/vr/ - Retro Games

practice practice practice

>>5892325
dont use a mouse to draw it will look like shit

>>5892325
if a pixel looks better over there instead of over here, place pixel over there

>>5892345
What should I use?

>>5892351
Draw on paper and take a picture. Then shrink the image to a low resolution. Mouse is good for coloring.

>>5892325
You don't. "pixel art" is garbage done by no-skill hipsters. It's not supposed to look like sprites from a well done old game.

>>5892373
Excellent advice. That's a surefire way to get your stuff to look like pixel shit.

Seriously 0n stop posting your shit here, no one cares.

>>5892325
I saw pic first and immediately thought of STrider before I read your sentence. Maybe try to make it sound out more from the source?

>>5892325
>that six pack
>that lack of shading
>that orangutan length arm
keep at it OP, right now it's lacking depth.

>>5892325
Don't do what Capcom did by using comic book artists to create animated sprite work.

>>5893487

>>5892345
Don't listen to this idiot. A mouse is perfectly suitable, you just need to learn fundamentals like anatomy, shading, and perspective.
Look to the first reply of this thread

>>5892325
What kind of goofball runs around with a big 申 on his chest?

You have a long way to go as far as shading is concerned. You have at least four colors for skin tone, but the fore arm only uses 2 of them, similarly the pants only have 2 colors while the shirt and facemask have at least 4 that I can see. Boots and bracers at least seem consistent. The cape is a tragedy with that outline.

>>5892325
Practice art with a regular medium first. You can’t get good at pixel art without a good foundation in the fundamentals. If you’re just messing around, then just draw as much as possible and look at games with reputably good 2D art (arcade and ps1 games usually) for inspiration.

>>5893494
Oof that's a blunder and a half

>>5893367
Who?

>>5893374
Thank you. I plan on doing exactly that. This was really just practice.

>>5893396
Thank you, haha. I will keep at it.

>>5893901
Lmao, it is one of the few characters that can be flipped. This is for a game.

Limit yourself to a color pallet and choose your pixels carefully. I myself am a big fan of the Blake Stone colors.

>>5894017
Thank you. You got a discord?

What retro game is this for, again?

>>5894041
shorty1k
#0688

>>5892325
Travel back to 2002 and make a sprite comic.

>>5894184
Nice, sent request. JoeMushashi1989.

>>5894017
>>5894184
You actually put those in games or just make them for funsies?

>>5892325
https://mega.nz/#F!H1kgGIDT!W53xR4GSjaEImDSz2DeB3Q
http://www.mediafire.com/file/93ka9a4x6grdlvt/pxl.rar/file

>>5894208
I made them for my Doom wads

>>5894214
>weebshit

>>5894221
noice

reposting from /ic/ just in case:
>proportions are actually okay for the most part
>chest is a shapeless blob
>cape is stiff and doesn't look like cloth at all
>lack of consistency, some parts have outlines but others don't?
overall it needs a lot of work but you're definitely on the right track. i suggest you take a look at sprites from games like street fighter and mark of the wolves since you seem to be going for a similar style to them. pixel art is just a medium so you can grind your fundies like perspective and anatomy any way you want to as long as you're making sure you do it consciously. honestly if i were you i'd join a discord server or a forum with people who know what they're talking about so you can get a constant stream of advice and criticism to improve with
>>5892345
most people use either mice or tablets, just pick whatever you feel comfortable with
>>5892373
that's actually a good technique but it's not going to be of much use in OP's case
>>5893906
wrong. the fundamentals are what's in your brain and have nothing to do with the medium you're working with. just because some people have some warped idea that pixel art is dumbed down doesn't mean it's true

>>5892325
Back in the early days of NES emulation I honed my pixel art/sprite editing skills by editing on-screen NES graphics directly inside Nesticle using its Pattern Table feature. Nowadays you'd be lucky if you even get one of those old DOS emus to run, so your best bet is to study the classics and see what worked and what didn't. There's a fine art to making things look square pixels look smooth, and your sprite here commits several cardinal sins. Study, study, study and practice, practice, practice.

