Dessa's Pixel Pix

[Dessa]

Completed:

Trixie & Pixie

All me, except Trixie's original design, of course.

Silver Lining:

-> ->

Co-designed by Dessa & brianblackberry. Spriting & font by Dessa. Composition by Brian.

Martini Paradise:

-> -> -> (It looks like I made a mistake with the coloring at first)

Design & composition by brianblackberry. Spriting & font Dessa.

Teensy weensy things

These were mostly just for practice sake, and/or for small size Steam icons, which are 32x32

Works in progress:

Silver Lining Smileys:

By: Me. This project is on permanent hiatus. I'll revive it if there's demand, or if the whim strikes me.

I also made these. They're older and not up to my current standards, and I go back and forth on whether I will go in to revise them:

Aqua Drop

( I was supposed to be a short, easy project! Oops! )

v

->

Original painting by Mudbug, for Aquadrop. I originally didn't intend to put the Mucha-style border around her, but I realized far too late to fix things that I had a bunch of extra space and I needed a good way to use it. Mucha was fond of these curvy sorts of drawing with heavy borders, so it was a good fit. The bubbles in the border were just a happy accident -- Circles fit nicely and bubbles can be easily scaled down to 1 pixel. I still have to add "garnish" to the 4 corners. I was thinking sea plants, but I might just opt for something geometric like Celtic knots instead.

And just for horseappless and giggles, a palette swap of the above. This is Lava Drop. She lives in the center of the earth.

Random Manestream icon

I have a bunch of frames drawn to animate this, but I never bothered sequencing them.

[Dessa]

Rue

Rue's Cutie Mark detail:

Rue was intended as a last shebang in the traditional style I've been messing with, and is the first OC here I've deseigned, pencilled, and pixelled from scratch. This works because of the polish. SOme of the fundamentals are lacking. But I'm satisfied with it.

Ace High

My first in this new style. I'm in LOVE with this one. A few problems, but line of action, and line weight give this punch. Experimentation Win.

This was based on Bannhammer's design, but pencils and pixels were me. And from here on down you can assume as much unless I say otherwise.

Appliance

A continuation of Ace High's style above, but more refined. The fundamentals of this image arent as good as Ace's, but the polish is much more. IMO, it's not as good, but I still like it.

OC deisgn by Appliance and Davroth.

[Dessa]

Re-Served.

Re-Reserved.

[Kudalyn]

So much amazing-ness! I used to sprite just a little on a Pokemon forum a while back, but it's NOTHING compared to this!! Being able to do this from practically scratch?!

Please, keep up the amazing work! You have a true talent and eye for this!

[Dessa]

Update: Added Aquadrop to WIPs.

[Kudalyn]

HOLY NUCKING

I...

I...

*dies*

This is WAY beyond what I had expected. You're BLOWING ME AWAY with your talent and abilities! <3 I can't express enough the love I have for what you're doing here!!

And XD Lava Drop. Never thought of that Neat idea!

[Dessa]

I've been lazy lately. Little things, but nothing big:

THis had a bunch of stuff done to it that was never updated here:

[Kudalyn]

Still so cute! Love your pixel talent

[ziddia]

How have I never seen these? They're great!

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Shimmer Star]

These are....

AMAZING

[Manestream]

Is that a tiny flicker I see? So cute x3 omg lol, this just made my day at work xD

[Dessa]

The latest WIP:

Pencil: Bramble Rose

Rear pony is Mudbug's design.

There are some weird problems with the rear hooves there that need a second look. Not sure how to position Silver Lining's right rear leg there. The faces need tweaking to get the character of the pencils better.

[Dessa]

I'll do this step by step style. Maybe people are interested in the process?

Original Image:

Goal: Render a finished version of this in 100x100 size (The max size of most BBcode forum avatars).

First is some image processing. I shrink it down in paint.net, and then fiddle with the filters to make the dark lines darker and the light lines lighter:

This makes it easier to see what's going on when you're zoomed way in. A bunch of floating feathery greys gets confusing fast.

Then, I import the image into ProMotion (a spriting program) and reduce it to few colors. Usually 4. While a ton of grey gets confusing, no grey at all makes it impossible to render subpixels.

Next, I draw over it with black and white pixels only. The point of this step is to cut shapes. I clear away all the mess so you can see where the lines are. I dont bother with trying to make sense of the shapes quite yet.

Apparently, I lost the paining that illustrated this step. Bummer. Well, it looks way rough, with a bunch of odd shapes that could be anything.

On a scratchy sketch like the above, this step is hella confusing. Having the original handy for reference is a lifesaver.

Now it's time to make decisions. After some thought, I start to move lines around to make the shapes into something recognizable. At this point, I realize I want to draw the entire figures in the image, so I expand the canvas. This board goes to 125x125, yes? Pretty sure it goes higher than that, even. Now it's 100x125. This sort of pixel counting is always necessary. Had I been truly stuck to 100x100, i would have had to shrink the image down and redo a bunch of work.

