Quoted By:
146/151
I drew the birds 20% bigger. They are a full 3x larger than Gen III sprites.
As I approach the end of this first pass, I think these birds highlighted a few things I still struggle with. Rendering feathers is probably the most difficult part of this so far. And fire is very easy to overwork.
After finishing the last five sprites, I'm going to revisit Bulbasaur and do a second pass on all of them. The earliest sprites will need complete recoloring, as I move on I expect I'll just be doing more refining. Starting with Dewgong I switched to using a single color per section for outlines, whereas before I was using multiple colors for outlines for a more 3D effect. Ultimately I prefer the bolder look of a darker outline - the higher resolution gives me more room to nuance highlights and shadows, without needing the tint the outline so much.
As I told David, this is the first pixel art I've ever done, and committing to doing 151 individual pieces was a big way to start. A lot of these I got 90% of the way there, knowing that fresh eyes and more experience would help me get that last 10%. But the work will never be truly done, I can always keep refining even after finishing the game.
When I do the backsprites I'll be redrawing the Gen IV backsprites, and I think that will give me more insight into how the professionals do it. So I may hit the backsprites first before tackling the second pass of the front sprites. I'll also have to be careful to make sure the colors of the front and back sprites line up accurately.
Outside of the earliest sprites I've been pulling colors straight from the Gen IV sprites. The exceptions are Porygon and Ditto - for them I used Mew's pallette. Porygon's blue sections are from Mew's shiny sprite. In my game/headcanon, Porygon was engineered using Mew's DNA after creating Mewtwo through genetics was a disaster. :)
When front and back are nailed down I'll do the shiny versions.
