Dragonfree's umpteenth pixel art thread

[Dragonfree]

Try #3462352345 at making a pixel art thread that does not die. Please do correct me if the silly rule that even art threads cannot be bumped after a month has been reconsidered, but it got one of my threads locked in the past.

Thunderyu, a member of a fake dragon legendary trio. I'm a bit unhappy with the fact I couldn't fit the wings in as being bigger in comparison to the body, since a major part of the design is that the wings should be huge, but eh. (I'm thinking about shrinking the body to somewhat remedy this, actually.) It's made from scratch, but the pose is inspired by the old sprite, which was a very heavily edited R/S Aerodactyl base with Charizard parts:

Yeah. The other members of the trio should be coming soon.

 

[Nicolas]

I like it! so, thunderyu, polaryu, and volcaryu... 2 more I guess

 

[Dragonfree]

Yes, there will be two more.

It's a pixel-over of a Vulpix that I drew, actually from a while back; I was just redrawing the ears and curls and shortening the neck. Now the head looks too small. Argh. ><

 

[Yume Tsuki]

it looks nice ^^ keep up the good work

 

[the bitter end.]

Nice; Thunderyu seems better since I've read TQFL (Thunderyu is awesome)

 

[Nicolas]

I for one, actually like the shadings of your sprites and your pixel-overs, it looks more like a 3d-ish effect on the sprites

 

[Yume Tsuki]

yeah he's right =) vulpix looks 3d

 

[Dragonfree]

Thanks. The shading on the Vulpix still bugs me personally, but eh. :/

Volcaryu, the next of the trio. I don't like the sprite as much as I liked the Thunderyu, but it does fix some of the things that always bothered me about the old sprite (which I otherwise thought was the best of the trio then). Here's the old one, for comparison:

 

[agurcsik]

Wow! That's amazing! You should do more stuff like you did with the Vulpix, too.

 

[Dragonfree]

Thank you.

Here's a beta version of Polaryu. Unlike the other two, I was giving Polaryu a bit of a makeover in design as well as in sprite quality.

I hate the wings and absolutely cannot figure out what to do with the shading on them. And the crystals on the limbs look pasted on. And it's a bit monochromatic. But I like the head, the pose and the new design. I'll do something with those wings and possibly reconsider the placements and/or number of crystals later, but for now I'd like some input on it so far. This is what the old one looked like:

 

[Snowfire]

These are great! I like how you did the Vulpix, you should do more!

 

[Gary the Magic Fairy]

The shading on the wings isn't bad. I think it works well. Something about the placement of the back wing kinda bothers me, though, but I can't seem to figure out exactly why.

I agree with you on the crystals, they do seem to be a little off. The arm ones are too big, perhaps?

The head... that point in the nose/mouth area seems like it would look better if it was rounded off a little more; it might that part look less.. flat. I'm not a fan of that dark spot on the neck, either. :x

The pose and shading are very well done.

Nice job on the other two, also. I really like Volcaryu, especially the head.

 

[Nicolas]

yay the 3 dragons are done :3 and your base for the Polaryu sprite is Charizard right?

 

[Yume Tsuki]

Your Volcaryu is really improved i like it now, Polaryu hmmm.. I got it maybe you should put the wings a bit higher

 

[Chibi Pika]

I love Polaryu's new design--the old one was always my least favorite of the three.

I don't really mind the wing shading, but the wing structure does seem a bit odd, mostly because of how the bone from the elbow to the wrist joint is so much longer than the one from the shoulder to the elbow. It seems like if the wing was outstretched, the skin around the elbow area would have to stretch way more than usual. This is mostly due to the sprite size restrictions causing the posing though. I have to say however, that the uniqueness of the wings is still insanely cool.

For fixing the paste-y look of the limb crystals, I'd just recommend messing with moving their position around. The arm ones kind of seem to be laying right across the shoulder blade. The leg ones coming off the knee doesn't seem so bad, though.

