Aura's Sprite Realm - New 23/1/10, Amazon Spearwoman

[Turuk]

You may want to also make it clear whether his face is fully covered by his helm or whether some sort of facial elements are going to be partially visible.

[Frogger5]

Hmmm to me his legs look symmetrical making him look duck footed. Nice sprite though, these are coming along well .

[Aura]

Ok. I'm going to try some more sprites soonish.

[Aura]

Amazonian Centaur and Wizardess.

[Peter the Great]

As a rule you usually don't want anything at exactly 90 degree or 45 degree angles as you have them in the centaur and wizardess respectively.

[Frogger5]

Ok two problems I can see:

1. The centaur's legs are bending backwards slightly.
2. You might want to consider lowering the right one's breasts a bit. Right now they're higher than her shoulders.
apart from those two things, nice job!

[Aura]

Better ?



Any more comments for the wizardess ? I want to improve her.

[woodmouse]

Horse legs bend that way, right?

[Blarumyrran]

Any more comments for the wizardess ? I want to improve her.

• The sword is in an awkward position - if the sword was pointed in the opposite direction (up and right), it would look much more convincing; or if the sword-holding arm was lowered down, in a more static position, it would be even better.
• The sword is under 45 degrees from the up/down axis; arbitrary, messy degrees like ~10 degrees from the up/down axis look more convincing
• The sword is white - look at the swords of mainline units, they are actually strongly shaded and colorful.
• You are pillow-shading. Not every body-part should have the same level of highlights & shadows - eg the belly should be wholly darker.
• Don't have breasts as circles like that; draw a solid-color torso with no weird circles on it, and then draw highlights on it to where the top side of breasts should be.
• The dress does not look natural - her body looks like a cone pointing upwards. Hips are very important, you don't have them at all.

[Aura]

I attempted fixes for most of that stuff (gave her a second fireball instead of a new-pose sword but I can always go back and put one in again).



Any better than before ?

[Blarumyrran]

Slightly better, but pillow-shading is your major problem.

[Aura]

On everything ? Or mainly the torso ?

[Blarumyrran]

Everything. Eg now her right hand should probably be really dark.

[Aura]

Do you have a link to a tutorial explaining how to shade well on similar sprites handy ? I'm going to try redoing the shading if it's the biggest problem.I tried a little, but I don't know if this is an improvement. If not I'll probably erase all the shading and redo the lot.

[Blarumyrran]

It isn't really pixel-art specific - you just have to have some logic behind the highlights, not just the same kind of highlight on everything.

Eg here the first figure has the same highlight/shadow tones for all parts of her body which is bad, but third figure has them roughly according to placement & light direction which is good: http://itchstudios.com/psg/tuts/value1.jpg (from this big tutorial, http://itchstudios.com/psg/art_tut.htm that kitty especially likes to link to)

EDIT: And yeah, that is better - but make the highlights/shadows contrast higher. Also, breasts should probably not be separate balls, but form a single wide bump under the cloth.