Art for the Return of the Darks

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thvk
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Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by thvk »

Hi
im making art for my addon "The Return of the Darks" and i want to have some feedback.

UPDATE:
units i presented here:
Preview.png
Preview.png (322.2 KiB) Viewed 2664 times
Last edited by thvk on March 8th, 2021, 8:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
Campaigns Im working at:
- The Return of the Darks[ unfinished ]

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. : ) - Isaac Asimov
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The_Quixotic_King
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by The_Quixotic_King »

i think they look good, the style is charming. But, on the flipside, they aren't in a Wesnoth style at all. which, you don't have to make them in a Wesnoth style. it depends on what you want for your era.

besides that, i think for the Darks_shaman and the Elder_Dark, you should line up their shoulders, currently the right shoulder is lower than the left.
“Truly I was born to be an example of misfortune, and a target at which the arrows of adversary are aimed.” -Donquixote

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thvk
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by thvk »

What can i do to make them Wesnoth style?
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Vyncyn
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by Vyncyn »

If you want to make them more wesnoth style there's a few things you can do
  1. Change perspective. Currently yours look like a frontal perspective. Wesnoth units are more at an angle/ bird view.
  2. Make them beefier. Wesnoth units are usually smaller than yours, but wider torso and arms
  3. Don't forget the shadow
Quick edit for visualisation
Quick edit for visualisation
EOUDarker-edit.png (958 Bytes) Viewed 4386 times
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thvk
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by thvk »

I have some Problems with drawing them in the bird perspective. I just dont get the propotions.
Are there any Tips?

Thanks for answers
thvk
Last edited by thvk on September 3rd, 2020, 7:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
Campaigns Im working at:
- The Return of the Darks[ unfinished ]

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. : ) - Isaac Asimov
Pilauli
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by Pilauli »

Okay, this is a bit long. But I hope it's useful!

I think "angle/ bird view" means that the unit is facing sort of diagonally, and the camera is looking down on him, so you can see the top of his head. All of the units that I'm using as examples are basically in this view, facing toward the bottom-right. Note that some units have their feet arranged differently (like sticking one foot out), but are still looking in this direction. For example, the Elvish Archer.
Image
You could copy a unit that already exists (Spearman, Elvish Shaman, etc.) and draw over it. That can help you get all the body parts in the right places. You don't have to exactly copy everything, but being able to say "let me put this unit's feet in the same place as the spearman's are" is really helpful.
ImageImage
If your art program has layers, you can put the existing unit on the bottom layer, and work on a higher layer. That way, you can hide the spearman (or whoever) when you don't want to see him.


More things I notice about your units, as compared to most Wesnoth units:
- They are very dark-colored all over. Most of the existing Wesnoth units have dark shadows and bright highlights, which makes the details easier to see. Someone used the Assassin as an example because his clothes look black, but actually have a lot of light-colored areas. And the Fire Dragon is awesome because the darkest shades are actually purple, but the dragon still looks orange.
ImageImage
- You have a lot of straight or 45-degree-angle lines. For example, there's a long line running straight up the front of the Elder's robe, and the Summoner's arms kind of have corners in them. (I mean, elbows are supposed to be corners, but this one has a point on each side of the elbow.) Straight lines are easy to draw, but it sometimes looks better if more of the lines are a bit curved.
If you look at the Elvish Shaman, you'll see that her staff actually curves a bit at the top, and her arms are resting at her sides rather than sticking out. She also has straight lines, like a diagonal one along her ear and more diagonal ones (at a different angle) where her skirt splits open, but you'll want to think about whether straight lines make sense in any given situation.
Image
- Your units have simpler clothing than most Wesnoth units. Instead of the red shirt and pants your Summoner is wearing, he could have a shirt, pants, a belt, and a jacket thing, or his shirt might wrap around in the front like those karate outfits... you get the idea. You might also want to pick some part of each unit's clothing to put the team colors on, so that a red-team unit looks different from a blue-team unit, and so on. Most of the pictures I've posted so far have had some bright red on them - the Assassin's headband and shoulder pads; bits in the Elvish Shaman's hair, on her staff, and along the bottom of her skirt; and the Mages (down at the bottom) have red at the tops of their staves and in stripes on their robes. All of that red would be blue if they were on the blue team, green if they were on the green team, and so on.
- I can't really tell which of your units are how tough, because the Darks Shaman looks almost the same as the Elder Dark, and so on. Most Wesnoth units get a few pixels taller and wider each time they level up, and also get more bling and jewelry. For example, here are some mages.
Image->Image->Image->Image
(regular Mage, Red Mage, Arch Mage, Great Mage)

