Pix3M

Wow your a great pixeler!! Have you done the other ponies? If not I totally think you should!

 

Yes, I have. Feel free to dig around my deviantART (link in sig) and see what you can find. There might be a difference in quality as I've been improving at a pace a little too quickly to be able to produce anything consistently for projects though =/

Amazing! I have to say, there's a ton of really great artists on here lately, you're definately one of them.

 

Lol just artists on here? I start to get dwarfed once you look at a larger scale that puts more people into consideration.

There is little to say beyond the fact that is just crappin' awesome. Was that made in Paint, or what?

 

I find MS Paint to be rather clunky with handling colors which is especially not what I want as RD's colors are going to be pretty difficult to juggle, so I didn't use MS Paint. I used graphicsgale as it's something I'm more comfortable using at the moment, though now I'm wondering if there are other pieces of software that might be even more useful.

The only time(s?) I did do an edit and post it was when you specifically asked for it publically

Also, for obvious reasons, it's hard to point out where the problems are with text. I could do it better with an "edit" that circled all the areas in question but I was only going to do that once (or if) you showed interest.

That could work, though I'm not that interested in making changes on a work that I already spent a good amount of time with. I wanna move on, you know?

I may not be the best artist, but when it comes to banding in this portrait I do spot quite a bit of it. While the angles may not be "banding" per se, they are another issue that more has to do with using AA effectively.

 

It might come across this way, but I'm not out to belittle what you make, I'm not here to try and sound smart by using pixel art jargon only me and you probably understand here, I'm not here for any of that. I simply see some problems with what you've got there and I thought I'd point them out. I don't make edits often for other people's stuff because I'm already working long days and have little time to even do any of my own pixeling, hence one of the reasons why even that Twily pixel I've been working on, which normally I should've been able to get done in less than a week has taken well over three weeks already, and it's (maybe...) only 50% done. I can try and put some time aside and fix what I notice, but I really don't want to do that if what I do isn't going to be looked at seriously. If I have the assurance that it will be, then I can try and cram it into my short allocation of free time tonight if I can.

 

Last time I remember you making an edit to my own works, I did not even ask for it. Here, I am asking if you can make edits yourself because it's difficult to describe the exact location of whatever errors there are, and I can't help but wonder how useful your constructive criticism is because it does not point out where the errors are, or if the errors are even worth the time to fix so the only thing I can do is go with what I think I know about banding, and pay more attention to my works.

Not to mention, there was one instance of skip-one banding that I intentionally left there because trying to avoid it would create jaggies.

I'm not doing any editing if you're just going to get snark with me when I'm trying to purely be helpful and give good C+C. Was working on an edit, not sure if I'm going to continue with it. Not even sure why I started an edit, past time or two I made you one you threw it out the window anyways.

 

It's very possible for somebody to give advice that turns out to be bad. Some things sound great on paper but does not work out in practice. Makes me think back to my first attempts at moving eye glares to give life to an otherwise static picture. Sounds great on paper, but since I didn't know jack about subpixel animation, the glares moved crazy far for moving only a distance of one pixel. That's one of my concerns with trying to change the curvature of 45 degree lines as I can either imagine using some 45-degree banding (oh the horror!) to shift an area less than a distance of one pixel, or risk exaggerating it too much by not using a buffer color to achieve this.

I've started on an edit trying to figure out exact what areas were problematic, but I figured that I'll probably miss areas that I can't catch.

I'm not doing any editing if you're just going to get snark with me when I'm trying to purely be helpful and give good C+C. Was working on an edit, not sure if I'm going to continue with it. Not even sure why I started an edit, past time or two I made you one you threw it out the window anyways.

 

It's very possible for somebody to give advice that turns out to be bad. Some things sound great on paper but does not work out in practice. Makes me think back to my first attempts at moving eye glares to give life to an otherwise static picture. Sounds great on paper, but since I didn't know jack about subpixel animation, the glares moved crazy far for moving only a distance of one pixel. That's one of my concerns with trying to change the curvature of 45 degree lines as I can either imagine using some 45-degree banding (oh the horror!) to shift an area less than a distance of one pixel, or risk exaggerating it too much by not using a buffer color to achieve this.

