Vampire Elf

That tutorial topic doesn't even have the word tutorial in its title :| I mainly meant this for my tutorials anyway and I wanted it separate from my actual sprite topic so that people can find it all in one easy place rather than search through pages. I plan on having a few more spriting vids, as I said above I'm doing on of erasor re-coloring in action. I also plan on doing one particularly on how I sprite hair(On an FE9/10 Stefan Mug I'm making, I just want to finish everything but the hair first so that I can focus on that in the vid) and I've been considering doing some audio commentary, explaining what I do, as I do it.

A nice easy place to find tutorials and spriting video's etc by me ;) I seem to be making a few spriting video's lately and I quite enjoy it, I also know they can be a bit instructional, or provide insight into spriting, so I thought I'd post this old eraser re-colouring tutorial for ms paint. On a side note, you can enlarge the eraser by holding down the control[ctrl] key and then also holding down the plus[+] key on your numberpad, this makes it possible to re-colour each shade in 1 click instead of rubbing the eraser back and forth. (Currently uploading a video version of this re-colouring style in action) Spriting videos: Splicing: Custom work: Edit work:

The new cloth colour(the old hair colour) doesn't mesh well with the 5th skin tone used on the clothing and the headband. Using outline colour instead(as above) could help with this, though this makes things alot darker, so you'd want to edit in some 5th skin tone as anti aliasing, since the majority of it will be removed to make the clothing actually look ok. The hair makes no sense with how the headband is, and the headband gets randomly cut off, see how the tie up on it makes sense on Echidna? how it's outside of her hair? if you wanted the headband to tie up under the majority of her hair with a knot on the side, this isn't the way to do it, maybe get some pictures of headbands and hair ties before you try something like this, so that when you do it it actually makes sense. The necklace is symmetrical and disregards the angle of her body, the cord/chain is extremely dark and stands out like a sore thumb against the skin. Above ^, is how I've shaded a necklace, you're welcome to reference that when fixing this one. You've also changed her eyes from light to dark, when doing this you should always revise the shading as light hair/eyes/clothing/skin/etc are shaded differently from dark ones. Your third skin tone looks a bit off, it seems a bit darker and a bit less saturated then it should.

Ohh yeh I forgot about that part haha, her body needs to be a bit wider,along with her arm.

I'll start off by going through the squared sections first real quick. Uncompleted outline in the hair square, the chin looks particularly jagged in the squared section also. The line under the eye is where i think you should lighten the lower lid shades, those 3 pixels look a bit darker than they should with the new eye white. No anti aliasing on the arm square either, which I didn't have on Ankara either but it's less noticeable because the shades are closer together. I don't know if this is meant to be ripped on the chest square, if so then you might want to have a more jagged sorta line going down the center with a few square tipped tears so that it isn't just horizontal lines going across, something like the tears in this below. V (A mod can merge my posts if you want, I only double posted so that Reaper got my cnc ;) )

I think it's more that my AA is horrible on it and saving as a GIF only made it worse haha, I think it looks ok on ankara cause her sleeves are quite dark and the shades have low contrasts but it looks very pitchy on yours that's all.

Ta nickt, yeh there's also that massive chunk of second shade and a few other things I was meaning to fix also :D

Jerrike is getting a new mug :D yay, over all the toher ones, the 2nd one is my favorite so i sorta wanted to get that vibe again in his new mug, but I also wanted him to look more like me, so i used my personal mug as a base(and vika's hair, cause i'm lazy, still needa re-shade some of the hair cause it's messy shading still in parts) anyways :D

I still cant get over how, part of his nose, 2 flicks of hair and a change in eye direction turn jerrike into joshua :D

