportions and pose looks a little awkward. I feel like I can't say too much about this; the way you draw a Snivy is up to your interpretation. If I were to compare it to the official art sources and say that the head to body ratio is a lot more equal compared to a normal Snivy's pretty big head and small body, it would be incredibly unfair. Rather, I think the posture of Snivy is just a tad stiff and unnatural. The biggest contributor to this is probably the perfectly straight right arm, and I feel like the pose might look a little bit more balanced had you made the left arm straight as well (for a hugging the stomach kind of pose) or curved out the right arm like the left arm (which would have also upped the glee factor on Snivy's general body language as well!). My attention is also drawn to the nearly identical feet, which in this case is probably fine but if I had to be nit-picky about the general perspective that's been established in the rest of the picture (with the left arm having smaller fingers due to perspective and the leftmost petal on the leaf looking a bit smaller) it seems like the left foot could have been made a tad smaller/higher or the right foot pointed slightly more outwardly just to create a bit more variety between the feet. It doesn't look bad, but the thing about posture and nature is that no two things are identical and that things don't tend to occur in straight lines or perfect squares or circles or such. The tips of the two feet being noticeably identical is incredibly nit-picky of me, but I feel like a small change in just one arm and one leg will go far in making the Snivy's posture a bit more natural.

You've already addressed the colour a bit in response to Elrond's critique of this piece (which I found by accident and decided to read before formulating this) and you've correctly identified that the hue-shifted highlights that you've given to Snivy (done very well I might add) looks a bit out of place as it doesn't harmonise well with the background. I find that the background is severely lacking in harmony with the Snivy in general, but it is not an easy task to pixel a background in any situation! There's two ways to approach backgrounds and objects in most artistic mediums; you can just have a background with its basic colours in a neutral lighting environment paired with an object with its basic colours in a neutral lighting environment to obtain a picture akin to a photograph taken inside a white room with white lights or something. This is something like the way Pokemon sprites worked before Gen 6, where the sprites were shaded in a very neutral fashion and so were all the backgrounds, so they paired well together, and that's kind of how the blue sky and green grass work with the Snivy in this picture. However, it's a bit more jarring than what you'd see in the Pokemon games as Snivy has not been shaded in a way which implies a neutral lighting environment, while the background has. It's also a bit strange that Snivy is the only object that actually has highlights; the highlighting done on Joltik and the grass is a lot more subtle compared to the oomph factor that hue-shifting provides. When you see the minimal yellow highlights on Snivy, you would expect a very warm, low-lighting environment; something like a sunset (which would've worked great with a lot of the colours that already exist on Snivy!), or a torch-lit room, to list a few. In the case you had good reason to have a nice blue sky with the grass you do, it should be reasonable to go in reverse in the sense that you incorporate colours of the background into Snivy and Joltik. Make the background more vibrant, then use those colours to harmonise with Snivy and Joltik. I know you worked on the objects and the background separately, but when you're thinking about colours you should consider what's more important to the overall feeling of the piece, such as the desire to have a very specific environment or the desire to make your subject matter pop, and try to manipulate the other into making sense with the colours that you've already decided are the most important. You could've just as easily given the grass some of the yellow highlights transitioning into a lighter colour (near-white if you don't like using pure white), and then give Snivy similar highlights to imply that it's a very bright sunny day for example. Make the sky a bit lighter with colours picked from Joltik's eye and also shift the shadows a bit more to the blue side, and you might save colours while making the overall atmosphere more focused.

On the topic of shading, you've done very well as you usually do! In terms of texturing, the dithering on Snivy's highlights is pretty obvious and actually makes the Snivy look a little scaly. This would partly be due to the resolution of the image and sheer size of it being a lot larger than, well, most pixel art, and dithering in this case creates more of a texture than it might on a smaller image. Something else to consider as to why the dithering might be more prominent here is because it is used rather sparingly, i.e. it only applies to highlights. Had the shadows been dithered as well (and I'm not entirely sure why you decided not to; it would've gone a long way in making the feet and tail leaf feel a bit more... flat without being flat, if you catch my drift) then it might not be so prominent. On the topic of shadows, as I already mentioned, I feel like some skilful dithering (which you're perfectly capable of) would've been nice in adding a bit more depth and consistency to the shading of Snivy. On top of this, it may be hard to hugging the shape of the body when you shade it on a serpentine body such as Snivy's, but with the implied direction of the light and the way the back has been shaded, I think extending the shadow along the curve of the body more would be appropriate and work pretty well. The shape is communicated well enough as is, but it could potentially look more natural and be unambiguously more conical.

And that's all I really had to say! I'm sorry if my use of parentheses makes it a bit hard to read, I tend to type out sentences that I make in my head orally, so there's a lot of odd pauses as if I'm mid-rant all the time. I also feel like I'm being incredibly nit-picky and maybe not as constructive and more critical than I intended to be, but in the end I hope you get something out of reading all this! Keep up the good work; maybe I'll look at critique'ing some of your other stuff when I have time.