...Hi everyone! =D

So... I'm in college studying art, hoping to break into the art field for a career someday, and in my spare time I like to do a little art. One could call it an obsession.
I adore 2D game art- I've tried a handful of times to make myself a game using my sprites, but unfortunately I don't have the attention span to learn coding. One of these days I will...! And hopefully, by then, someone far, far better than me at technology will have created a program that will make a game for me if I type in all the things I want the objects to do when you press specific buttons.

But anywho! I've been on a total kick makin' sprites lately. I don't know why- it might be because I've run out of money for tactile art supplies and now I'm restricted to computer art, and sprites are such nifty little things. <3 I'd love to hear thoughts/criticisms/whathaveyou on these! I'm actually fairly proud of them- just five months ago my sprites were cringingly bad, and even the ones from last month lack the detail and the... well, the spark of these new ones. Still, I'm developing; I can already see a thousand ways to make these better. =P
At some point, maybe when I'm a little better (especially at animating, which I'm still working on!) I'd love to work on a game with one of the indie companies on here... I dunno if my skill level is close to it, though. (That, and helpful pointers/criticism, are why I'm posting these here! <3)

These are my Steampunk character Pidgin; she is the character I dress up as when me an' my friends are rocking modified Victorian wear at conventions. Not that we're nerds or anything:
Platformer style; screwed up the animation so I'm reworking it:
http://img847.images...pidgincopy.png/

RPG-style overworld... There are so many things off with these! But I've only done one other overworld ever, and it turned out horrible, so I'm not completely disgusted by this one... still, I'd like it to have a little more to it. =/
http://img849.images...pidginback.png/
http://img11.imagesh...noverworld.png/
http://img854.images...ldlefstept.png/
http://img96.imagesh...ldrightste.png/
(Y'all don't need to see every frame of her walking animations. xD)

RPG-style ports... I'm actually happy with these. ^___^ In previous, shoddier ports, I tried a little too hard to copy anime-style, which isn't really my groove. I wasn't sure how my own style would look- but it's nice!
http://img59.imagesh...pidginport.png/
http://img10.imagesh...nportangry.png/
http://img859.images...ginportcry.png/

Random Victorian-dressed lady in an old-school Sega-ish style Platformer sprite... This one is one of my older ones, but I liked the shading. And the animation I managed with her sprite came out okay.
http://img830.images.../i/splady2.png/

Aaaaand monsters. I love monsters. Ever since I was a little kid with her Pokemon games, I never sensed the justice in a world where some people can be garbage men and some people can be monster designers. There are flaws aplenty with the sphinx, but I love my little Crypthound. <<33 And the wyvern is fun, too.
http://img860.images...gravehound.png/
http://img217.images.../monsterou.png/
http://img135.images...s/i/sphinx.png/

Thoughts? Ideas? Radical political conspiracy theories? I'm open to all forms of feedback. =D

Wow, most of that's pretty decent! Colours, shading, etc. If I have one real negative comment, it might be worth taking into account perspective and figuring out how the figure is composed as a rough sketch first before trying to draw it - most of these look like they were either drawn from stock reference or no reference. I have little to no doubt your spriting skills are fine, but the way the character is laid out within the space needs a bit more thought.

Thank you! =D

I do compose them as rough sketches before starting the pixelin' process, though I don't use reference images, as I know I ought to. ^^() I see what you mean, though- it's what threw me off, especially, with my Sphinx sprite, and it's what's making my character's platformer sprite so hard to animate. Personally, the composition of my dog-monster looks fine to me (do y'all disagree? This isn't me being defensive, it's me trying to parcel out what I need to work on. xD), but I feel like the wyvern's also needs tweaking... maybe I'll be able to figure out all the little flaws if I step back for a day or two. ^^()

But thank you so much for your input! I need to put more effort into the sketches/drafts before I resize 'em to sprite over them; that ought to help with perspective issues. =)

Yeah. If you can get the animation right first and believable using stick figures or something that gives you a solid foundation to work on.