I realize this seems like a lot. You already have two important points of the Wesnoth style right, though: shading (you did shade the units, and they aren't pillowshaded, so that's great), and making the outlines be a darker shade of the base color, rather than being solid black or not being there at all.

There are actually tips and tutorials on the website here. Look up at the very top of the page, and there is a link that says "Create" next to the links that say "Home," "News," "Play," and so on. Here are links to the parts that are probably most useful for you:
https://wiki.wesnoth.org/Create_Art - This one has a lot of links to more specific pages of advice. For advice on units, you'll want to look in the section that says "Sprite Art."
https://wiki.wesnoth.org/Creating_Unit_Art - General guidelines for units.
https://wiki.wesnoth.org/Team_Color_Shifting - Remember when I talked about team colors? This is the directions for how to put them on your units.
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The_Quixotic_King
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by The_Quixotic_King »

That is one of the best brief Wesnoth art tutorials I've seen. you put it nicely Pilauli.
“Truly I was born to be an example of misfortune, and a target at which the arrows of adversary are aimed.” -Donquixote

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thvk
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by thvk »

Thanks for the Great Tutorial Pilauli. With this it is much easier to draw them.

I will post the edited units soon.
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thvk
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by thvk »

So here is the edited Darks Magic:
EOUDarks_Magic.png
EOUDarks_Magic.png (8.91 KiB) Viewed 3962 times
Shadow is comming soon
Pilauli
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by Pilauli »

He looks a lot better, although I think he could still be improved. So I spent a couple of hours playing around with him.

The very first thing I did was change all the black in the image to a very dark gray. (It looks black, but the computer can tell the difference.) This is because pure black is not recommended for sprites, which is because some computer programs treat black and transparency as the same thing, which is obviously not very useful if you want him to have a black outline, black cloak, or whatever. So it's better to use a shade that's very close, but not exactly identical, to black.

The next thing I did was try to shade his staff/glaive. I ended up giving it a really dark outline along the bottom edge, with a paler stripe down the middle, and then another outline (but less dark) along the top.

Then I tried to make the highlights on his body lighter, but that didn't really work because it just made some very pale stripey bits along the edges.
Shaded staff, tried brighter highlights.
Shaded staff, tried brighter highlights.
Darks_Magic_1.png (8.83 KiB) Viewed 3933 times
I decided to go back to the old colors and then draw more highlights in a lighter shade.

I'm drawing the new highlights a little bit more toward the middle of his body. Putting them too close to the middle would be bad, but they shouldn't be at the very edges, either. You know the pictures of shaded spheres that people draw? That's the sort of highlight positioning we should be going for. Here's a picture from Wikipedia for reference. Now, obviously it's not a photo of a real sphere, but it looks like a sphere. (And we don't need to draw real people, just pictures that look like people.) Another thing to keep in mind is that you don't need to use every shade on every part of his body. As a silly example, if he's holding a shield up toward the sun, then his hand that is holding the shield will be in the shield's shadow and not be very bright, especially when you compare it to the hand that he's just waving around in the air. This is why I'm not trying to put the new highlight color on his legs - I think they are in shadow from his torso and cloak.

I'm also going to take the decorations off his chest and put them back later. What are the decorations supposed to be, anyway? I'm pretty sure they aren't pockets, and pretty sure they aren't medals awarded for heroism on the field of battle, but as I said, I'm not sure what they are. They actually make his shirt look blue from a distance.

And I'm going to make a couple of changes to his hands and weapon.
- His glaive's stick would actually look better in this case if it were straight (rather than bending where it goes through his hands) because it looks like maybe it broke in his hand and he's just holding it and hoping nobody notices. Bends look better and more natural than straight lines <i>if</i> they are in the right place, but if there isn't room to put a bend in, it can look worse than a straight line, and I don't think there's room here. (Although I admit that shading the stick reduces the room available for bending with, so the shape looked a lot better before I did that.)
- I'm also going to try to shade his hands. They're pretty small, so I'm just going to add even brighter highlights on them and make the stick darker underneath them, to indicate that they're casting shadows.

