General tip: Consider not drawing eyes

[Dixie]

If you're having trouble drawing your unit's face and you're trying to draw very distinct eyes, you should also consider not drawing eyes distinctively as an option, as in trying to work out the unit's face to look like the way you want without drawing explicit eyes.

Yeah, I guess so. Much in the same fashion that if you are unable to cook hamburgers, you could consider just eating toasts. It does the job, but it's not really the same... (okay, it's almost supper time over here, sorry )

On a more serious note, though, drawing eyes is not even hard. You could just look up any other sprite and copy-paste that bit. There are way more subtle things with pixel art: avoiding pillow-shading, outlines, palettes, etc. If you are unable to draw eyes, would you even be able to draw a sprite, even unshaded, that looked like anything at all? Moreover, your blurred eye sockets face-thing looks much more subtle and complicated to draw than eyes...

Just a few thoughts, anyway...

[siddh]

Here's a zoomed-in picture of two of the more succesful modifications to the previous images.

So when you look at this picture you can see that drawing the peasant I did not use white for an eyeball, instead there's just skintone, nor black for the eyebrow or the iris, but the picture gives off the impression that the peasant has eyes, despite them not being distinctively drawn. Same with the white mage. Although you can see that the skintones are slightly different in the area where he used to have an eye, and you can somewhat make up a representation of an eye from the zoomed in picture, the idea still is that on the pixel level, no eyes was distinctively drawn, but instead shades of skintone are used, yet the final image produces the impression of an eye. The goblin is also a good example so I should've included that as well. Anyway, I think you can agree that this is a reasonable?

Also it's complicated since it's about the form of the face as well, eyes and eyeballs can be represented by darker shades, which account for eyesockets, which creates the impression of eye by the contrast of eyesocket and skin. So I don't know. I hope this was of some use anyway.

[JaMiT]

[...], but the picture gives off the impression that the peasant has eyes, despite them not being distinctively drawn.

Well, sure. I thought that was the point of drawing something indistinctively -- give the impression of the thing drawn without drawing details. It could be a useful skill when drawing small images. (In fact, looking at the zoomed-in images, I would say it was employed in drawing the original images, just to a lesser degree than you propose.)

That leaves the question of which look is preferable. I suspect the answer is going to be subjective, though. (Personally, I tend to prefer the more distinctively drawn eyes in this topic, aside from the "urg_urg" example.) So it may be good that you have started to delve into how to draw these eyes well, while focusing less on trying to convince people to prefer your style of drawing.

Since you have gotten away from supporting "not drawing eyes" and into supporting "drawing eyes, but not distinctively", maybe you should update the topic's title to avoid misleading people?

[Dixie]

Well personnally I don't really read your edits as "dark eye-sockets" but as "frowning with my thick eye brows", "closing my eyelids" or "hving happy manga eyes (^^)". It can (and has been) used in many specific context for those very purposes (although I'm not sure Wesnoth does it), but for a baseframe, meh. Especially since drawing eyes is not even really hard to begin with... Regarding your inital argument, I'm not sure we can say it is really more realistic that way either.

But hey, that's just my peanut opinion, I guess. I'm not really sure why convincing anyone is really that important to you... If you like it, great! Enjoy doing it, I won't stop you.

[Blarumyrran]

abc

[Wussel]

Please give a break. All this guy is asking is not to have oversize manga style eyes for sprites. On this pixel scale any regular size eye will be just a slightly darker (than the surrounding) single pixel. That is what he is asking for. It is a question of style, not of blindness. I hope you can see this.

[Sapient]

I was kind of surprised to see that this debate is still active. I suppose someone could add a poll, but based on what I've read so far it looks like the eyes have it.

[homunculus]

@Blarumyrran: ...and trolls!
Off-topic: is it correct to say elves and dwarfs?

@Sapient: Obviously it is alive because the topic is so inspiring.

[Blarumyrran]

non haebla

[artisticdude]

Well, at least we all seem to agree that eyes > no eyes.

You can knock yourself out debating the pros and cons of different approaches to drawing eyes in pixel art, but ultimately any position on the matter will be an entirely subjective personal preference. The eyes will not be changed on mainline sprites, and anyone who wishes to contribute to mainline or have their work remain in a style consistent with mainline will need to draw the eyes in the current mainline style. UMC authors are of course free to deviate from that mainline style and draw eyes however they prefer, but none of the mainline sprites will be altered merely to suit a subjective (and honestly, rather trivial) stylistic quibble.

And that's really all there is to say on the matter.