(And I forgot to mention this when replaying on sppf, but I really love Volcaryu's shading. Not only is it awesome looking, but it really embodies the D/P style, imo.)

~Chibi~

 

[Dragonfree]

Thanks for all the comments. :3 I finally finished Polaryu in a way that I'm decently happy with, after a lot of tinkering:

Basically, I redid the wing shading completely with a whole bunch of dithering, moved the base of the wing and slightly shortened the "forearm" of it, added a visible mouth and shortened the far arm by one pixel, aside from redoing the crystals. I tried a number of things that didn't really look right until I was finally reasonably happy with how this looked.

 

[Snowfire]

Polaryu looks much better now that you've fixed the wings, and I love how you did Volcaryu's head!

 

[TB Pro]

Wow, these sprites look great Dragonfree! I knew you riocked, but I didn't know you rocked this good! Polaryu looks better! I love them all, though I seem to prefer Volcaryu best. Well, BOL!

 

[An-chan]

You really are good! Those three dragons look awesome, I think the shading on them is expecially well made. I like Polaryu's color scheme, it's very icy indeed, and I think its wings have the best shading of those three. The crystals might be a bit off, but that's a minor beauty fault. I also like Thuderyu's wings, but the blue gems on its yellow skin remind me of Sweden... =D All the three of them look fabulous! Keep up the great work!

That Vulpix is awesome, too, I like the pose and I don't think its head looks too small. Something about the shading, however, does bother me... I think it's because the shade differences are too steep. The lightest shade is so much lighter than the darkest shade it looks almost like it's glowing, which makes it look a pit... plastic-ish? I don't really know. It does look 3D, but maybe you should try toning down the darkest shade a bit, or then darkening the lighter ones.

 

[Dragonfree]

Since Amachi has assured me that I'm allowed to bump this, more stuff.

Basically, I went on a spriting spree to make D/P-style back sprites and animation frames for my Leta family of fake Pokémon, who already had D/P-style front sprites. The animations tend to be a bit lazier than the real game animations, whose frames tend to be completely redrawn instead of just moving body parts, but meh.

I actually edited a couple of pixels in the front frame 1 sprite (in the tail and one paw), but that's not really something anybody who hasn't been staring at the old sprite for hours would ever notice. I despise the shading on the back sprites, but I despise the shading style of the D/P back sprites in general.

My favorite front frame 1 sprite becomes my favorite frame 2 and back sprites. Letal always seems to turn out better than the others for some reason. When I looked at these again yesterday I noticed that the highlighting on the head looks a little skewed, but I haven't been able to try to fix it yet.

My least favorite set. The front frame 1 sprite is actually new, or semi-new, because the original "official" front frame 1 sprite was in a different pose; I always kind of disliked that because it looked too small, and I had made an alternate pose that made it look big and imposing, but it always looked like it was about to fall over and I could never really be bothered to fix it. Now that I was going to waste my time animating it, I thought I might as well grab that sprite and fix it instead of animating the small one, and I don't think I entirely succeeded because it still looks awkward; the animation is even worse because even though the mouth is sort of passable in my opinion, the left front leg that's down in frame 2 (and somewhat the other one) looks ridiculously stiff and I absolutely cannot figure out what in the world I can do with it to make it look less so (don't think I didn't try, although I think some of my attempts only made it worse). Help, please?

Then the back sprite is sort of meh-ish; it looks kind of silly when it's just the head compared to Letal showing part of the whole body, but that's what the D/P back sprites tend to do. The animation is pure laziness, as it is ridiculously hard to get the 'horns' looking right in perspective and to make it actually move its head would require stumbling upon another angle where I can get it right and that looks natural as movement from the original pose, so I just went "What the hell, let's just make it blink and open its mouth or something." I might make it do something more interesting later.

Oh, and I made this random scratch Gastly the other day. It also looks kind of wrong and I'm not sure why.