My Artwork and Looking for Suggestions

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potatomanjack
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Joined: July 14th, 2009, 4:41 am

My Artwork and Looking for Suggestions

Post by potatomanjack »

Hi All,

I'm a relatively new player of Wesnoth, having only found the game about 3 months ago. Of course, I'm completely addicted and am now at the stage where I would love to contribute.

Art has always been a hobby of mine, especially when it comes to miniatures. I'd now like to translate this to contributing sprite art to one of the many projects underway here.

However, this will be the first time I've really gotten into sprite / pixel art, and I was wondering if anyone had advice that would help me begin and learn the ropes. For example, as a beginner would it be better to try and develop a sprite from scratch using mainline sprites as 'guidelines' or would is it more helpful to play with current sprites and work on animation / colouring?

Any advice, tips, or stories of other peoples' experience would be greatly appreciated. Also, if this is posted in the wrong section, Sorry! Please feel free to move it to the right place!

Cheers,

PMJ

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"Work is the scourge of the drinking class." ~ Oscar Wilde
Last edited by potatomanjack on July 16th, 2009, 2:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
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"Work is the scourge of the drinking class." ~Oscar Wilde
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thespaceinvader
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Re: Advice on Beginning Sprite Development

Post by thespaceinvader »

I'd suggest probably the former. And get yourself a good program to do the work that can use layers, GIMP's good if you want something free, though it has quite a learning curve.
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potatomanjack
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Re: Advice on Beginning Sprite Development

Post by potatomanjack »

thespaceinvader wrote:I'd suggest probably the former. And get yourself a good program to do the work that can use layers, GIMP's good if you want something free, though it has quite a learning curve.
Thanks for the advice. I'll start with trying to build a sprite from scratch and then will post here for advice.

I've got GIMP up and running so will use that. I can see what you mean with the learning curve though... It looks similar to K2 to me from here :D

Thanks again,

PMJ
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Jetrel
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Re: Advice on Beginning Sprite Development

Post by Jetrel »

My biggest suggestion on sprites is to give up on explicitly representing body features.

Sprites are so small that you can't explicitly draw things like fingers and facial features. Instead you have to suggest them with overall shading. Instead of making a proper hand, you'll make a blob of skin-tone in the shape of the whole hand. Instead of drawing a nose, you'll simply put a highlight in the middle of the face. Instead of drawing the hundreds of locks of hair on a real head, you'll just make some 3-5 locks. Etc.

You must embrace this practice, or you'll make terrible sprites.
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potatomanjack
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Re: Advice on Beginning Sprite Development

Post by potatomanjack »

Thanks for the advice on features Jetrel.

Well, I've been working pretty hard, and have completed my first ever sprite from scratch. Now, it's nowhere near the quality of the game sprites, but I'm kind of happy with it seeing as it's my first sprite ever.

I would love any feedback at all on it, but especially on the helmet, I've had a lot of trouble with it (as you can see). I'm trying to go for a helmet that comes down over the eyes, but stops there and has a wide brim around it. I especially wanted it kind of silver and shiny looking which doesn't come out at all.

This was done in paint at this stage (e: hence the black background), as I don't have GIMP at work. GIMP will definitely help with a whole bunch of things :)

Anyway, would love some feedback! cheers!

PMJ
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thespaceinvader
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Re: Advice on Beginning Sprite Development

Post by thespaceinvader »

For a first try, that's very good.

A couple of hints. For purely technical reasons if you're spriting in paint or any program that can't manage transparency, it can be useful to use a colour you're not using in your sprite as a background, so it's easy to remove when you need to. For metals, remember that metal has an extremely wide range of brightness values when polished - the highlights should be quite bright, and there should be specular highlights where it's brightest which should be white or nearly white. Conversely, the dark tones should be very dark, close to black. But not actually black, usually - very little in life is really black. Using some blues in steel can be very useful, as well - it doesn't have a massive amount of colour by itself, but it tends to reflect the sky through its mid values, making it quite blue - check out the axe blade up close on the Dwarvish Explorer sprite i recently finished, you should see just how blue it is.
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potatomanjack
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Re: Advice on Beginning Sprite Development

Post by potatomanjack »

thespaceinvader wrote:For a first try, that's very good.

A couple of hints. For purely technical reasons if you're spriting in paint or any program that can't manage transparency, it can be useful to use a colour you're not using in your sprite as a background, so it's easy to remove when you need to. For metals, remember that metal has an extremely wide range of brightness values when polished - the highlights should be quite bright, and there should be specular highlights where it's brightest which should be white or nearly white. Conversely, the dark tones should be very dark, close to black. But not actually black, usually - very little in life is really black. Using some blues in steel can be very useful, as well - it doesn't have a massive amount of colour by itself, but it tends to reflect the sky through its mid values, making it quite blue - check out the axe blade up close on the Dwarvish Explorer sprite i recently finished, you should see just how blue it is.

Cool, thanks for the encouragement.

Now that you mention the background colour, that makes a lot of sense. I've got a version on white background as well, so I'll convert that one.

I'll work on the helmet and blade based on your advice for shinyness and colour reflection and will then repost for more advice. :)
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tsr
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Re: Advice on Beginning Sprite Development

Post by tsr »

I am very impressed! Also the advice given by tsi and Jetrel is very good (that should go into some kind of tutorial).

One small point: since you are intending this to become work used in wesnoth you might want to use the same perspective that wesnoth uses. At the moment your sprite is in direct front view while wesnoth uses an angle ((check out the game sprites). Ofc any sprite work you do that teaches you something is good for you but it might feel more rewarding to first make a sprite that is usable in game and then actually nail all the anatomy, etc than the other way around.

