Josip Posted March 2, 2015 Share Posted March 2, 2015 Hello Everyone, After spending a few days reading on how to do a proper sprite and dithering I went ahead and tried to recolor a sprite. I would appreciate feed back and any suggestions that you may have to help me grow as a sprite artist. Thank you guys! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ErrantDShepherd Posted March 3, 2015 Share Posted March 3, 2015 (edited) Okay! I will rate your sprite! A for effort! ...execution, uh... I've seen far worse, the skin color selection isn't blending so well at the moment though... So uh, A for effort!? ;p Actually... You've got some concepts down, it doesn't make my eyes bleed which is always a great step in spriting! What have you been using to recolor? Paint? Also which tutorials have you been checking out BTW, so I know what might be good ones to refer to you? ...anyways, congrats on taking the step into spriting, keep at it! :D Try new things and always try to sprite something you can be proud of at the time. Don't take the lazy routes either, as they won't really help you develop as well at all. ;) Edited March 3, 2015 by TheErrantShepherd Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josip Posted March 3, 2015 Author Share Posted March 3, 2015 Awesome! A for effort is not so bad :) I have been switching between GraphicsGale and Paint.Net and find it that I really like paint.net more for the hot keys amd eraser tool. As for tutorials..heh. I watched some videos on youtube (whatever I could find) and these two sites: http://makegames.tumblr.com/post/42648699708/pixel-art-tutorial http://themechanicalmaniacs.com/guides/spriteguide.php#Type1 If it helps, I do not like using the quick recolor tool (since I am new to pixel art) so i do pixel by pixel. So far the hardest part for me is trying to see every part of the sprites. I feel that my eyes get tired and its hard to distingues body parts and limbs. Thank you again :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josip Posted March 3, 2015 Author Share Posted March 3, 2015 Hello Again, I went and studied my first attempt and compared color deviation with my sprite with other FE sprites and noticed ( like you said TheErrantShepered) the skin tones do not blend so I found out that my color deviation was too dramatic or to far apart. So I went back chose a mid tone that I liked and deviated the skin tone a few points to a darker shade and a few point to a lighter shade. I also rearranged the tones and followed another tutorial that stated:1. You should work from inside out and not outside in (lol..yeah i did that)2. That the highlights do not touch the sides (so I tried that).So this is my second attempt. Please rate guys! And again, TheErrantShepered, I am grateful for your advice. :)P.S. I just fixed the skin tone, once I get that down ill move on to the other stuff :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ErrantDShepherd Posted March 3, 2015 Share Posted March 3, 2015 (edited) Awesome! A for effort is not so bad :) I have been switching between GraphicsGale and Paint.Net and find it that I really like paint.net more for the hot keys amd eraser tool. As for tutorials..heh. I watched some videos on youtube (whatever I could find) and these two sites: http://makegames.tumblr.com/post/42648699708/pixel-art-tutorial http://themechanicalmaniacs.com/guides/spriteguide.php#Type1 If it helps, I do not like using the quick recolor tool (since I am new to pixel art) so i do pixel by pixel. So far the hardest part for me is trying to see every part of the sprites. I feel that my eyes get tired and its hard to distingues body parts and limbs. Thank you again :) I would recommend against that... Pixel by pixel work is great when actually doing edits or custom work... but is tedious and leads to mistakes when coming to recolors. I don't use paint.net, but it sounds like it does have the eraser tool... and honestly for doing any sort of recoloring, that is one of the easiest tools to use out there. Extremely useful to use the color swap function of the eraser tool. :) Hello Again, I went and studied my first attempt and compared color deviation with my sprite with other FE sprites and noticed ( like you said TheErrantShepered) the skin tones do not blend so I found out that my color deviation was too dramatic or to far apart. So I went back chose a mid tone that I liked and deviated the skin tone a few points to a darker shade and a few point to a lighter shade. I also rearranged the tones and followed another tutorial that stated: 1. You should work from inside out and not outside in (lol..yeah i did that) 2. That the highlights do not touch the sides (so I tried that). And again, TheErrantShepered, I am grateful for your advice. :) P.S. I just fixed the skin tone, once I get that down ill move on to the other stuff :) K, so... taking a look here... lets take a closer look at what has been done... -Looking at the latest, and the previous sprites... there are elements of each that you had correct and elements of each where things went a bit off. The previous sprite actually really only needed