Blaze's Custom Portraits?

[BlazeKing]

Portraits I made when I had nothing to do, critiques more than welcome

Names (In order): Jayden, Vargas, Selina, Verke, Darke, Varne, Robin, Chrom

Jayden, Vargas, Selina, Verke, Darke and Varne are splices, Robin is a full custom one and Chrom is custom but uses Forde as a base.

[Blue Druid]

The splices look way too much like the originals, and it's hard to see them as different characters. Vargas's shoulders also seem to suffer from pillow-shading. I like your Chrom, but he looks unfinished. The shading on his pauldron is random and he has no anti-aliasing.

Nice profile pic though. XD

Edited April 17, 2016 by Blue Druid

[BlazeKing]

I was a bit lazy when it came to the splices, *might* fix them eventually, gonna fix up Vargas, as for Chrom, really proud of this one so thank you for liking it, I followed his portrait from Awakening as much as I could. Also, why do you feel Chrom is "unfinished" and what's anti-aliasing?

[Topaz Light]

Ahh, nice! Some of these are pretty ambitious, so props for carrying through with a tough idea!

The full custom bits look kinda wonky, though. I'd try to get really comfortable with splicing, and maybe looking up a few full-custom tutorials if you want to get better.

I don't know if you're also do traditional or digital art, but it might also help to do some sketches, scan them (if they're traditionally-drawn), and sorta... sprite over them, I guess? Shrink them down to FE portrait size and convert them from regular drawing to pixel art. I've seen that technique applied for full-custom Pokémon sprites, so I'd imagine it could work in this context, too.

As for specific comments...

Jayden's... sideburn, I guess? If that's the term? looks like it's defying gravity a bit; it should fall straight down to his shoulder and kinda rest in between his pauldron and his neck. Strangely, the minimug doesn't really have this problem.

Vargas' shoulders look really weird... like, the position of the light source doesn't match the rest of the portrait; it looks like it's coming from next to and kinda underneath him. I'd take a look at how bare shoulders are generally shaded in FE portraits and try to use that as a point of reference. Also, the shades you used for his hair are a little too close to each other; try broadening the gap between the main shade and the next shade down.

Selina's custom(?) hair bit is kinda neat, but it doesn't really match the texture of the rest of her hair very well, and the face that it's layered over the rest of her bangs makes it look really weird, like the bang line is just kinda overtaken by something else partway through. Also, there's a stray dark pixel on her left (our right) hair strand. I don't know if you meant for it there, but I don't think it should be.

Verke's pretty good! The custom shading in his hair is a bit wonky, but there's not really a whole lot else that sticks out as all that wrong with him. I particularly like the color choices for him.

Darke's also fairly competently-spliced. The hair on the right side of his face (our left) doesn't look like the flow of it quite matches the cloak it's supposed to be draped over, if that makes sense. Also, the blue for his cloak is a little bit too harsh and bold; maybe mellow it out just a bit? Try borrowing similar shades from existing FE portraits and try them out on him; Eliwood and Roy's portraits might be good ones to reference for that.

Varne... just looks like a straight recolor of Innes to me, honestly, plus some custom coloring for the black streak in his hair. Using only two shades for each color for the hair causes it to look really strange, actually; generally, you should stick to three shades for the hair, and keep that in place for each color you want to use for the hair. Hair of one color with another colored streak in it is usually fine as long as the colors go well enough together, but three or more is getting to "badly-designed DeviantART OC" levels, so watch out for that. Also, the yellow and purple shades of his clothes seem to clash, just a little bit. Props for using a complementary pair of colors, though.

Robin and Chrom... are admirable efforts, but I think it would be prudent for you to practice splicing more and check out some tutorials for making full-custom sprites, since it's clear you still have a long way to go in that regard. Robin's robes actually look pretty nice, but they look incomplete, like... they don't have any texture to them yet. There doesn't seem to be hardly any antialiasing going on at all to smooth out the outlines, and there seem to be just two shades for each color; neutral and darkened. If you look at Fire Emblem sprites, in most cases, there are three shades per color used, occasionally just two, and on very rare occasions—and only for colors that are very minor in the sprite design!—one shade. Gold trim uses the same shade set as the character's skin, provided the character is light-skinned (almost all Fire Emblem characters seem to be).

If you want these to be hack-insertable, you can only use 15 colors, counting the outline color. Technically, the graphics have 16 colors, but you need to leave one color "slot" open for the "background" transparency color. My advice, if you want to use lots of colors in a single sprite, but insertion compatibility is a priority for you, would be to practice with color combinations a lot, and learn to be thrifty with shades; pick shades of colors so some of them can pull double-duty, so to speak. Make it so that, say, one color's darkest shade could also work as another color's middle shade.

Oh, since you asked about it, you know when sprites put pixels of the "shaded" tone around outline curves to make the lines look smoother? That's what antialiasing is; without it, your lines will look very rigid and give the sprite a sort of "low-tech" vibe to it, which is fine if that's what you're going for stylistically, but if you want something like the much smoother-looking pixel art that Fire Emblem tends to use, you'll want to learn to use antialiasing effectively.

[BlazeKing]

Thanks for pointing stuff out, I tried to fix a few minor bits, like Darke's hair a tad bit, I have no idea what happened with Varne, I think my brain checked out halfway when making him, Verke and Darke are "brothers" I suppose, so I made their main colour palette with the same theme of using complementary colours, not so obvious for Darke, it mostly shows for the battle sprite for him (I think I'll post the battle spritesheets for Verke and Darke just for it to be critiqued...they're bad), Verke is yellow and purple, Darke is blue and orange (not obvious). For Jayden's anti-gravity hair, I blame Lyon.

P.S I am TERRIBLE at drawing people in real life, so that whole turning drawings into sprites...not gonna work for me, I think

Edited April 17, 2016 by BlazeKing

[BlazeKing]

Fixed up these 2 a small bit, but Vargas' shoulder shading still feels wrong for me, for Robin I added a shade of colour for the robe (1 for the purple and 1 for the black, is there anything else wrong (other than Robin being absolutely ugly >.<)

[Blue Druid]

I was a bit lazy when it came to the splices, *might* fix them eventually, gonna fix up Vargas, as for Chrom, really proud of this one so thank you for liking it, I followed his portrait from Awakening as much as I could. Also, why do you feel Chrom is "unfinished" and what's anti-aliasing?

He seems unfinished because his clothes aren't shaded; they're monochrome. And anti-aliasing is the smoothing of rough edges. Here's an in-depth tutorial.

[BlazeKing]

Fixed Crumb up a bit, added a bit of shading.

[Toa]

use a photo uploading site like imgur and the image function of posts to have your images ready to view without clicking each one.