After doing that, his hands look super obvious with everything else still dark, so I'll make the stick and his arms lighter-colored so they hopefully match his hands better. Now I've got something like this:
Changed a lot of stuff.
Changed a lot of stuff.
Darks_Magic_2.png (9.16 KiB) Viewed 3933 times
His belt is very brightly-colored, and it keeps distracting my eyes, so I'm going to find some more shades of magenta and make it a little bit darker. (By the way, I really like how you drew the belt. The lump where it fastens is a great example of being able to make people see things without drawing every tiny detail.)
And now I'm going to see if I can make his face look clearer, because I keep thinking he has yellow skin (his cloak fastener) and a gray mask. Actually, first I'm going to make his face a little bit bigger (comparing to the Spearman shows that his head is still not too big.)
So then I'm going to draw just a smooth round face-colored thing sticking out of his hood. Then I'm going to add eyes.
... Are purple eyes important? Because I can't get the purple to show up very well, so it would really be easier to just give him generic dark eyes.
Okay, I'll do the eyes like dark lines, and they mostly look like eyes, and then I'll put a little bit of a paler dot in the middle to show that he's got a nose. Faces are hard.

And I'll add more contrast to his cloak, and try to shade his shoes with a little bit of lighter gray. (The shade of gray I chose was too dark, so you can't tell I did anything at all to his shoes, so that was kind of pointless. But it doesn't matter enough for me to change it back, either.)
Face, cloak, details.
Face, cloak, details.
Darks_Magic_3.png (9.38 KiB) Viewed 3933 times
Oh, almost forgot to give him a shadow! And I'd better put the blue back on his chest, too.
Shadow and blue things
Shadow and blue things
Darks_Magic_4.png (6.05 KiB) Viewed 3933 times
So that's my attempt at making him more Wesnoth-y. If I compare him to a Spearman, he still doesn't quite match, but I'd say he's come pretty far.
ImageImageImageImageImage

Hmm... his legs are skinnier, which might be a trait of the Darks in general. I think I made his shadow a little bit too big. And the cloak actually makes it harder to tell where his arms and legs are, which is annoying because it's a nice cloak and it would be a shame to take it away from him.

You can use my version if you want (it is, after all, based on your drawing), and you're totally welcome to copy and modify it. I hope some of this helps!
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thvk
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by thvk »

Thank you for the really nice edit. You are right they have skinnier legs, they are using magic the whole time to improve their fighting skills so the legs arent used.

Just some changes:
Darks_Magic_1.png
Darks_Magic_1.png (5.47 KiB) Viewed 3926 times
- purple color for the eyes
- darker shading for the cloak(too hard outline)
Darks_Magic_2.png
Darks_Magic_2.png (5.66 KiB) Viewed 3875 times
- removed the blue things
- better shading for the clothes
- increased length of staff
Last edited by thvk on September 5th, 2020, 7:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
Campaigns Im working at:
- The Return of the Darks[ unfinished ]

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. : ) - Isaac Asimov
Pilauli
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by Pilauli »

Nice!
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thvk
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by thvk »

Here is the edit for the Darker:
Darker_2.png
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Last edited by thvk on September 8th, 2020, 9:14 am, edited 2 times in total.
Pilauli
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by Pilauli »

I see a couple of small details changed. The crown is a good idea, because it's an easy-to-see marker that says "important guy here".

Hmm... the magic crystal looks interesting. I think I'm going to try to animate it.

Edit: Okay, here's what I've got. It's supposed to be spinning, but that isn't quite as clear as I'd like. It's definitely doing something, though. :D
(If you want to use it, the frames are in the zip file.)
Darks-Crystal-anim.gif
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Attachments
magic-crystal-float.zip
(6.75 KiB) Downloaded 296 times
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thvk
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Re: Art for the Return of the Darks

Post by thvk »

That a nice animation and i will use it. Thanks.
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