Besesoth posted:

I didn't mean to say not to go for style or flashy poses! Just that if he's going to have the shield he might as well use it. The sprite you posted looks good for that purpose, although I might have him pull it back when he's doing the flashy little low cut, so he's not moving his arm through or over the shield to do it.

An alternative, of course, is just to not give him a shield at all, which I see you've done in another pose. In that one - with the sheath - make sure that the sword goes into the sheath tip-first and comes out tip-last, but otherwise it looks good to me.

systran posted:

digging gene wolfe's heads of cerberus

Chipp Zanuff posted:

I don't understand the palette though, it seems a bit too complex for me to understand. How do you get those colours to work together?

_jink posted:

generic space marine is out of place amid those other rad designs

Chipp Zanuff posted:

Red Mike posted:

Took your image as a background and drew a stickman sketch on top. The shoulders are good, but coupled with the hip it reads completely wrong. The chest/back looks like it has mostly the right arch, but it's still quite a bit too turned towards the camera. Now, the left-side shoulder is odd, in that it's slightly too long/to the left. The shoulder itself should start just a bit more to the right, along with the rest of the arm.



I drew a few guide lines for the arms. Keep in mind the left-side arm is supposed to be nearer the camera, and note that they're the same size, if not the front-side arm is even slightly shorter. If you've been trying to use the hip as a reference, this'll be solved once you fix the hip issue.

Thigh size is fine, but the direction the legs are going is...hard to understand. The left-side leg looks okay, except for below the knee where it looks like it's one pixel to the right for some odd reason. The right-side leg is good, but it looks off because of how the hip is placed. Left-side foot looks good, but the right-side foot seems pointed in a different direction from where the leg is.

I took the liberty of adjusting the basic design, starting with a stick sketch like before.



Note the position of the hip now lifting the leg a bit higher, the arm now starts slightly inside the shoulder, and the position of the arm is the same for both sides, and aligns with the hips directly. I also moved the head a bit to the right since it felt off to me. Now, I'll fill in the stick figure with what should be the actual layout. I'll use one colour per body part, and only show the outline, so you can see how the other side should look.



You're probably going to have to zoom in to actually tell what's going on. You should intuit that the stance looks better in the lower area now, and the fact that the right side arm shows up a bit at the top right near the shoulder gives a much better idea of it being behind. I also drew a couple of guide lines on the chest to make it clear how far right the body is facing. The only problem still left is the actual stance (which I didn't change), which leads to a bit of a...rooster like position, where the chest is thrown in front to the point where he's actually leaning back. Lean him slightly further, which should also let you peek the right side shoulder properly.

A more complicated bit of advice is the pick a motion or line you want your drawing to follow. In my sketch, I lined up with right side leg with the chest so that it forms an elongated line, with a twist at the bottom from the lower leg. The other leg then gives a straight backing to that line which 'balances' it against a hypothetical gravity you imagine on the drawing. This sort of thing is what gives poses a feel of strength, and, if applied to animation, a feel of motion.

Hope this helps, and that you can make sense of the (really overloaded) last drawing.

e: Minor disclaimer, I'm still crap at posing and anatomy myself, so don't follow this advice blindly, give it a go and see what you come up with.

Scut posted:

I think you are referring to the 'Bravo' design. I agree that it's generic looking but it's intended to be 'ordinary, line infantry' with no special abilities. The player is going to be dodging them or killing them without severe difficulty. I had a different design for them with a cape and no helmet but it made them feel too 'special'. Maybe I'll revisit the design, this all came about from a game jam originally so I was operating under a time budget that is no longer an issue.

Red Mike posted:

Took your image as a background and drew a stickman sketch on top.

samglover posted:

It's not pixel art, but I've noticed that "fixing" comic book art is becoming a thing on Tumblr, especially for drawings of women. I'm only posting it because the best artists seem to go through a similar process — drawing the skeleton, then a wireframe, and building up the anatomy from the bottom. It might be help Chipp Zanuff get his art out of the awkward poses they seem to be stuck in.