Pic related is a Mega Man sprite I drew a few weeks ago. I started off drawing him from memory, but as much MM as I've played in my lifetime I still had to use the original sprite as a reference. And that's really all it comes down to. If you get to a point where you understand what works and why and you can edit existing sprites into something new, then you're all set to be making original work from scratch.

>>5894472
>weebshit
On a retro video game board, oh noes!

>>5893906
>Practice art with a regular medium first. You can’t get good at pixel art without a good foundation in the fundamentals.
There are sprite artists who can't draw squat with a pencil and paper. It's completely different when you're drawing pixel by pixel instead of in continuous lines.

>>5896334
>that pillowshading and highlights
bruh where the heck is your light source coming from
>>5896752
almost no one draws pixel-by-pixel unless it's something really small, but you're mostly right about the rest. pixel art can actually feel closer to sculpting than drawing traditionally depending on how you do it

>>5896886
>pillowshading
I don’t know what this means. You mean the shading looks soft? Capcom overshaded him in MM7 and MM8 too.
>lightsource
I don’t know, it’s a sprite. Tell me where the light source is on Sonic’s sprite in the Genesis Sonic games.

>>5898261
Pillowshading is a type of shading.

Sonic's light source is coming from the top right, notice how any surface facing that direction is lighter, and surfaces in the opposite direction are darker.

>>5898261
Holy shit holy shit holy shit

>>5898323
I wasn’t familiar with the term, but after reading about it I can see how I’ve done it in the past. What I don’t understand is why it’s treated as a cardinal sin of pixel art when it’s seemingly just a uniformly lit character. I mean, I could drop s

>>5898323 #
I wasn’t familiar with the term, but after reading about it I can see how I’ve done it in the past. What I don’t understand is why it’s treated as a cardinal sin of pixel art when it’s seemingly just a uniformly lit character. I mean, I could drop a 3d model into a room with multiple light sources and there could be evenly distributed shading on all sides. Cartoons get away with not having a light source coming from one angle all the time.
>>5898371
Imagine working really hard on something and feeling proud of yourself only for someone else to go “holy shit holy shit holy shit” at your ignorance. Please draw something better yourself or shut up.

>>5898568
People aren't telling you it's a sin, they're suggesting ways to get better.

Though by your reactions, they'd probably be better served just telling you to fuck off.

>>5898579
Can you elaborate on these reactions of mine? Because I am definitely curious as to how anything I said there would justify telling me to fuck off. Not the part where I asked how pillowshading was different from uniform lighting (because I’m actually trying to learn something here). And not the part where I told the guy who have me a troll response to shut up. So what?

>>5898579
>People
One person. The other one just said holy shit. So I googled and read about it (as mentioned before) and gathered that pixel artists see it as a cardinal sin. At no point did I attribute that term to anyone here, and by anyone I mean the one person who actually gave me a helpful response.

>>5898605
>>lightsource
>I don’t know, it’s a sprite. Tell me where the light source is on Sonic’s sprite in the Genesis Sonic games.

Things like this. Do you really need to be told where the light source is? Or are you claiming there is none? And lines like
>Cartoons get away with not having a light source coming from one angle all the time.
just go to show that you're not paying attention to where shading is coming from when watching animation. Like it's something you don't have to deal with, when you've already tried to include it in your sprite, and did it in a bad way.

Reacting this way is telling people that you don't want to learn and that you don't want real advice. Thus, people are better served making fun of you and/or telling you to fuck off.

And this still isn't retro. 0/10. kill ur slef.

>>5898634
>Reacting this way is telling people that you don't want to learn and that you don't want real advice
No, it should tell you that I still don’t understand that. Imagine that, being human and not fully comprehending something!

