Frogger's art. Possible UMC story art.

[Reepurr]

Scary big az swords indeed! Hide!

Only big problems are:
• The big az horns are facing south, but the visor is looking southeast.
• The gold looks like there are only two shades. Try having a dark shade, a normal shade, a bright shade and a near-white shade (use sparingly) perhaps?
• One sword is vertical and the other looks, er, like he's stabbing himself in the heel...

But otherwise, awesome! OTT FTW!

[Frogger5]

There more than two shades.

• There is the darkest blue, which is used only for outlines.
• There is the lighter blue, used for the darkest shadows.
• A dark brown
• A lighter brown
• A golden yellow
• A lighter golden yellow
• And white


The fact that you can only see two shades is probably a good thing.

I'll bear all that in mind when I edit it next.

And those horns, yes

[Zerovirus]

That's not bad! You're markedly improving with pallete usage and placement, though proportions could be worked on a little. Notably, your legs are a bit too short to sustain such a top-heavy unit, making the unit look stumpy overall. The horns and sword pull the visual balance further up as well, adding to the unit's top-heavy look. Maybe I'll try a fix in a second.

EDIT: Alright, here's a short seminar and stuff.

Every spriter has a slightly different set of Internalized Proportions in Pixelart. That is, they tend to focus on different things when they do pixelart and emphasize them accordingly. On this tiny scale of pixels, proportions are necessarily exaggerated in order to create focus. Differences in proportions are expected and can be used artistically at a high skill level. Everyone has their own set and one of the things to do at this level is to figure out what you tend to like drawing and what you don't. I can tell from your sprite you like the torsos and arms. For me, I trend towards longer legs to fit more detail in, and larger weapons for the same reason. In my edit, I simply shortened your arms a bit, lengthened your legs, and shortened the horns (they looked absurdly huge, compare to my first example sprite).

About your pallete- it's oversaturated. In comparison to two of my other gold-ish sprites, in zooming in you can tell that the first one has an extremely desaturated, almost-copper pallete that converts to gold under 1:1 resolution due to eye trickery. Same with the next one- there's even a shade of pink and a shade of gray-offwhite in there too. Notably, your blue is a bit too saturated. Such color scheme would be more usable for a large-scale piece of pixelart, something less realistic and more stylistic, than application to Wesnoth. (I tried using MS Paint to recolor your sprite's pallete, but for some reason it didn't like the pallete you used.)

And there you have it- the two major issues with your sprite, proportions and palette. Notably, I once did a sprite that's approximately on the same skill-level and efficiency of pallete usage. I think it might be... enlightening (and a bit comedic to say the least). Note the incredible pallete inefficiencies and the top-heavy nature of the sprite. (ugh, hate looking at my old stuff lol)

[Frogger5]

Look on the bright side, he'd be awesome at American football.

Thanks for those tips, I'd better get to work on this.

[Frogger5]

Sorry for the double post.

Anyway, I tweaked the proportions a little, I experimented a bit with the colours, and this is what came out.

41 copy 1.png (2.7 KiB) Viewed 4428 times

Original palette, proportion tweaks

41 copy z.png (6.06 KiB) Viewed 4428 times

Proportion tweaks with Darker colours replaced by Zero's palette

41 copy.png (6.1 KiB) Viewed 4428 times

No proportion tweaks, almost completely replaced by Zero's palette.\

What do people think?

[Reepurr]

I think you may be using the palette badly. See, if you look at the gold trim (or whatever) on the Overlord - that's the guy with the axe - it looks gold.
Yours somehow came out green...

EDIT: You might be able to get some ideas for this sort of thing from Eternal's golden armour recolouring.

[Frogger5]

Made his legs longer and added a cape.
Not sure it really worked out though.

41 copy z.png (3.8 KiB) Viewed 4354 times

[Frogger5]

Having a break from pixel art, and needing to practice the other form of computer art that I am actually not so crappy at, vector, I decided to throw around for some ideas for the presentation of the new Roll2Dodge forum which will be arriving at the internet sometime this year. Actually, Dragonchampions' probably doing the art himself, but hey! i need the practice.

My idea for a header.

Yes ok, I know the pistols are stupid, but It's just an idea.

Logo ideas.

Crap quality because i took a screenshot.
Practically no one around here actually does vector, except the awesome sgt groovy, but, your criticism will be appreciated none the less.

[StDrake]

Blame it on my disgraphy, but I see the R right leg not ending in the same line as the left one, but a little higher (would say a few pix higher, but since that's vector sizing it over would make that invalid)

[Frogger5]

Yeah, I see what you mean. Unfortunately, it's a fault of the typeface, so it's difficult to fix.

[eliddell]

Not really--do a Convert Text to Outline (or equivalent command) on the R, select the individual nodes forming the curl-serif-thing at the end of the front leg, and yank them down a bit.

(I do vector art, but so far not here.)

[Frogger5]

Can you do that on illustrator? I know you can on Photoshop.

[eliddell]

I don't have a copy of Illustrator here to check, but manipulating text as a path is a very basic operation in a vector art package (done all the time by designers making logos), so if it wasn't capable of it I'm sure someone would have noticed and complained to Adobe by now. ;P The worst problem is probably going to be selecting just the nodes you need--I recall Illustrator as being painfully bad at that.

[Frogger5]

Fancied up versions. Critique is very much appreciated.

r2d13.jpg (619.81 KiB) Viewed 4082 times

R2d21.jpg (69.7 KiB) Viewed 4082 times

[Reepurr]

The stem of the R sticking out of the diamond looks really weird when no other letter sticks out.