Actually the back legs look best to me!

Main problems are front legs, and attachment of legs.

Insects have 6 legs attached from the thorax (middle body section). I guess you don't want that degree of realism, 4 legged insects are cute too... even if you don't actually have a thorax, the legs should be attached somewhere in the middle.

The eyes could be more towards the sides.

Light looks good except the strong shadows near upper outlines. Your light comes from above, no need for the darkest tone there.

Quick edit:


Yes, the highlights were misplaced, and too dark too. Don't trust that sphere: it's a graphic design, not at all a realistic light example!
Besides, there isn't one light example: different materials appear completely different under the same lighting.

I changed the front legs, moved the left eye, tried to suggest compound eyes (which reflect light very uniquely: in this I failed!), suggested segments (not so good either), made new antennas. More highlights next to eyes and mouth, to give depth there.

Your color ramps are uneven, too saturated, and too monochromatic. I addressed a few of those but not all: lightened the 2 darkest blue which were too close to black and too distant from the next blue; introduced a lighter blue shifted towards green; desaturated and hue-shifted pinks.

Checked some aa and banding issues, not all and not perfectly. Mostly, my antennas might not work so well on some backgrounds. Depends on what you'll do with it.


Edited by Manupix - 29 October 2009 at 4:50pm

AA = Anti-aliasing, meaning attempts at mitigating the jagginess of outlines. There is a simple tutorial here, first one on the first page. I did a little of that on the upper outlines of body and head. Sorry, I'm so used to write 'aa' I didn't notice, awful me!
The outer outlines of sprites is usually not aa'ed, because of variable backgrounds. That's the problem with my version of the antennas antennae.

Banding is what happens when you have 2 or more contiguous identical blocks of pixels. You have some on the lower head outline, I didn't fix it. A very detailed explanation here.

A color ramp is a subset of colors from your palette, basically the 'same color' going from dark to light. You have 3 ramps: blues, greys, pinks.
The tones in a ramp should be evenly spaced; your former blues had too close darks and a gap after them. Then, the ramps in a piece should integrate, not just stand separately to each other. You shift hues within each ramps to achieve this (and also to make better shading: realistic shading has either bluer shadows - outside scenes with blue sky - or warmer -inside scenes in warm colored rooms). More of this here and there.

It's much more than 'rule of thumb' and 'personal pref': making a good palette is an essential element of any good pixel art, and it is by no means obvious. You have to understand how colors work, relative to each other, to the whole, and how the eye works with them. I'm just barely beginning to understand this myself, but it's probably the most fascinating stuff I learnt doing PA.

Search the forums for all these questions, they have been discussed a lot times, here and at Pixellation.

Using my edits: you're supposed to redo them by yourself, not copy-paste them (as it looks like you did, partly). Not that I care the slightest actually, but you'll learn more doing it! ;) Also, edits are usually quick stuff just to make a point, they need to be refined.

Looking forward to more bugz!

Don't worry about this. Everyone has their own style and it develops naturally over time, without any effort (other than the general effort of improving at art, of course). If you try to force it, it'll be obvious and leave your art feeling stilted.

Anyhow, looks like you're doing a great job, and I don't want to discourage you, but there may be issues with this getting into the gallery if you submit it with Manupix's eyes. I know he said he doesn't care, but the rules for gallery submission are pretty stringent.