Pix3M

I think I can explain why you might not like your results. Here, I traced your drawing and made a silhouette. Sometimes, looking at your work's silhouette can show if something feels a bit lacking. Look at this guy's balance. He looks like he's about to fall over so he looks like a total pushover. Literally. The overall composition is also very straight and very stiff. Poking around google images though, I found a site that talks about proper boxing stances. http://www.expertbox...g-footwork-tips If we want a pony in a boxing stance, we gotta have our legs widened up a bit to have a more stable balance. We gotta put one hoof clearly in front of another. It helps to look at real boxers to make a more convincing pose, IMO. I wasn't intending to go for a boxing stance, but this work of mine appears closer to a pony boxing stance, and as a result, the silhouette appears more interesting:

Let's see... I think before we get too attached to your new OC's colors, I think we could have a darker eye color that stands out more. The cyan used for the eye doesn't seem to really stick out from the yellow coat. If you want to draw something with likeness to show-accuracy, your best bet is always to reference screenshots from the show itself. Pay attention to the proportions, and shapes. Try to imitate it. You can definitely consider looking around this dA group for a vector: http://mlp-vectorclu...rt.com/gallery/ Find whatever looks fun and not necessarily easiest, copy the body and face proportions by eye. Use the grid method if you want some fail-safes. Right now, we have eyes that are wider than it is tall. Show-accurate eyes are taller than they are wide. Your nose is round and bulgy but show-accurate noses don't curve up then down like a really round nose but instead they curve down. There are plenty of other things, but for now, we're probably better off getting more accurate pony proportions into memory through referencing. Doesn't matter if you don't get it right, as long as you know what not to do next time, I can say that you're on a path of self-perfection.

Bad advice. While an artist does not need to worry about staying accurate to produce good pictures, I was once told that good artists should be able to draw in a variety of styles. If there's a number one reason why people don't improve, its because they are too attached to bad habits.

The character design makes her look more of a high fantasy sorceress than a bookworm living in a steampunk-ish period. I dunno about other people, but it doesn't seem to say "twilight" to me enough. Eh, at least this looks like something i'd see rrom a comic book though! If there are any flaws aside for character design, I would have to stop and look at it for a while.

This is pretty much how you're supposed to learn. You look at a reference and pay attention to the little details so you learn how to draw from memory more accurately.

If you're a novice then how did you draw this? Any referencing? Tracing? Grid method? .... ... ... plagiarizing? Here I am scoffing at pretty much any pony drawing tutorial out there for not being as show accurate as it can....

Proportions are mostly spot on... almost too good. Thought about drawing something more exciting than standing around in profile view though?

Nah... if I wanted a pokemon-styled sprite, I would have simpler shading, pose drawn in 3/4ths perspective instead of profile, and the outlines would have been done differently. Here, I looked at a street fighter sprite and tried imitating their style.

Interestingly, this probably took no longer than 90 min. Considering the apparent popularity of this sprite though, I guess I could make more of these.

Turned out better than I thought. The original streetfighter sprites had much smaller eyes so there would naturally be no room for any highlights. I end up forgetting highlights.

They're desktop pony sprites. One of the most common set of sprites you'll ever find around the internet. Just look up the actual program that lets you have ponies running around your screen and the package includes the sprites you want in gif format.

They're blurry most likely because you scaled them up with cubic interpolation. Pixelly images like these should be scaled up only by a factor of a whole number, with nearest-neighbor or no interpolation.

I said it's my first attempt at this particular style. I'm not completely new to spriting in general. You can check my dA at the other styles I've pixelled in. Hahah.

Felt like toying around with sprite styles that are not completely familiar to me. I find that this turned out rather well for a first attempt at this style.

Some mediums don't really need fancy motor skills. Death the Kid apparently draws vectors which I hear is more usable with a mouse than a tablet. I personally draw all my stuff with a mouse, but pixel-by-pixel as a way of having complete control of everything instead,

I got where I am with my art skills because I generally know exactly what I can do to make the next piece better. Sometimes I gotta seek advice from people better than I am if I need to. Just bringing that up n case you wanna know.

For this reason, this is originally meant to be four times the size. There's a link in the dA page for this that gives you a 2x zoom version. I find that even if each pixel is blown up in size, it still sort of looks smooth. And yes. Larger the work for pixels, longer it takes. There are 160,000 pixels in a 400x400 image soooo..... there's a reason why pixel art tends to be small. Unlike digital painting, we can't just use a bigger brush. I've surrounded myself with enough actual game art professionals who are far more experienced than I am.. You are the first I have seen to recommend downsampling as a way to create pixel art. Others usually recommend blocking in major forms then refining to pixel-level polish or start with drawing line art. All without tools that blends and blurs pixels together. What is extremely impractical about your approach is that while we could be slathering colors around on a much larger scale, we could be doing the exact same thing but with non-AA'd brushes like any pixel artist who knows their craft. The difference is that when you try downsampling your large brushwork, you are left with unpredictably messy AA and a high color count that just shows poor workmanship. The better alternative from working larger though is to simply work at a smaller scale. A smaller scale is easier and can create similar results.

In case you haven't cleared your cache or something, here's what it looks like: Simpler than my other works but I was mainly focusing on coloring. Originally made to look good on dA... not sure if I should tweak the colors to look better on this site.

Pixel art is created pixel by pixel. Creating a larger image then down sampling them gives you very little control of the individual placement of your pixels because you are relying on a computer with no spatial reasoning to do your gruntwork. The resulting sloppiness will show and is totally unprofessional. You called your 'pixel art' high quality then you just backed off saying that it is unsurprisingly sloppy for a 15 second drawing? Please, I don't want to see people try to put their sloppy fifteen second doodles on the same level as works like mine. I consider it.... very sloppy. But... I guess our standards are different as I have seen what some of the best pixel art looks likem EDIT: And for the record, graphicsgale also has nearest-neighbor interpolation. Any basic image editing tool has it.

Surely not 'high-quality' like one of the first people I've ever idolized: Has the exact same color count as my own work and is done within a day... This artist even used the EXACT software I use for pixels. Source: http://fav.me/d33p2oh Your example doesn't really convince me. Your lines have a jagged quality which no pixel artist who knows their craft would leave in their works. EDIT: Plus you posted a JPEG, which is a totally unusable format for pixel art.

Haha. the interesting messes we get into when criticizing stuff before we realize who made what we just criticized. I was in a similar situation with a real person and yeah.... ... ....

Power and flexibility to do what? The main use I ever found for regular pixel work that it is much better for cropping images. Well then, here's a screenshot from the Suited for Success episode, right before Fluttershy says "French haute couture, please!" https://dl.dropbox.com/u/83822168/TMP/2012-09-11%2020.06.18.png