Darcsabre's Sprite Art

[darcsabre]

So I don't have much time to devote to sprite art, but I felt like giving it a try. I'll post my work here, and any critic is welcome.

This is a recoloring of Zerovirus' lizardman. I just tried giving him some armor.


And this is my first sprite. I did it from scratch, but I compared it to the Thug so I could work on proportion. It needs a little work, any advice?


Also, I use Paint to draw Sprites, but I am thinking of getting GIMP if I hope to take this seriously.

[Lord Ork]

Seems bigger than the thug, specially the head. You should use darker outlines. Anyway, it's a very good start.

[kyi_the_bard]

I sprite solely in paint, using GIMP for transparencies. And I take my spriting serious. (Even if it's whimsical.)

[Blarumyrran]

I sprite solely in paint, using GIMP for transparencies.

Why would anyone ever possibly do that. Paint may be fun as a challenge of doing something in a sucky environment, but for anything beyond that...

[Zerovirus]

You could think of using Paint instead of GIMP as training at high altitude for when you get to run a marathon at regular altitude.

But I personally just think Paint's not as complex as GIMP, which I'm still in the process of learning.

[Cloud]

Neorice uses paint (IIRC), and no one could call him bad

It's about what you're comfortable with, plenty of GIMP users can produce bad art, just as Paint users can.

[Blarumyrran]

You could think of using Paint instead of GIMP as training at high altitude for when you get to run a marathon at regular altitude.

You could think of using Paint as training to light a fire with a flint, for when you need to cook your meal with a microwave.

Neorice uses paint (IIRC), and no one could call him bad

The ratio of the amount of skilled pixelart people using either PS-likes or specifically pixelart software to the amount of skilled pixelart people using Paint is some 100+ to one, so the point is quite void though.

It's about what you're comfortable with, plenty of GIMP users can produce bad art, just as Paint users can.

A 5-year-old can produce pretty bad paintings with both tomato ketchup and oil paint. That means oil paint is not superior to tomato ketchup.

[thespaceinvader]

The difficulty curve in GIMP is extreme. I still haven't winkled all the tricks out of its innards. But make no mistake, it is a better tool than paint (and I don't think Neo still uses paint. I'm pretty sure he's moved to more versatile tools). I find layers particularly invaluable in my spriting, since they mean that you can mess about with things that are lower in the z-order/behind other things in the screen, and still keep them totally intact rather than winding up losing bits of them when you might need to keep them for later. It also helps to have transparency effects easily available, not to mention a decent colour pallette, near-infinite undo states... I could go on. If you're serious about spriting, you NEED to get used to a serious program. No buts about it.

Paint is all very well for the first tries, but getting a good tool will help you SO much. It's also a HELL of a lot easier to use a tool like GIMP for animations. There was a reason, way back when, that neo never animated the sprites he made (nowadays, that reason is more that animating tends to be boring) - animating in paint is damn near impossible.

[Blarumyrran]

animating in paint is damn near impossible.

Funny that you would say that - my first experience with animation was through the undo mechanism of MS Paintbrush of windows 3.1 - iirc it had only one undo slot (MS Paint has 3), so the undo key iirc also worked as a redo key, so by pressing the undo shortcut key really fast, you could have a 2-frame animation!

The point is obviously still true, but thought id mention it

[thespaceinvader]

A 2-frame animation consisting of a single tool-action

Although, i suppose that tool action could be a copy/paste...