My god! JosephSeraph proving yet again what a mega talent he is. You picked the right guy for this!

S-Sorry, but again, I prefer the old ones, colour-wise at least. The actual designs are great but something about the skin colour makes them look... sickly is the best description I can come up with. I think it might be the highlights. They appear too white/grey instead of being closer to the skin tone. Maybe try varying the colours a tad away from the washed-out ones.

I took a closer look and you use a lot of grey colours for shadows and highlights. It really washes out the colours that are there (which are nice ones!) and makes them drabber than they should be.

so everything that's remotely dark isn't allowed colors? dyhalto please. he was using ff6 & rudras tiles and you think that made it dark & gritty?





rudras was literally about stopping the apocalypse as a result of human pollution. no idea what you're on.

i kinda agree with libby's "grey skin" thing but also don't really mind it. i'm also a big fan of joser in general so *shrug*

Thanks for all the feedback guys! As you can see, the second batch is quite different from the first one. I'm experimenting still, and later I'll come back to the portraits and rendering them with the style that Felds will prefer, and that I feel are also better technically. With that in mind, all the feedback is incredibly helpful!

I haven't done pixel art portraits in a while, but I"ve done lots and lots of tiles -- so I'm bringing the limited palette mentality far too intensely into the faces I feel. While with some of them I feel pretty happy (Metis' headgear texture is by far what I'm the happiest about) overall I'm far from happy with the palette, Dais in particular might be a bit too colorful.

Next batch of portraits I'll try to come with a more complex palette and see if it works! This way I can work on smoother shading on the skin without relying on whites (which are actually grays) for instance.

I'm also considering doing drawn portraits and rendering them colour-limited through irfanview to give them a PS1 rendered look, but that'd require approval (it would look fitting though, since I touch it up at hand it'd have a distinct pixel art look while having the palette control of a regular painting of mine)

Anyway all that detailed feedback is extremely precious!
And as @Craze mentioned by citing 2 marvelous examples i'm not going to do that by dulling colours out, but instead by working on a more solid palette : )

Testing a completely different approach; doing HD art and shrinking / color reducing it, then touching it up as pixel art.




we're torn since the new technique looks more PS1-ish than SNES-y even though it only has 20 colors (technically possible on the SNES)

I'll try "raw" pixel art again, but maybe with a broader, browner palette.
Perhaps i should take a few days to fetch SNES era portraits, deconstruct them, study their palettes etc. then resume work on this!

Thanks for the feedback, guys.

Funny, I prefered the greyish tones of the other personally. I have no problems with that.

My only issue is that they all look like if they were smirking or happy about something, but your new one has a better, more determined attitude I think.

Regardless I prefer the new ones to the rips.

author=Craze
dyhalto please. he was using ff6 & rudras tiles and you think that made it dark & gritty?

No. I was thinking it was dark & gritty on account of the game's summary and all the elaborate details put into characters, the bestiary, the newspaper clipping events, et al. It's the stuff of a game more likely to follow a politically driven logical storyline and less likely to be a series of fetch quests in order to defeat the dark god. Usually those kinds of games avoid the bubbly smiled pink and purple hair folk.


Anyway, the whole thing will be a package deal in the end anyway. We have no idea what the new sprites and tilesets will look like yet, so what the heck am I on? Feld and Joe, forget I said anything. My comment was too in-the-moment.