I've started on an edit trying to figure out exact what areas were problematic, but I figured that I'll probably miss areas that I can't catch. I cannot say that I know every possible bad way to arrange pixels. Some tutorials that try to cover banding may mention different types of banding, some types are not even mentioned on some. You hang around at forums populated by other pixel artists. I don't. I mainly do what I want, improving at my own pace. You probably know different kinds of banding that I am not even aware of. I don't even know if I can spot all the unecessary banding errors (if they are unecessary to start with).

RE: Banding, it's not hard to ignore in the hair, but it really really jumps out in the eye.

 

As for the AA, it just doesn't seem like you really define good curves with your AA -- hence why some areas with 45 degree slopes look like they're missing AA, because they are -- they jump out as straight segments when other segments are curved. Also, transitions between 45 degree angles and the 22.5/67.5 degree slopes are a bit jagged and could benefit from intermediary slopes, which is possible with or without AA, but with AA you can exaggerate the curves even better.

 

This is making it sound like you can see a lot more 'issues' than I can. How about this? Go take this portrait, make appropriate edits, and see what happens.

I find a few areas inconsistent: you anti-alias the lightest and mid-shade of the skin, but then you don't AA the darkest and mid-shade together. Lots of banding in the eye. Despite also having lots of banding in the hair as well, I think it still looks rather nice and stylistic.

 

Lol I am not even sure if banding is an issue if you can't really discern the banding pixels very well. Makes me wonder if I would see any improvement at all if I try to fix what seems like a non-issue for me right now. If it doesn't, then what you brought up would be a non-issue.

And where am I not AAing the darkest and mid-shade?

HA! So I was right! But yeah, eyelashes I feel could help here. Doesn't have the same amount of cool/adorable ratio that the usual Rainbow Dash has in the picture without it.

 

Edit - I thought that weird gibberish at the bottom was a language. Will do to highlight and read that stuff from now on out.

 

I finished it and updated the OP

I wonder how much better people think of the finished version compared to the version which was just a WIP though. Opinions?

You saved it as a jpg.

I really don't know if I can say very much because saving pixel art as a jpg effectively destroys it.

Care to read something I've written? http://fav.me/d53tjrd

That might work with art, but in Minecraft you can't really zoom out far enough to make it not look like highlights or something like that, I can try it, but can't guarantee that the shading will be correct.

 

I'm curious. If I'm challenging you (and not completely serious too) to copy something on to minecraft, then... how can you get it wrong if you can easily open the image up on an image editor and zoom it to see the exact color and placement of every pixel? O_O

*Puts on my best trollface* I dare you to recreate one of my pixel art on minecraft.

No really, you don't have to recreate this if this is too daunting as there's like 27 colors used so I don't even know if minecraft can handle such a palette if you're telling us how limited minecraft's colors are.

Putting that side though, I would recommend trying to shade yellows with oranges though, just like what I did with RD's yellow hair.

Extremely limited, and since it only provides a profile view instead of something more dynamic like a 3/4ths perspective, you're usually gonna see pretty boring poses. Only *great* for non-artists as being able to make your own stuff pretty much frees you from having to put up with limited options.

This looks pretty darn neat, but it doesn't feel as finished as your other pixelated works. Not sure. Oh, the eyelashes aren't there. Maybe that's it. And what's with the weird colors on the bottom left? Did you really just leave your color pallete there?

 

If you took the time to find out what the small, crossed out text says, it clearly says that it's not finished. I was just seeing how nice people would be when they look at an unfinished work. As if leaving my color palette wasn't obvious enough, haha

Depends. ..............................................................................................................................

 

*clap clap* exceptionally informative, good sir.

I get that point, but I'm not a fan of such types of stereotyping threads; I see a lot worse on /b/ and /pol/ of that nature, and it's to the point where any thing of the such sickens me. I mean, I guess there are less stereotypical topics I could use, but then it's more like "ask someone who of this group of people" rather than "ask this person".

But it works, because it gives something for potential askers to work with.