I noticed a bunch of anatomy problems too, so I went in and tweaked things. I spend a lot of time on this step because changes are much easier to make now than later.

I consider this step done when all the lines look clean. Straight lines look more or less straight, curves lines don't wobble oddly, etc. This is tricky because some line angles work better than others. 45 degree angles and horizontal/verticals are pretty much always clean. Some angles wont ever look clean until you alias them (and even perfect aliasing will never make them as pretty as those golden angles above -- so consider it when you're composing an image).

Mudbug's hair is particularly confusing in the sketch, so I went and found a reference of Mudbug:

I tried to stick to the original (Bramble Rose) sketch's style as closely as possible (Bramble Rose's hair is more flowy, most notably), but this was good for filling in details I couldn't make out. Edit: Thank heavens! A simple cutie mark! Complex ones pretty much have to be fudges at this size)

I also picked colors from this image, as well as from another Silver Lining image above. I kept the colors very basic for now. Adding a bunch of other tones can wait for later.

Inevitably, I notice things after coloring. Still, it's not an unbearable amount of effort to fix anything at this stage. Mudbug's head was is too big above. This ate up the better part of 30 minutes to fix, but it had to be done. Luckily, I was able to slide some stuff around and make it work. Otherwise, i would have had to make a head from scratch, which I always find hard to do when the rest of the image is already there.

At this point, it looks pretty nifty, but there's another layer of polish before I declare the simple colored line-art finished.

Time to anti-alias this *****! I build color ramps for each of the colors that share a border (which you can see up and to the right of the ponies there. I keep one on the canvas for easy eyedropping, and to help me conceptually arrange the colors), then I futz around with any line that looks jagged. The risk here is overdoing it and making a big ol blurry mess, or using a few to many visual tricks and breaking the consistency of the line. Sometimes though, it rerally does look better to break the rules. This is what makes the pixel artist better than the PC. The PC can shrink an image very well, but once it gets to a certain size, the only proper judge is the human eye. Also, I can get a small curve done with fewer colors than the average PC algorightm.

This skill comes with observation and practice. Thisi is about "finding the pixels between the pixels"

I'm not done with this step yet, but I've finished aliasing Mudbug here. This is where I am currently:

It's subtle, but it makes a big difference, no? Look at muddy's eyes in particular. Those big flat curves don't take well to pixels. With aliasing, they become bonafide curves. Note that I don't alias the outside edges. This is so that it appears unartifacted on different backgrounds.

After I finishing smoothing out Silver Lining, it's on to shading. I might think about some background details here. Maybe the tree that was in the original. Maybe a mudpit. Not sure yet. Then I'll add some text, just for ****s and giggles. Something like "Sky and Soil" or "Clouds and Clay" or something. Cutie marks are one of the last things I put on a pony. Often, they are too detailed for any real faithfulness. When possible, I try do do something iconic. Martini Paradise, above, demonstrates this. The Martini Glass was drawn at a 45 degree angle (remember what I said earlier about 45 degree lines?), and abolutely everything that might obscure it shape has been removed completely. You might not get a real impression of what martini's CM looks like from that representation, but you'll see a pony with a martini glass on its bum. It's the little challenges like this that I think make spriting fun. This would be MUCH easier, and much less satisfying, at 400X600 or w/ev.

[Dessa]

I've been working a bit on my traditional skills and my construction, but I sill have a ways to go. maybe one of these days I'll be able to afford a scanner, so I can post pencils and such.

I've recognized a problem in the above with Mudbug's proportions, and my next task is to hand-sketch it out and work it out by hand, which is admittedly much easier than trying to pixel every problem away, I'm realizing.

In the meantime, I was working on The Big One for the Foal Submission contest:

My largest work to date, for sure. This thing took forever. At least 18 hours to complete. By now I've worked out a much better process, but it still takes time. Perhaps I need to get more familiar with some of the programs functions (I discovered a really useful one late into the game). I'd like to be able to finish something like this in 10. The lack of a scanner added some time, for sure, since I had to eyeball it onto the screen. That probably would have saved me a couple hours.

[Kudalyn]

So cute!

I really really REALLY like that one!

Love the style and shading! Very impressive

[Dessa]

It's my first piece not based on someone else's pencil or design. I see a few things I'd do differently if I were to start over, but I'm pretty happy with it.

[Ginger Mint]

hi hi

New tricks to make art easier are awesome, and I'm sure the great and powerful Trixie would approve. Sometimes I look back at the methods I used to use in the past and wonder how I ever got away with it. But then thats the benefit of pushing yourself to the limit and trying big things, you're more likely to discover something new.

[Dessa]

Current WIP

For an Rp character.

[Ginger Mint]

hi hi

Is that a color palette I see floating in midair? (And are those the color of her hooves, or shoes?