the skin shading fixed mostly... The other shading looked okay, except that the second darkest grey could have been darker. If you look at the shading on the base sprite, your shading should match up exactly if its a recolor. Where his lightest blues go, your lightest greys should and so on... I have not taken a look at those tutorials you posted, but will do so to see if their advice is any help or not. EDIT: color deviation, or hues/brightness/whatever is difficult to get right sometimes... a helpful tip from one of BwdYeti's tutorials was that the brightness should be about 20-40 apart... I find typically somewhere around 40 usually looks best, as you don't want the opposite issue of not enough contrast either. Here's a helpful GBA Fire Emblem class sheet for your reference... from the fine, fine people at The Spriters Resource. All GBA Fire Emblem classes Edited March 3, 2015 by TheErrantShepherd Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josip Posted March 4, 2015 Author Share Posted March 4, 2015 Thanks Again! Mmm, I see. I studied both the previous and latest and noticed the mistakes you pointed out. I went back and used the GBA Fire Emblem class sheet ( Thank you everyone who contributed :D ) as a reference and did the recolored ( I guess I was a bit too excited that I did not pay attention to where to place my new palette). I also made the gray a bit darker and so I hope this is a much better one. Also, I did notice very quickly how tedious it is to recolor sprite by sprite lol. However, it is a good way to help me understand color placement and learning the anatomy of the Fire Emblem sprites. I mean I still cannot tell on some of them where there limbs connect with their sides and stuff (more on this later). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ErrantDShepherd Posted March 4, 2015 Share Posted March 4, 2015 That is looking better. Maybe try some more practice recoloring and studying the base sprites, then try some small edits/splices? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josip Posted March 4, 2015 Author Share Posted March 4, 2015 Ok, I will :) Thanks again for all the tips and pointers :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ErrantDShepherd Posted March 4, 2015 Share Posted March 4, 2015 NP, keep at it... Keep learning, and keep an open mind, but most of all keep up that great effort! We all started off doing recolors/edits back in the day... Well, except the people who are prodigy artists, the rest of us learned/grew from a lot of trial+error, failing at tikes but learning from most experiences. ...but even the genius had to start somewhere too! ...and hard work and willingness to study goes a long way to achieving skill for oneself in life and art in general! :D ...so keep it up! :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josip Posted March 4, 2015 Author Share Posted March 4, 2015 :) Thanks!!! I'll do a few more recolors and start my first splice and post it up here when I get done :D Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josip Posted March 5, 2015 Author Share Posted March 5, 2015 HeyOhh!! So I did some studying about color, in fact I found this really awesome book at Barnes n Noble that has a list of colors that work great together. Also, TheErrantShepered gave me an awesome tutorial on color : http://finalbossblues.com/thinking-in-color/ So this is my new semi-custom recolor (semi because to get what I wanted I could not simply use the color slider to color everything the same). I played runescape from beta to 2008 and my favorite armor set was the Black Trim!! So this is a tribute to that. Rating is always appreciated :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ErrantDShepherd Posted March 5, 2015 Share Posted March 5, 2015 (edited) Looks like you're getting it down. No egregious errors I could see... Let's see some more. ;) (will give some more in depth thoughts in a bit) BTW, so have you do any spriting before this? Or art in general? ...or is this something new you are trying to develop? BTW, sometimes I personally find to try and stay in the FE GBA colors it can help to use colors from the official sprites. Its great to make/develop your own pallete, but sometimes... It gives that extra authenticity, I guess? ...main thing is that the colors work together without either blending too much, or not having enough contrast. :) Edited March 5, 2015 by TheErrantShepherd Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josip Posted March 5, 2015 Author Share Posted March 5, 2015 (edited) I have never done any spriting before. I took one color class my first year of college in 2007, but as far as my artistic abilities I have not spent any time developing them (that changed 3 weeks ago). I spent my entire college life in the science field and love it, but now that I am out and have my degree I finally wanted to pursue my dream as a game developer. So I am self teaching C++ and also learning how to create simple graphics ( and everything in between:Color, Saturation, Hue, Value, etc). that i may combine to create a simple rpg program from scratch. I know