I mean, I could say I'm a "Paid Commissioned pixel artist for 2 commericial games", but I feel that this would be more of bragging rather than talking about off-topic things; personally, I like to keep pixel art talk to dA, the pixel art threads that rise up here (when I try to give C+C), and when I make my own thread when I finish a new pixel. I'm more the one that feels like flaunting your abilities when not needed or in an ask thread like this is cocky and discourages other aspiring artists. I'd rather people ask me about more offtopic things than my pixel art or hacking endeavors.

 

Two commercial games? I wonder, how's the demand for game graphics done in pixel?

I don't see it as a "circle jerk" between "friends" yet -- as for expanding audiences, it's a pretty open topic already. "Expanding my audience" sounds hella formal for such an informal thread

 

On other forums, I've seen similar threads go really popular, and usually their thread title goes something like "Ask an Asian anything", Asian being the thing that the OP wants to emphasize as being interesting and important and people wanting to ask troll-esque questions about the OP being Asian, which might be what the OP wants.

So, what do you have here? You have your name, which would attract friends, and /b/rony, which is apparently some 4chan thing. Not sure if presenting yourself as a 4chan user is that interesting.

If I wanted to start one of these threads, I would most likely have a title that mentions me being a volunteer spriter for the MLP Online game which is probably more interesting than me sticking my name in a title and mentioning that I'm a user of some other forum.

It already made you want to ask 2 questions

 

Surely you don't want this thread to wind up being a circle jerk between friends. You need to expand your audience.

An ego problem faked for the purposes of this thread, perhaps.

 

Well, I don't think *pretending* to have an ego problem is gonna make people want to ask questions.

Do I sense a potential ego problem?

You can look up videos of artists making pixel art to know what the process looks like. A link that can help you get started: http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299

The canvas size can be anything you want to be, but keep in mind that working large scale starts being impractical. A dA avatar already contains 50x50 or 2,500 pixels, and working larger scale means more pixels to manage. With regular ol' digital painting, the artist can just use a bigger brush to cover more area. You cannot do the same with pixel art.

Use paint (like a boss)! Thats how true pros do it . Or don't use it. As for making the art just go pixel by pixel I guess.

 

MS Paint is only good for impressing laymen as there are other programs that can do the same thing but quicker (e.g. MS paint lacks keyboard shortcuts). Just sayin'

It looks really good, and it is not immediatly obvious it is pixel art, but, on closer inspection, it actually is!

 

And here's a fun thought. There are pixel artists who have a goal of refining their works so make their work appear as high-resolution as they can.

An interesting read that sounds like a must-read for anyone interested in getting anywhere with pixel art: http://www.pixel.schlet.net/

Remind me of those old CPS1 or MS-DOS character select screens, really cool. Was this just for fun or is there more than meets the eye?

 

I found myself a niche where I can offer commissions to make stuff like these as forum avatars for people who want a nice pic to represent themselves as a pony, and I'm doing the mane six to practice my technique.

Funny to see people praise me when I showed them something that was not complete at all.

Here's the finished version:

Comparison with the old:

It's better production quality than the actual show's.

Well, what might we expect from a pixel artist who has an idea of what he's doing? Pixel art might be a time-consuming medium, but hey, because it takes advantage of the very element that makes up a computer screen, pixel art can achieve a quality on the computer screen that no other medium can hope to compete with.

The only thing is that pixel art is utterly impractical for large-scale animations though. It's usually used for smaller-scale game graphics. Eh.

Considering you've made plenty of pieces that are better than this, that's saying something! I love how nonchalant you are about your skills and MS Paint -- people fawn over your abilities and you go, `Meh, it's just another program.`

Partially because I took a hard lesson on how big of an ego I should have. Sure, there are very few bronies who could make something like this using only the basic of the basic drawing tools, but even then, if you start looking past my little clique of ponies and pixels, I'm not the best artist in the world, so I should be careful from acting like so. I also included two links to two bigger, better pieces of pixel art in the video's description that I kind of neglected to add into the annotations as the main point of this video is to say that yeah... MS paint is just another program once you know what to do with its tools. It's still a horrid piece of software though.... no keyboard shortcuts and no support for transparencies.