artisticdude's Art

[artisticdude]

I hate to sound as if I'm stealing all your stuff but I might make these the heroes in my rpg type campaign along with their pet.

Sure thing. I made 'em to be used.

[artisticdude]

Oh, the ambition...

Obviously, this is still a WIP. But I like to think it shows potential. If/when I finish it, it will be my single largest work of pixel art to date.

[beetlenaut]

Is there any particular reason you are making this pixel art instead of shading with a brush like normal people?

[artisticdude]

Is there any particular reason you are making this pixel art instead of shading with a brush like normal people?

...Because I'm not a normal person?

Actually, I'm doing a brush version too. But I went off on a pixel-art tangent somewhere along the way. I thought it would be a fun challenge to try a large-scale pixel project.

[artisticdude]

Progress. Actually, this large-scale stuff is kind of fun. And, oddly enough, it doesn't really seem like that much more work than creating a sprite. Probably because larger pieces are a lot more forgiving than sprites, where every pixel has a large impact on the shape of the object.

[homunculus]

you seem to be changing the shape of the head a lot, and it seems to be turning into a zombie face.

you might want to try increasing contrast and brightness on the brush version, and converting to indexed, or converting to same palette as the pixel version, to see where the differences are.

[artisticdude]

Further progress. I'm actually quite enjoying myself with this piece.

you seem to be changing the shape of the head a lot, and it seems to be turning into a zombie face.

you might want to try increasing contrast and brightness on the brush version, and converting to indexed, or converting to same palette as the pixel version, to see where the differences are.

Hm, I see what you're getting at. I'll probably wait until I finish the pixel version to finish/fix up the brush version. Thanks for the comments.

[Blarumyrran]

If you're making something like a realistic large face, you may often have to redraw large regions entirely (because changing the shape of the nose slightly also changes the shadow cast by the nose, and the way the skin stretches around the nose, and the shadow cast by the skin around the nose, etc), and then all the pixel-level optimizations (that pixel-art is about) that you had previously constructed in that area, are lost because they are very sensitive even to the slightest changes. So making something like this in pixel-art can turn painful.

Some thoughts:
* looks nice
* the line between the neck and the head looks weird
* the mouth is disturbing/asymmetric
* you separate the eye-whites from the skin very strongly; you may be tempted to do this when you look at photo reference, but unlike photo reference that face's skin (like most pixel-art skins) is very monotonous so the eyes stand out in an eerie way! I think it's often okay to paint eye-whites in the exact same colour as the skin.
* keep an eye out for possible horizontal/vertical/45-degree-diagonal lines to abuse; if something is close to one of those, make it exactly one of those; stylizations like that is exactly what pixel-art is about; if you don't do such tricks, the same result would be much easier to achieve by just digitally painting the face and indexing it

[artisticdude]

Thanks a lot Blarumyrran, your advice is very helpful and much appreciated.

EDIT: The hair is coming along very, very, very slowly, but I'm making progress. The eyes still need some touching-up, and the lips are crap that will be redone.

Hair. Sooooo much anti-aliasing, and soooo many narrow escapes from banding.

[SFault]

Shouldn't the mouth be aligned with the same perspective as the eyes?

[artisticdude]

Based on my (admittedly less-than-perfect) knowledge of facial anatomy & perspective, yes. Perhaps this fixes it? I raised her left (our right) eye a pixel or two, which should hopefully bring the eyeline closer to parallel with the line of the mouth.

Also, more work on the hair.

[homunculus]

That starts to look good, just one thing that I am puzzled about: compared to the brush version, the jaw line has changed from curved outward to curved inward.

[artisticdude]

That's an after-effect of both changing the angle of the jaw from the original angle in the reference I used, and altering the shading of the neck/jawline area multiple times. I do want a square(r) jawline, in keeping with the reference, but you're right that as it currently stands, the curve of the jaw isn't quite anatomically correct (generally speaking, that is). Should be an easy fix, though.

[artisticdude]

Well, I haven't touched the jawline yet, but I've addressed a number of other issues, and I've done a lot more work on the hair.

[Zerovirus]

Move the lips one pixel to the left. I won't post the image here, but I did try it and I think it helps a bit.