this may sound crazy to a lot of people and overly ambitious to others, but this has been my dream as long as I could remember :) So here I am! How I got here was rather interesting lol. I found out that people are hacking pokemon so I did all kinds of research for pokemon, than I found out people were hacking Golden Sun (my All Time Favorite RPG on the GBA) which was all kinds of overwhelming. Then someone mentioned that there was a Fire Emblem hacking community and I got crazy excited seeing all the stuff people have been doing (heck, I am playing a few FE hacks on my phone every night just to see what people have done (and let me say its awesome )). Then I decided on learning to hack Fire Emblem. I did all kinds of research! Downloaded all the sprites the internet had to offer about Sprites, Backgrounds, etc. (Im not kidding lol whatever was on the internet I have lol) and downloaded all the programs I needed from Nightmare to Note++ and even got Photoshop (which is too advnace for me right now so I am using graphicsgale to give myself a base). That is about when i decided to finally sprite my first FE character. I picked one and just did it ( Like Arnold Says " I failed 11 times trying to bench press 500lbs, but on the 12th time I did it.") So I just did it and here I am. This seems more then what you wanted to know, but I figured it could serve as a bit of encouragement for other who just started :) P.S. Will do! I will stay within their color selection next time :D AND I uploaded One that I did manually, and one that I simply used the AutoRecolor slidder in GraphicGale Here is a Link to a PDF of a colorchart for everyone!!! :D http://research.stowers-institute.org/efg/R/Color/Chart/ColorChart.pdf Edited March 5, 2015 by Josip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teapot Posted March 5, 2015 Share Posted March 5, 2015 You might want to look into getting an image hosting account or something, so you don't have to keep uploading them as attachments. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ErrantDShepherd Posted March 5, 2015 Share Posted March 5, 2015 (edited) What Etain said. If you are unsure where to look... There's some good image hosting site links, and tutorials and resources in general in the pinned sprite resource thread. BTW, nah, I like hearing peoples' stories. We're all here for various reasons, but we're all here for a common purpose as well to develop our art... so its cool to hear that, thanks for sharing. :) ...and yeah, the hacking in the Fire Emblem community at large is pretty damned impressive. I have a special liking for the ones in the hacking forums here, but I am sure there are some other great Fire Emblem hacks and fangames I might not even know about. -Color chart is interesting, is that for hacking/gba colors or something else? -On the sprites, which is which? The right is yours, right? Keep at it! ...it is much improved from that first sprite posted. Maybe try some edits/splices or whatnot. Or try adding bits you like from other sprites like bandannas... or long pants or belts/long coat tails... have some fun! :D Edited March 5, 2015 by TheErrantShepherd Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Teapot Posted March 5, 2015 Share Posted March 5, 2015 What Etain said. If you are unsure where to look... There's some good image hosting site links, and tutorials and resources in general in the pinned sprite resource thread. That topic is like way outdated, though, and nobody's keeping it updated. We might have to purge it and start anew, with someone who'd actually be willing to keep it up-to-date. Of the hosting sites listed there, ImageShack now requires you to have a paid membership to use. If you like Gyazo, Puush is another alternative that does basically the same thing, but lets you upload directly, as well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josip Posted March 5, 2015 Author Share Posted March 5, 2015 (edited) Since I already have a dropbox account, I was just going to use that and thank for the update Etain. :) I am going to go try to splice something and show it on here soon :) Oh! Regarding the Color Chart, it just a quick reference (Not GBA specific, however you could mark them) for people who want to know the values of each color in different languages. I like it because instead of trying to find a color on the color wheel, I just look at the chart and type in the value to get an exact match :) Edited March 5, 2015 by Josip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Josip Posted March 6, 2015 Author Share Posted March 6, 2015 (edited) HeeyOhhh, I took up TheErrentShepherd challenge and went ahead with splicing my own character. Just a heads up, I did not follow or read any splicing tutorials, going to go find some now and read up a bit before I splice another one. Please critique my work guys :D Let me know if I did the whole dropbox thing right :) https://www.dropbox.com/s/ywb8aqisc64g6re/1st%20Splice%20FE%20%28fix%29.png?dl=0 Edited March 6, 2015 by Josip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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