>Do you really need to be told where the light source is? Or are you claiming there is none?
It was a serious question because there are some Sonic games where I don’t know that there is a single solitary light source. I’m only going off my own memory, mind, but when I think of Sonic and Knuckles’ sprites in their titular Genesis title I think of soft shading all around. They wanted to give the sprites a more 3D look and putting too much shading to one side would have had the opposite effect. And if that doesn’t make sense, it only goes to show that I still don’t understand the problem, not that I’m denying there is one. You seem to be reading more into the motivation behind my words than is actually there.

>just go to show that you're not paying attention to where shading is coming from when watching animation.
I’m not talking about anime. I’m talking about run of the mill western animation. If pillow shading is what I understand it to be—merely shading all the edges—I absolutely have seen that in cartoons. If you want to read that as an excuse, fine, but I’m the one TELLING YOU that I’m trying to learn something here.

>>5898647
Your art looks like shit. You need to practice, not shitpost on the internet or you'll never get good.

>>5898648
Jesus. Who am I even talking to anymore, >>5898323 or the troll that posted after him? All I did was what anyone would do when confronted with a criticism they hadn’t heard before and didn’t full understand it—I tried to understand it. If all you’re going to do is say my art looks like shit you’re not helping.

>>5898654
go back and read the first reply to the OP

You want a detailed critique of the issues? That was back here:
>>5893901

This thread's been up quite a while, let's see what you've done to try and improve.

>>5898658
As far as I know, I don't have any of the OP's problems, but you tell me. I mean, I'm not the most confident artist in the world, but I wouldn't have dared critique him if I didn't think I was at least a little more experienced.

I didn't want to have to post any of my other original sprites because most of them are even cartoonier than that Mega Man and the OP asked how he could improve at drawing a Strider like character. But here are some sprites of the New Age Retro Hippie from EarthBound.

>>5898673

>>5898675

>>5898676
A Mother 2/3 style enemy.

OC for the thread

>>5892325
You should get this. I highly recommend it. It's what I use now. https://gumroad.com/l/pixel-logic

>>5898679
And an unfinished sprite sheet for a fangame. That's all I can find for now, everything else is probably on another computer.

>>5898647
anon...i'm sorry, but pillowshading, the kind you used on your mega man sprite makes things look FLAT, not three dimensional like you're claiming it is. "pillowshading" can hardly even be called shading in the first place since it doesn't follow a light source. sprites like >>5898673 and >>5898679 do have a light source so i'm just assuming you haven't taken the time to look at examples of pillowshading and hence can't understand why it looks bad (and why it's not actually a thing in any cartoon, or at least shouldn't be)

>>5892325
Like with any art form you need to study and reproduce the classics for at least 10000 hours before you begin making original work. I recommend studying some classic 90s scotformers.

>>5899060
Well, there's no denying that the bottom picture looks better, and if I were the one drawing that fairy that's the style of shading I would go for. I mean, I usually do try to think of where the light is coming from. I guess what I'm still struggling with is why the above picture is *incorrect*. Because it seems to me that if there's a large light source or multiple light sources, that shadows wouldn't necessarily be cast to one side or the other.

Let's take the fairy's arms for example, since there's no way to justify separating her face into individually shaded portions (that looks horrifying). What that tutorial seems to be saying is that in nature objects are never lit at the center and shaded at the edges (as her arm is there). You're right that it would be wrong to animate an entire cartoon with the characters looking that way, but to call it a misunderstanding of how light works seems to me to be an exaggeration. I've seen too many drawings that were shaded that way to think otherwise.

So can nothing really be lit that way *ever*? Is this some art class 101 shit that I somehow went 30+ years not knowing? Go on and humble me if so, Anon, because I really need to know.

>>5899094
Here's the Sonic sprite I was thinking of, by the way. There is a lot of that lighter-in-the-center-shaded-at-the-border going on here, though now I do see how there's some dark blue on his back spines that prevent the sprite from looking completely that way.

>>5892325
Go the DKC route and cheat by making all the sprites prerendered 3D models. Then you never have to learn how to draw.