Quote Originally Posted by Noblejanobii View Post
Most of what you said makes sense and I'll consider it for next time, but I do have a question about anti-aliasing and the colors. See in my experience whenever I use anti-aliasing it makes the sprites blurry and harder to see. It hurts the quality of the sprite. As for the colors, both the regular sprite and the shiny sprite use four colors. These are the base white, the base pink, the inner ear/iris pink, and the yellow for the eyebrows in the regular sprite, and the colors in the same corresponding areas for the shiny sprite. The rest of the colors is just shading so I'm a bit confused what you mean to use less colors since most pokemon palettes stick to 3-4 main colors.
Ah, good that you're aiming for minimal colours. But see that colour table I put? Aalllll those colours are present in those two images. This happens when you miss recolouring some pixels sometimes. As a result, there are 47 different colours in those images, as shown by the table.

Anti-aliasing can definitely make it look blurry, but right now it's really sharp and a bit of anti-aliasing makes it look better. I don't know if you've ever seen Speed's guide right here, but she goes over anti-aliasing and the dos and don'ts. In post 4, she talks about it for a bit. Too much looks bad, but just enough makes the sprite far easier on the eye and is just kind of good practice.

Take Speed-X's pignite HD resize, for example.



Mostly the anti-aliasing is to cross over two colours that don't have a solid border, such as the brown or yellow stripes. Otherwise, it's around the face, specifically the eyes and mouth, which is very common. It helps to soften the image.



So anti-aliasing is definitely necessary to have a good looking sprite when it's a really large one (in which case it's more like pixel art, since I see sprites as smaller), because otherwise it lacks depth. You can see that Speed used AA minimally, but it makes a huge difference. If you were to remove that from the sprite, it would look too sharp and unnatural. Basically, whenever I want to learn how to do something better, I use Speed's stuff as a reference (even if I'm nowhere near her skill level haha).

But yeah aside from anti-aliasing, the other thing I'd suggest is higher contrast. It's hard to see the shading as it is now, and also makes for a flat image when the contrast is low.