Newbie at Spriting :C (needs some tip/help D:)

[SlayeZ]

Soooo...I spent some time spriting a portrait for the first time today...

based off:

The hair looks kinda unnatural :C...Anyway, could anyone assist me in like creating all the required frames to animate this ingame? D: I know its bad but ;-;

P.S:guess the model!

Edited April 22, 2012 by SlayeZ

[Khrene Cleaver]

Alright first things first, check out you colors. I'm sure your familiar with the term palette so I'll call your used colors that. For your character's hair palette, you only have two hair colors. Feel free to use 3, and use that third color to separate hair locks instead of the outline color.

[Sea Lion]

Yea, going along with the colors thing, until you get better only use existing fire emblem colors. Don't use the presets on paint or photoshop

[SlayeZ]

Yay Inserted .-. now for custom animations D;

How do you create/add in custom battle animations/sprites? ;-;

[AstraLunaSol]

You'll probably need more spriting practice before custom animations. Unless you're already good at animation, that is.

To script animations so you can insert it into the rom, you'll need to look at FEditor's docs.

[SlayeZ]

The only other spritework I've ever done was this:

But alright, ill check out the docs! :D

[Khrene Cleaver]

Well next up you need to shade your hair properly, cause its still a really big mess.

1) Use more contrast between the shade in your palette. That way your hair actually has depth

2) The shading is too jagged in there and make it smoooooth.

3) Your want really think strands/locks of hair, but you're lines for your are thick the the bends and thin at the straights. It should be the other way around, check out basically any in game mug, especially FE 8. The when the outline thins out use the next shade up

4) Experiment a bit. You don't always have to use the third shade to make a line between hair locks, especially with hair like this guy's. Just using the first two colors and the third really sparingly may do the job without making it look "pillow-y."

[Lenz]

You're using two colours for your outline: Pure black for the hair and what looks like the darkest shade of skin for the armor's outline. Even if you don't want to use an outline color from an FE game. Try to stick to one color at least.

Also, you're using the outline colour as the third shade for your hair. Oftentimes, this can be good for black hair. But your sprite's hair is more of a blue shade. You may consider something near the darkest shade used in Colm's hair instead.

As for the hair itself. You generally don't want to use the darkest shade for the hair too much, as it tends to stand out quite a bit. At most, keep the darkest shade in 1 pixel lines and use the 2nd darkest shade to define the locks of hair. The lines are bit choppy, so try to practice tapering the shades as well.

His pecs are angled slightly different from the body so you may consider trying to add more cloth under the left shoulderplate (our PoV)

But overall, it's a fair attempt at custom spriting for the first time. Your sketches are quite nice, though.