[Dessa]

Yes, that's a palette. If you're ever unsure if somethng of mine is WIP and you see one of those, then it is. It helps me keep the colors organized, and makes it easier to eyedrop them. I generally start out painting the basic colors, then I set up color ramps for aliasing. In this case, I've only aliased the face, since it looked particularly scratchy without it. I'm going to shade and highlight next, then add any background details.

Her hooves are painted, so that's red hoof-polish. I'm hoping this becomes clearer when I give her a topcoat highlights, so they'll look glossy. Polish color is the one color I'm not quite settled on. It looks good pushed in a purpler direction, but I kind of like the edginess of the red.

This is the first full pony I'll have finished that was designed and sketched from zero by myself. Silver Lining is just a head, and all the others that don't suck were sketched by brianblackberry or CatNapper. So yay! I'm having fun with this one.

[Dessa]

Getting there:

Zeroing in on those hard-to solve, nagging problems. THe right, rear leg here needs to slope a little more gently, and the bent forehoof was intended to look like the knee was coming at the camera, but I've next to no practice with foreshortening, so it just looks kinda deformed.

Close, though.

[ButtercupSaiyan]

Oh, I just love these!

The latest WIP:

Pencil: Bramble Rose

Rear pony is Mudbug's design.

There are some weird problems with the rear hooves there that need a second look. Not sure how to position Silver Lining's right rear leg there. The faces need tweaking to get the character of the pencils better.

But with this one, I just can't but feel that the pencil sketch was definitely superior. It had more style and those loose lines actually look better. If I was your inkist/finisher on a professional workflow, I would be able to take that basic concept art and retouch your small errors to make it look better than the pixelart you currently have.\

Don't forget that you can make your lines wider than one pixel and also practice the "lost line" technique! (Lost and found edges) http://www.btinternet.com/~leoarte/edges.html It means sometimes the line tapers, or ends suddenly and sometimes it's not there at all and then suddenly picks up again . If you study a lot of really fine vector work, sumi-e or classic comics, you'll know what I mean.

The thing about pixel art is that you have to be really careful not to lose the detail and style you had in your original draft. The roundness of the pixels, not pillow shading everything, etc. I used to do pixel art way back before Windows 64 bit MS Paint became crap.

So what's the latest app for pixel stuff? (Please don't say GraphicsGale, it makes me want to stab my eye out when I'm already comfortable with Flash and I can just turn off anti-aliasing and work with a limited palette/PNG dithering for a retro look.)

TL;DR what program do you use, and single-width pixel lines don't look as good as they could.

[Dessa]

THanks, I'm glad to finally hear some criticism on that piece. I stalled a while back on that for various reason, among them that there's a fishy perspective problem in there, and that the lack of comment on it denoted a lack of enthusiasm. It suggested there was something not there that I wasn't seeing.

A: Yes, the pencil is superior. Having worked previously only with Brian's style which works well with clean, thin lines, and treyin to apply the same thing here didn't work out so well. This could definitely use a different take, and my lack of experience shows here. I'll look over some of the styles you've mentioned (I'm familiar with some of them, but haven't really studied them) and mess around a bit. I'm not really sure HOW to capture this style here is my main problem, I guess, although there are little spots where I eel like it translated better than others (Silver Lining's hair tendrils, for instance, felt quite new and different to me).

The line work was in general incomplete. Generally, I lay out the forms with lines FIRST, then color, then I screw with lines more, since I can work directly with the colors to do thinks like AAing and the like. AT some point in this project, I got too in the mode of following a sort of formula, whereas it started as a "let's try something different" project.

I started messing with variable width lines later on with the Trixi-Pixie piece, and it looked good in places, I think. There's a lot I would do differently with that one looking back, but there are some bright spots I'm pretty proud of as well.

As for lost and found edges, I'm familiar with the concepts, and I've even applied them here and there, I think I could stand to explore it further, and this is a good one to do this on.

As for the program I use, it's Cosmigo Promotion 4.7. THere are more recent versions, but this is the only pirated version I could find. And as I am jobless for now, I won't be buying the latest one anytime soon.

tl;dr I've been intending to get the at Mudbug/Silver Lining another look for a while now, and you've given me some stuff to think about. Thanks again. And hell, if you feel like tossing up an edit or two with examples, be my guest! I'll get back to that one when I finish my current project, Rue, above (which I AM trying to hit with familiar techniques).

Now then, what do you like about what I've done so far? What are my strengths, in your estimation?

[Dessa]

Took a meandering path, but I'm calling this done. Looking at the early draft posted here, it's a MAJOR improvement. Trixie and Pixie felt a bit like luck to me in that I know the base image has flaws in shape and anatomy, but the end result turned out well anyway.

Rue, on the other hand, I just kept moving the lines around until it looked right. The initial image was bad, but I'm not covering up as many fundamental flaws with polish because fixed them instead (well, some of them).

[Brauner02]

Those are pretty amazing, i was never able to do custom sprites myself, only modding. it's nice to see people doing it thought!