Just a thought from a complete non-artist (at least with regards to wesnoth).

/tsr
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Re: Advice on Beginning Sprite Development

Post by thespaceinvader »

Some other things to consider: lighting in wesnoth tends to come from upper right front. We generally outline areas using a darker shade of the surrounded colour, but not black - in fact, using pure black is generally not that useful - pure black simply doesn't occur that often in real life - deep greys (or shades of whatever coloru you're using) are usually better.
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potatomanjack
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Re: Advice on Beginning Sprite Development

Post by potatomanjack »

tsr wrote:I am very impressed! Also the advice given by tsi and Jetrel is very good (that should go into some kind of tutorial).

One small point: since you are intending this to become work used in wesnoth you might want to use the same perspective that wesnoth uses. At the moment your sprite is in direct front view while wesnoth uses an angle ((check out the game sprites). Ofc any sprite work you do that teaches you something is good for you but it might feel more rewarding to first make a sprite that is usable in game and then actually nail all the anatomy, etc than the other way around.

Just a thought from a complete non-artist (at least with regards to wesnoth).

/tsr

Yeah, I realised that about 1/2 way through the sprite, and just figured I'd use this as a learning tool, and thne the next one I'd try for the angle. Also, I figured it might be easier to do a face on as a first because it's a bit easier then trying to get the face/body angles right. Thanks very much for the tips though!
Some other things to consider: lighting in wesnoth tends to come from upper right front. We generally outline areas using a darker shade of the surrounded colour, but not black - in fact, using pure black is generally not that useful - pure black simply doesn't occur that often in real life - deep greys (or shades of whatever coloru you're using) are usually better.
I'll make sure to clean up the black on this in the next version. Will also try and adjust the light for the next sprite.

Are there any sprites that ned creation at the moment that that it would be more valuable for me to work on while also not being so important that anyone would ever depend on me :) ?
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melinath
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Re: Advice on Beginning Sprite Development

Post by melinath »

I could use some good wesnoth-style sprites for my my UMC, if you're interested. Specifically, what I can think of off the top of my head are:

1. a male druid initiate - a human who's had enough to do with elves that he's started learning their magic.
2. a "runeblade" - a human who's learned how to combine magic and swordfighting.

If you'd prefer mainline work, I'm sure there's plenty of stuff there, too.
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potatomanjack
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Re: Advice on Beginning Sprite Development

Post by potatomanjack »

melinath wrote:I could use some good wesnoth-style sprites for my my UMC, if you're interested. Specifically, what I can think of off the top of my head are:

1. a male druid initiate - a human who's had enough to do with elves that he's started learning their magic.
2. a "runeblade" - a human who's learned how to combine magic and swordfighting.

If you'd prefer mainline work, I'm sure there's plenty of stuff there, too.
I like the sound of that runeblade - sounds like something that would be fun to do. I'll make that my next test... although I really don't want to promise much, as I'm still very new at this.

Attached is the most recent version of the sprite I was working on. I've changed the light angle to the top right, and switched the spear head, as I just couldn't get the crescent moon blade to work. Also removed all pure black for darker shades instead, and fixed up the background with GIMP so that it's transparent now. Would definitely love some more feedback on how to improve this little guy.

Thanks everyone for the help so far, I really appreciate it.

Cheers,

PMJ
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Hoplite_v2.PNG
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thespaceinvader
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Re: Advice on Beginning Sprite Development

Post by thespaceinvader »

Make everything a little thicker - the arms, hands, legs and torso should all be at least one pixel wider - he's shading into the stickfigure look at present, particularly against bright backgrounds - compare it with mainline humans of the equivalent level and you'll see =)
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potatomanjack
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Re: Advice on Beginning Sprite Development

Post by potatomanjack »

thespaceinvader wrote:Make everything a little thicker - the arms, hands, legs and torso should all be at least one pixel wider - he's shading into the stickfigure look at present, particularly against bright backgrounds - compare it with mainline humans of the equivalent level and you'll see =)
I took a shot at making him a bit more 'buff' this morning, and think it looks ok, but needs a bit of work still for proper shading. I still need to do his legs, but I think they were less of a problem.

New version attached.

I really appreciate all of the hand holding through this. I'm hoping that eventually I'll be good enough to contribute mainline game level artwork... of course that's a long way off :)

Cheers,

PMJ

e: back at work, so am using paint again, hence the grey background.
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Hoplite_v3.PNG
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potatomanjack
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Re: My Artwork and Looking for Suggestions

Post by potatomanjack »

The second is already a significant improvement over the first--I think you did very well with the general size and perspective, and the pose looks good. The robe will definitely need a lot of improvement to look like cloth (which is pretty tough to get right)--it's very flat at the moment. Studying the mage and necromancer lines will give you some good ideas for how to do large areas of it. The head is also too small--try a pixel larger on both axes, it shouldn't be too hard since there isn't a face to distort. I would avoid putting blood channels on swords at this size, because the blade (not counting outline) is only three pixels wide, and the channel takes up the entire middle third and looks bad. the blade should get darker steadily from right to left, but also keep in mind that the entire right edge of the blade won't have the same brightness--the reflecting light would be brightest in a certain area, probably near but not quite at the tip of the blade. Again, there are plenty of mainline sprites that would be helpful to look at.
I've take a stab at this. I've still got a lot of work to do with it, and especially the robe, but I'm happy with the progression. Also, think that the sword and head look a lot better from your suggestions.

I'll keep working on the robe in the meantime, but more suggestions are very welcome.

Thanks,

PMJ
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Blood_Acolyte_v3.PNG
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