WIP Actually started working on this as a new mug for my main OC Jerrike, I was using my self portrait as a base because I wanted Jerrike to look a little more like me, then I thought hey, the new chin I have on this thing could work for Josh, so I spliced in part of his hair(near side cheek) and messed with the nose a little, I was actually happy with those changes for Jerrike too :D. I then changed the eyes a bit to be more like Josh's and re-coloured it so It looks like him, and now I'm kinda killing 2 birds with one stone :D (It shows how lazy I am cause I used massive chunks of my Vika's hair in it too haha) Funny how the colours and the eyes changed it from looking like my self portrait and Jerrike into a Joshua replica :S Either way, dno if they'll share a body as of yet as their both swordsman, it wouldn't be too far a stretch, depends on if I'm lazy or not haha, either way I'll probably cater the sprite more to Jerrike(and his new naked-er design) than to Joshua's hatter coated design, I dno, quite happy with how this' worked out cause I wasn't quite planning to join

It's not that we aren't "cool", I just find it exceedingly ridiculous that you were going to disqualify him for no particular reason at all.

Ermm... I don't think it was really specified that he has to stay as sword master looking unit, and i really don't see the point of re-classing and pimping, as being separate contests... Joshua can turn into a 'ssin so maybe someone see's Assassin Joshua as being pimped? It certainly crossed my mind to make him into a 'ssin when i was thinking up ideas/ -Class pimping shall go by similar means, however class changes may occur(yes even for promoted/non promotable classes) If you're allowed to do it on the battle sprites why wouldn't you do it on the mugs too? I really do find your comeback to Ken's mug very ridiculous... this is WHY competitions really should be run by people who know what theyre doing and don't change the rules as they go along.

WHy is he wearing those shells from mario kart on his shoulders... and is he from the simpsons? *yellowskin... SHOT*

other than the fact that it has little shading and makes no sense... the colour levels arent that great either, but I'm sure you'll get there eventually. It almost looks like it should be a sorta 50's esque hair style with that flick, so i dno, this is what i assumed you were going for, maybe if it had a shape similar to this it'd make more sense?

I re-colour on paint, I refine the colours or change hue on photoshop :)

@dancer: It's photoshop dear ;) indicated by the bar at the bottom with the blue Ps icon, that says Adobe Photoshop ;) :D but i think gimp might have similar features, dno for sure though, havent used gimp in forever.

tiny update, just near his eye

I know :D i just do random stoofs for my galleries, changed it anyways. <i had it right over at fes :P anyways, vid's up

FEND splice contest entry this week Will have the video up shortly.

Thanks all, will take that stuff into account when i go and mess with vaida again soon, till then Just fixed the arm so the salute sat better, the hand was too low before, will probably still tinker with the shading and stuff a bit more, threw in a pic of me I used as a reference when making this(cause I hadn't posted that when i originally posted the self portrait)

He needs to be taller again, roughly where the orange line is, he also needs more back and a bigger head, the armor looks alot better though its shading could be further refined. Have a look at the(amazon) near breast on my example, while it does have shading over the actual breast itself it has shading below, since you're only working with 2 colours and outline i'd suggest dictating the shape of the breast with the darker blue and using the lighter blue for the breast itself, it might take a few trial and errors but I'm sure it will look right eventually, only thing is atm it seems her breast starts on top of your shaded arc as apposed to that jsut giving the breast a more spherical appearance. I also changed around a few pixels on the eye using hair colours to get a softer look on the far eye and make the near one less "pixely" i think i changed a pixel on the jaw too, but i dno for sure haha, Also, the sections that are in orange squares, I don't quite know why they're filled but not shaded with the rest of the hair, they should either connect with the hair or turn to background colour ;) Hope this is somewhat useful in your editing process

Are they all going to 1 scale? or just whatever height? because he needs to be taller if they are, even with Lynn at her new height. Lynn: needs more whites in her eyes, atm all she has is Iris, pupil and shine, no whites around them(mainly on the near side of the near eye) Other than that i'd just suggest taking a look some referances of how cloth falls and working on the shading around her breasts, cleavage is another thing you might want to work on in this mug/body. Katan: the lines that seperate katan's armor are kinda pillow shaded, I dont know if you want it to look indented or if it's seperate plates, but if it's indented then try and add some depth, if it's seperate platesthen you want to signify that by shading as if they dip splightly where they touch, because I think that's kinda the look you're going for.