Dragonfree's pixel art thread... of doom.

[Desgardes]

Theyre nice.

No the best, WHOAMGIWANTYOURBABIES, but You are on the right trail :>

 

[Tabitha]

Wow, amazing ^o^
I love it! Jolteon looks so cool.

 

[Opacus]

Pretty nice stuff Dragon. Though I think you should try some more detailed stuff. All of these are simple and cartoony.

 

[Dragonfree]

Phew, it's been a while since I checked this thread.

Sugimori art is the official art of the Pokémon, as in the Pokémon as drawn by Ken Sugimori (the main designer). TCG stands for Trading Card Game, and thus TCG art is basically the pictures found on Pokémon cards. I have no idea what the heck dreemxweever meant by "Japanese animé versions of sprites from the Pokémon games", but whatever it is it's not what they actually are. o.o

Some elaboration on exactly what you mean by "more detailed stuff" would be nice. I make sprites in the style of the official Pokémon sprites, so if it's stylistically you're talking about, then I'm not interested. If not, as I said, please elaborate.

Anyway:

Fwee, new Leta line sprites. :D Here are the shinies, if you're interested:

And the old ones, for reference:

The new ones are all scratch except that I reused the shape of Leta's head from the old sprite (which was originally an Eevee stripped of all its features). I'm especially happy with the new Letal. :3

 

[Shattered Moon]

Wow, your art is beautiful! It's very admirable. :) Keep up the good work.

 

[Innagadadavida]

I really like the Fakemon! Can't wait to see some more!

 

[Dragonfree]

That was kinda spammy. :/

D/P-style Letaligon in its old pose, for those who prefer it big and imposing. With this sprite, the evolution line together looks like this:

 

[Samson]

those are very nice. the shading just seems absolutely flawless. only thing i can point out is the fact that the middle and final pokes in that chain look a lot alike. maybe you should try to make them look a little different by giving the last one some red marking on its body. that way you can make more use of the shades used for the eyes.

 

[Dragonfree]

Giving it red markings would kind of ruin the general concept of the design; Leta is designed as the epitome of plain, simple purity and innocence which then grows a protective armor. The basic idea is that without the armor we'd have that cute little white thing with big red eyes and a squiggly tail, just in a slightly larger form (admittedly with claws). If I started messing with the color scheme of the body, that would subtract from this aspect of the design concept.

Letaligon differs from Letal a great deal more than, say, Ponyta differs from Rapidash, anyway; aside from the size difference, Letaligon has fangs, very prominent claws and a dramatically larger and differently-shaped mask. It is not a matter of some small detail (like Arcanine having a mane all around its neck but not Growlithe) or some almost stylistic difference (like Muk's expression looking more evil than Grimer's). All in all I must conclude that at least in comparison with some other Pokémon, Letal and Letaligon are really not all that hard to tell apart.

 

[GamerAse]

Your tutorials are the best! I finally learned how to make half-decent pixel art. You're the best. Also, your splices (it's the correct term, isn't it?) are some of the best i've seen. Kudos to you. Also, i liked the old version of the last Leta evolution better... Oh, whatever. Your pixel-overs are also the best I've seen (think that's all!).

 

[Dragonfree]

Two pixel-overs - both of them suggestions, actually. Firstly, a Dialga that somebody suggested and made me remember I had always intended to make one since I love Dialga:

And secondly, a Jirachi made for somebody who was making a ROM hack. It was made from an image he provided, which later, when I searched DeviantArt for Jirachi, turned out to have been a thumbnail of this picture by crayon-chewer on DeviantArt. I don't know if he got permission from the artist to use it in the ROM hack, but at least I asked after creating it. Meanwhile I am giving full credit to this crayon-chewer for the original picture:

 

[Dragonfree]

A Palkia to go with that Dialga. My God, Palkia has to be one of the most difficult Pokémon ever to sprite. Whatever I may have said about Palkia's D/P sprite looking bad, I can forgive them now that I discovered that Palkia uses the full allotted palette of sixteen colors and a grand total of one does not appear as a perfectly ordinary shade on some part of its body. This means that there is one dark gray color for the outline, and then the possibility of reusing the shadow colors of some of its hues. That thing is freakishly difficult to work with, and I really think it came out surprisingly good considering that. I thought I'd have to make up an entirely new shading scheme to be able to work with the D/P Palkia's seemingly awful palette, but somehow that pink looks considerably better on a large pixel-over like this than a tiny sprite. Maybe the outline shading, which I changed quite a bit more, has something to do with it. Even the shiny version looks halfway decent:

Also, despite being twelve pixels shorter, Palkia looks bigger than Dialga in the pixel-over because Palkia is more massive; fewer pixels out of the available space are transparent. Similar concept to those two Letaligon sprites. Here they are together, so you can see what I mean:

EDIT: Ah, what the heck. I made a shiny Dialga too.

 

[GamerAse]

Simply... amazing.
You are the true Sprite Goddess :t012:

 

[Dragonfree]

Gah. Ditto. Easy as hell to outline; a nightmare to shade. A huge blob of one solid color will never look good in such a tiny palette. ><; But here it is.

I'm not sure what the heck I can do with that thing to make it look halfway decent. :/

 

[Gridiron]

Like I said at SPPF, your Dialga is perfect. Your Palkia is really good, but not as good as Dialga. It's still good enough not to need any improvement (well, maybe some tiny improvements, but I can't say exactly where it needs it). (I wish I would have checked here before I started to make my own Palkia sprite, because ours are similar in size, and everyone will think I stole yours, but oh well (I made mine so it would be a similar size to your Dialga sprite)).

Ditto's okay. It can't really be great, not because of your spriting skills, but because Ditto's just a blob and it's hard to make a great sprite of it.

 

[Dragonfree]

Pixel-overs of this Mew that I drew and the Sugimori Butterfree. I don't like the Butterfree much but I can't really put my finger on why; I love the Mew's head, but hate the shading on the body.

Both made for my sig.

 

[Blennix]

Your work is very impressing. Palkia and Dialga look outstanding also.