Playing with a rendering method.

Contrary I saw that on TIGSource, looking good, lovely colours.

Madmax, those trees... <3 Inspiration for some of the trees in prelude.

His torso is a little tilted back, so you might have problems with the idle animation, but apart from that if that's what you want him to look like it's pretty much done I'd say.

Yep. It's suppose to be me and irl I like to stand with my thighs as far forward and chest as far back as torque will allow me. So yeah. Perfect.

Geti: At first I didn't know what to think, that's so much different from your usual prom-esque concept art. But I think it's perfect.

Cheers, contrary. I figured I'd take a step away from bright colours for a piece or two, and it was nice to actually do some rendering for once.

I like it, but it seems really... inactive. His arms are at his side like he's a doll... he should be using his arms more. Maybe holding his cigarette?

The center scales are very good, but the ones farther from the middle look a bit off.

I think I'm done with this one now

Madmax, that's freaking awesome. The characters seem to clash a little with the terrain but everything is just so goddamn pretty!

The good:
It's just kick-ass as usual.


The bad:
It has a low contrast. Sure, it's in the sunlight, but the grass should be greener, and stuff like that. (Other than the lack of contrast, the grass is awesome. :3 )
The shadows should be darker.

The firepit looks odd, mainly the light rocks and then suddenly dark rocks.

The fence looks too neat and perfect, like it was made by a machine. It doesn't fit in with the medieval theme of the picture.


The ugly:
Wait what?

Now, I'm not quite the maniacal expert you are, but I believe that things can be scorched, and said scorching can be fairly definite, with little fading in and out.

I think he means the closest rocks, how they seem to be a different mineral then the white ones. I thought I could give them variation and still have them look natural, not the first time I've done that.

Ah, so right about that fence, I'm not good at giving things grungy textures. Anyway thanks guys.

Madmax, lol go get hired and make some money, guy. If I was rich I'd hire you to pixel backgrounds to hang up around my house.

Aw man. I spent like a tonne of yesterday and today working on this chick. The guy, for the most part, came together very easily. I was dreaming about spriting this guy for a while, and every part just came to me even though I'd never done anything like it before.

This new ♥♥♥♥♥, on the other hand, bugs me to ♥♥♥♥ in so many ways. The colour scheme, the proportions, the pose, the look, every single part is pissing me off, though I think that the arms and midsection are in most need of reworking now. It's like a table cloth that wrinkles further the more I try to smooth it out. What do you guys do when you can't make a thing work? Do you just give up or do you force yourself to do more? I think I have been doing far too much "Make one WIP then take a 4 month break".

Maybe I should just try animating the guy, does anyone have any good guides/suggestions?

It could probably be worse.
Like you said, the guy was easy because your brain had a clear idea of what he looked like already. You might want to try just doodling out what you want her to look like before you try again; even if the sketch isn't very good it's still fine - the idea is more that you figure out exactly what you are going to sprite in your brain.

Do the whole iterative thing. Do one draft iteration to try to get what you were going for onto the page/canvas/digital space/whatever and then fade it and move it to the side (or paint on top) and you'll find it goes a lot smoother. It's usually wise to do 3 or 4 iterations of one idea to see where you can take it, but you'll usually want to have much more than one starting point for a design to explore the idea space more (though for something where you've got a clear idea of what you want, that's likely unnecessary).I think it would've been more natural looking to use the same "mineral" as you've used on the surrounding ground, because localities generally have only a few types of rock commonly available anyway.Mmmn, perhaps, but I wanted to go for more of a portrait feel and explore the rendering technique without worrying about dynamic posing

Some fine portraits

And a portrait of a friend.