Worked through an animation using that advice... I'm afraid animating sprites is yet my Achille's Heel, though. >= (Not to mention, uploading it seems to have sacrificed my control over the speed of the animation... it's slower and better looking on my computer. >__>)

Aaaand lazy as I am, I'm also hoping that if I keep practicing, it'll take me less time/effort to do a fairly simple animation... heh, one can hope. =P As always, any/all advice is appreciated. =D

pretty good work. the arm of your animated dragon gets oddly skinny in the last animation frame. I kind of feel you are a little scared of using real contrast, making the characters a little flat. also try adding shadows, it's not even so important to have them really accurate, just darken what you think will not have direct light and certainly add shadow to the floor. I used to do a lot of pixeling, but usually on an even smaller scale. I believe it might be more sensible to draw with pen/paper then scan and color if you want to have larger images. at least thats what I would try. nowadays I really only use 3d as it seems a lot more time efficient.

^Thanks for pointing out the arm- didn't notice that, but you're right! I'll fix it... later, but I will fix it. ^^()

I see what you mean about using more contrast, too... I'll keep it in mind. =)
When I was first learning to sprite a few months back, I used to scan in sketches and pixel over them... unfortunately, since moving for uni, I had to leave my scanner at home. I have a tablet, fortunately, with which I can make quick sketches at a normal scale then shrink 'em and pixel over- but it's not the same. Still, it's much better off than if I was just using my laptop touchpad and nothing else.

Been working on my animations a little bit, and making some progress, but not much. Also trying art on a smaller scale (monster designs are fun! =D):

I agree, most of this work is excellent. Your shading technique in particular is outstanding. One thing that I noticed is that all your designs seem extremely "clean". That dragon has absolutely no blemishes, markings, scars, dirt, or anything like that. Makes him look slightly less menacing IMO. Maybe its just me though, I have no idea. Taking a look at one of our enemy sprites in our game, I guess its pretty clean too. Maybe I'm just so used to seeing this?




Here's a sprite of my own that I've been working on. The image contains the multiple draft versions from left to right. I had some help from a very experienced friend (he did the jump from the first draft to the second) so I can't claim complete credit though.



Notice the chest in particularly, how it was made "scruffy" and kind of roughed up. That's what I mean when I said maybe you should take a look at making your sprites less "clean".


As for animation, good luck there. I don't think I'm anywhere near ready for that yet. Here's a set of animation frames from our game. Maybe you can use these as a guide in constructing your own animations? These are the walking animations. We have running animations as well.






Keep up the good work! You definitely have talent and plenty of room left to grow.

Roots- Thank you! I'm flattered to get compliments from a developer I admire (love the progress on HoA; you guys are doing so well. o_o!)

I agree about adding scars/blemishes... the spider example is a good one, too, 'cause the one on the left DOES look almost too cute to be an enemy. And I did some editing to my latest hyena sprite (cute guy I posted last) to make him a little scruffier; I'll experiment with adding scars and stronger markings to him, too.

The animations you posted are actually pretty helpful- answered at least one question that was bothering me, but that I couldn't quite put into words.

Aww, thanks! Yeah, we sort of have a unique case with our game because all of our enemy sprites are static, but have four variations that indicate increasing damage. For the spider I shared, the frame on the left is at 100% health, while the frame on the right is at 1% health. When its put in the game, we actually blend between two different frames so that the damage appears gradually as the enemy gets weaker and weaker. It works really well, just as long as you don't make any drastic changes in appearance (ie, an arm or something falls off to the ground). Thus our enemy's "scars" occur naturally over time.


Also for the sprite animations, here's the order in which each frame is used in the animation loop (where 1 represents the left-most frame).

{2, 3, 4, 2, 5, 6}

Frame #1 is our stationary/still frame. So when these characters are moving around on the map, they stay at frame #1 until they start moving, and then their frames are updated in that looped sequence. Frame #2 is sort of a "neutral" position in the stride, where both legs are together.