Here are a bunch of examples: http://lesstitsnass.tumblr.com/tagged/redo

Edit: I don't do pixel art; I just hang around and admire the work you all are doing. I sketch a lot, though, and I feel like I learned a ton about drawing bodies from scrolling through those posts.

Chipp Zanuff posted:

Red Mike posted:

The shape on the left version is good, but the details are off. Chest line isn't correct, I drew the guide line on the sketch to show you around where the center of the chest would be. Same thing with the face, in that it's not centered, but it does look as if the head is turned towards the left, so that is fine. The left side arm is still odd, because it starts too far out, and is too thin. It can be a style choice, but right now the chest size and the arm size don't feel right together to me. The hip looks really weird, but mostly because you're splitting the legs very strictly, with no shading or anything. Maybe round it off so the back foot looks rounder somehow if you don't want to shade. Foot position is also off, because they're not flat, and they're pointed in the exact same way. Here's a quick filling out of my earlier sketch, complete with silly face, with your colours, and highlighting of issues. I also highlighted the line I was talking about in the earlier post.



Notice how the back/front leg line is mostly the same, but the feet are making the line figure 'unstable'. You need the feet to be able to balance the rest of the figure without it toppling over. If you want the feet to have the same angle, they need to be flat. If not, one should be flat (and act as a platform), and the other should act as a tip. This isn't a rule as such, but it works fine for most side-facing figure.

Now, the version on the right has the same problems you had initially with the hips/legs. Try drawing one of those line figures like I did, and notice how your figure is completely unbalanced now. Someone standing like that would probably fall backwards. You can't really have a person leaning back like that with knees bent. Either lean it forward, or move one of the legs back to serve as a tip, while the other becomes a platform.

Looking at the middle figure, you'll notice that if you draw a line figure of them, it's pretty stable, mostly because it's both not leaning forward, and doesn't have bent knees. It's good practice, but you need to keep trying to figure out posing before putting time into the drawings. Next time you practice, spend half the time you did before practicing with stick figures instead of a full on drawing, and flesh it out in the rest of the time. You'll probably notice the fleshing out takes less time than you expect, even if the results might initially be worse.

e: oh also the shading on my version on the back leg's knee is completely wrong, since the leg wouldn't be pointing that way, disregard that.

Shoehead posted:

And then I got tired of that and fixed up more stuff from my tilesets

oddium posted:

This is super pedantic and maybe it's not the same everywhere but those road lines are bugging the h*ck out of me. Generally yellow lines seperate traffic in opposing directions where white lines seperate traffic moving in the same direction

oddium posted:

This is super pedantic and maybe it's not the same everywhere but those road lines are bugging the h*ck out of me. Generally yellow lines seperate traffic in opposing directions where white lines seperate traffic moving in the same direction

oddium posted:

This is super pedantic and maybe it's not the same everywhere but those road lines are bugging the h*ck out of me. Generally yellow lines seperate traffic in opposing directions where white lines seperate traffic moving in the same direction

Chipp Zanuff posted:

Promised an update for the medium version, here it is:

Red Mike posted:

Legs are much better, arms look a bit too long to me, but nothing too odd. Good to see you're still steadily improving.

_jink posted:

that's kawaii dogg. Couple things: I don't know if it was intentional, but having the pupil not touching the top or bottom of an eye makes their expression look shocked/stunned(emphasized further by the dark line under the eye). I'd also try bringing the nose back a pixel closer to the head, making the hair shine one unbroken line, and smoothing the transition to the top of the head 1 pixel so the top isn't quite so flat (if that makes any sense).

beyond that you should experiment making the shadows darker/different hues. They're really close to the light values atm and you can go crazy with that poo poo in pixel art. The animation itself is really good!

