Need help with sprite

[Action Kasper 1]

despite the fact that he walks like pedobear, i'm actually pretty proud of my sprite. the only thing i hate about it is the face. what should i do to make it look less derpy? i drew this in adobe illustrator over a frankensprite of thief03, with prisoner01's head. the rtp sprites don't have faces, and i'm getting pretty frustrated with this.

 

 

edit: here's a closeup of the face. i'm really having trouble getting the 'down' sprite to look good.

Edited April 6, 2012 by Action Kasper

[Jon Bon 43]

I think the problem is you have too much detail on the face when it's close up, and it gets distorted when shrunk. If you are making a rtp sprite size, so like 32x48 then you really only get like 30-50 pixels for the face, a good 1/3 of those are for shading around the checks, face sides, hair etc, and then you get like 6 pixels per eye. You have that many pixels to gain detail from, your face has way too much detail to be shrunk down that small. That awesome triangle nose, will likely be 1-3 pixels max.

 

What you need to do is use your sweet colored big drawing and redraw it in a smaller version, keeping in mind you can not keep all the detail. The reason his face looks all 'derp' is because it's all blury because of the shrinking process. You can definitely use that technique to make the sprite, but you have to zoom in and manually fix the pixels afterwards. Also when shrinking you will notice that the sides become semi transparent, this also makes a character blurry, and tends to make them to blend into the background. Characters should generally have solid, dark outer lines to clearly separate them from the word they are in.

 

I touched up frame 1 of your sprite for you to help give you a better idea what you need to do once you have shrunken something to make it look better. Use it as a basis for comparison, hope that helps.

[Action Kasper 1]

i'm just trying to get rid of the "durr hurr i smile all the time even when i'm being attacked by dinosaurs" look. i really just need to get someone to draw the sprites for me, then redraw them myself. i suck at spriting. the big glowy eyes are just all wrong too, they wouldn't match anything else graphically.

Edited April 9, 2012 by Action Kasper

[Jon Bon 43]

Agreed I didn't like the eyes either, but I was stomach full, teeth floating, and tired as a mule last night before bed when I did that. Brought back into GIMP and just shaved the top off. Take a look.

 

EDIT: Are you drawing the originals yourself?

[Action Kasper 1]

kind of. this sprite came from a frankensprite of thief03 and prisoner01. i put one's head on the other's body since i wanted the thief to take his hood off. then i put them into adobe illustrator, so they can match everything else i'm drawing for my game. everything else i've drawn have just been static objects like tilesets and battlers. i think the biggest issue is with the perspective, all the rtp sprites lean a little forward, and this one i drew is facing head on. i want the whole project to be graphically tied together, even if the writing is noticeably different at the beginning and end. i tend to write the best only in certain moods, so it's easy to see where i'm feeling differently about things.

 

examples:

 

and

 

[Jon Bon 43]

That's awesome, yeah if you are at that point, you are literally only a few months behind where I am, skill wise. I really suggest attempting the sprite, perspective is my bane too. The trick I use is I always keep the original for comparison as I create, and I have to zoom in and out TONS, that's the real key, what looks good/bad zoomed in, doesn't always look good/bad zoomed out. When in doubt, I always use others works as comparison. If I don't know how to draw something, I find a drawn example, and see how they did it then try it myself, or I look at a real world example and try to emulate, the angles, lines, shading etc. You are really close to being able to make pixel stuff, I suggest taking a look at the one I edited, zoomed in, and compare it to the unedited one. I made very minor changes on purpose so you could see the difference. 10 shades difference on the edges, is about the only change I made. As far as perspective goes, shading, and contrast are your best friends. Darker edges make things look like the middle which is lighter, stands out or is 3D, shading. When you have a dark color next to a light color, it make it appear to have solid lines around it but it doesn't, like the mouth I did above, only has a black line on the bottom, but appears to be lines on top, contrast.

 

Keep 'frankenspriting' and smoothing edges out like in my example. In a month or so you will feel confident to draw and edit pieces on your own.

[Action Kasper 1]

i think what i really need is some shading on the face, and to make the "head" shape a little shorter, and make the hair a little bigger, that way i can pull off the 'hair covering face' look, and it wouldn't look as bad. i need to change the perspective from straight on, to, upper middle part of the forehead.

[Jon Bon 43]

i think what i really need is some shading on the face, and to make the "head" shape a little shorter, and make the hair a little bigger, that way i can pull off the 'hair covering face' look, and it wouldn't look as bad. i need to change the perspective from straight on, to, upper middle part of the forehead.

 

Agreed, I was thinking too, that maybe just having the light part of the hair higher up might make a huge difference too. If you edit it and keep posting here, I'll be more than happy to give as much help as I can.

[SpriteZilla 1]

Personally i think sprites look better drawn in MsPaint or another similar program. The reason being that they have that old school retro look to them which I like. Here are some I plan to use in my game all made by yours truly.

 

http://gyazo.com/647d9b10608760da4fbf3d4619834b83