I'm going to site a particular moment from the AGS forums for you. Because it was an important moment for me where it fully clicked, when it comes to sprites, images, resolution, and some of the other terminology that makes sense of images we use in digital art.
My previous draft (as recorded in this post) for creating my own pixel art avatar gif was thus
Unfortunately
"I think the palette is okay. But if I were to be really literal here, this is NOT pixel art. You are using merging gradients and soft brushes, both of which are not used in traditional pixel art. See also here: http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299"
By god this is better criticism then I could have hoped for. I say that in all sincerity, I'm a newbie --sure I know the kind of results I want to end up at-- but I have no idea of how to get there. I had seen some examples of this dithering thing that's used for shading, but once that got a little complex went right back to what I know. Using a crap ton of gradients. This soft transition from one shade to the next almost makes the use of pixels invisible. Which entirely misses the point of pixel art, high amount of control and focus on the pixel as the tool, and as a visible tool used in the art. I seriously encourage anyone whose looking into making games and especially people who want to do art for their games to give this a serious read.
So along with a great amount of insight from that article on how do do this art and such, note the valuable examples of styles of dithering, the commentary on anti-aliasing, jaggies, and --one of my personal favorite technique errors-- pillow shading. Also understanding the difference and --more importantly-- proper use of hue, saturation, and luminosity. In all honesty I had kind of forgotten the difference between hue and saturation.. mostly just because I forgot what hue was, saturation is pretty self evident. I had basically just dragged the mouse around on the color finder until it was slightly darker or lighter. I feel stupid about getting them confused. I mean, I've learnt this, this. No point in focusing on the negative. So what to do. Well I'm going to change the color scheme ^^. The issue I was having from the get go was trying to get the exact right amount of red or yellow in the skin tones. And, while with more time it might be possible for me to get this to the realistic(ish) style I was aiming for, diving into full color scale is me diverging from my original goal. I wanted to practice dithering and shading, I wanted to achieve a level of believably with a strong pixel art approach. I wasn't going for photo-realism, I wanted a believable rendering, but believable and photo-realistic are two entirely separate beasts. So to focus on learning dithering I'm going to cut it back to a bichromatic palette.
That's the plan, I'm going to get to work. Good night everyone and good luck with your projects.
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