Chipp Zanuff posted:

Tad frustrated at the moment with the way my work is progressing; I feel it looks vaguely like what i intended (such as the bases looking like actual human beings or at least resembling what could be interpreted as one) but when it comes to the finer detail i struggle.

Travis343 posted:

Chipp Zanuff posted:

The first one is the dude i was working on before i got the advice, but i included him so i could point out my issue; with the smaller details like the breastplate and skirt/kilt thing.

Second is the silihouette, third is a stage i used so i could easily seperate the portions of the body and the last one is the end result.

Chipp Zanuff posted:

Chipp Zanuff posted:

Tad frustrated at the moment with the way my work is progressing; I feel it looks vaguely like what i intended (such as the bases looking like actual human beings or at least resembling what could be interpreted as one) but when it comes to the finer detail i struggle.

This is reinforced when i look at other's works, where i feel they're able to capture what they want in a better way, where as mine looks amateurish (which to be honest it is). I'll confess it's jealousy and envy on my part, i just want my stuff to look good, i've always wanted to make something i'd be genuinely proud off and even though people in this very thread have told me my progression is good and some of my pieces are good, i feel that they could still be done alot better. In that way, im my own worst critic/enemy.

Not able to post an example of what i mean, but i will eventually when i feel it's presentable and a comparison to what i mean.

Travis343 posted:

I'm not a fan of the bigger pupils. Theyre a bit too anime for what I'm going for. Im working on something kind of like this, losing the eye outline and adding an eyebrow, smaller white area with the pupils lowered a bit.



The right image is the original for comparison. A step in the right direction?

Travis343 posted:

The right image is the original for comparison. A step in the right direction?

swamp waste posted:

I know exactly what you mean and I think the problem is that you haven't learned how to look at things. You've improved a lot but you haven't given any indication of being able to look at your unsuccessful attempts next to someone else's successful ones, or at a real human figure, and figure out what you need to change based on the differences. In fact, people in the thread have been doing that for you. It's time to learn how to do it on your own.

Painters learn it by doing master copies. Maybe you should look at a sprite animation you really like and try to copy it without looking at the individual pixels or eyedroppering the colors of the original. Then when you're done, zoom in to the pixel level and see how yours compares.

Chipp Zanuff posted:

I included a previous version for comparison and i tried to simplify the limbs so it would help with their shading.

Chipp Zanuff posted:

This is true. I need to rely more on my own sense of what is right or wrong with my work; to that end i made another edit dealing with some issues i saw.

Red Mike posted:

An important thing here, which is something I used to fall into a lot, is that just because you simplify the drawing itself (a fabric-covered arm doesn't need to have actual folds protruding outward from the arm, at these kinds of scales) you shouldn't be simplifying the 3D volume you're trying to represent. By which I mean, yes, an arm is essentially two cylinders connected by a ball joint, but if you shade it like that, it'll look quite flat. In your image, for example, the front-facing arm is now weirdly rounded, when in reality the shoulder muscle would protrude more, as well as the forearm muscle, making the shading round out there. In that exact example, taking a bit of the shading off as it reaches the muscle, and as the forearm starts near the elbow, would give it more arm-like volume. One case you did apply that great is the hip where you showed that tiny ridge of shading.

Experiment a bit with that and find what looks more realistic to you, but don't be content when you do one version and it feels good, try and alter it until any alteration just makes it feel worse.

Also, regarding your image question mark, I think shading the back part is fine, even if they wouldn't be shaded normally. It's the easiest way to show it's further away. And in this case, my brain does immediately go 'it's further away' rather than 'the shading is wrong there'.

swamp waste posted:

You need to develop that sense first though. That's why I suggested master copies, because you end up with a very clear comparison-- "here's what I did that didn't work" vs "here's what the original did that worked." Now that I think about it making master copies of Fire Emblem sprites sounds kinda ridiculous but if that's what you aspire to, it can't hurt.