My start in pixel art - first character,

Hey Ho Community

I’m new to pixel art or art in general.
Befor I got into pixel art a week ago, I just did some image manipulation with gimp.

I started with the aseprite demo and Sunday I bought the full version.
So here is my first character I made with aseprite.
It’s a little apple character for my plattformer game I make.
Apple-Character_Idle_v04

The Sprite is 32x32 has 12 images and I exported it as .gif with 400% scaling for better view in the forum.

What do you think? Any suggestions?

3 Likes

Panda eyes?

This is an excellent start in pixel art, you seem to have a good understanding of the basic principles. There’s only 2 areas where I think you can improve; otherwise, the rest is subjective.

  1. The shading on the apple is pretty good, but it would look much better with a bit of hue-shifting from the darker, red shades to a highlight that’s more orange/orange-yellow. Don’t fret though, hue-shifting is something I didn’t learn myself until years of doing pixel art.

  2. The shading of the apple definitely conforms to the overall shape of an average apple, but it’s missing proper shading for the face. Shading is important to giving the illusion of dept to a subject, and all that’s missing in your animation is shading around the eyes and mouth. Without it, it looks like the face is just hovering over the apple body (unless that’s the look you’re going for).

I can’t wait to see what else you can do, keep up the practice and you’ll be an even greater pixel artist! :+1:

Thx for the replys.

The panda eyes:
Yeah, I’m really not into faces /eyes yet.
So how would you do the eyes?

I heared of hue shifting, but I don’t understand it completely. Maybe something to focus on in future versions of the apple.
But I will definetly try the shading around the eyes. That sounds easy whith a great effect.l

But next I will focus on some more characters like a worm or some tilesets I can use for my platformer game.

Often I was frustrated, when I see what artist do, and thought, “I’m never be able to do that”
That’s just wrong.
In this one week I learned that everyone can do art, even me. Just keep on track practicing is the way to go.
I’m pretty impressed of myself, whst I am able to do.
Never thought like this in the past.

So, if some newbies read this.
Don’t hold back, like me for several years. Give it a try and keep on learning. Everyone has to start small.

Maybe white fill with black pupils? Like normal eyes, not inversed.
With some outside “one step darker” red tone for outlining.

I think the main issue is the depth, your current one looks like the eye’s highlight has borders(So panda eyes.) if you add a larger reflection on the eyes towards the top right corner and a little more depth it could look better.
Though I could have spent more time here is an edited version: image
While we are here you could also improve the consistency of your light source as the shadows and highlights don’t really move around with the motion. Since it’s a rounded shape it would probably have a rounded highlight and shadow.

Black (dark) colors generally shouldn’t be used for anything except eyes pupils for this size of pixel art. So outlines of eyes better “be done” by contrast between white (light) color of eyeball and normal (darker than white or light) color of body. So you will have kind of infinitely small outline without really drawing one.