Minerva Mink :: Pixel Art Detail

whoops -- I uploaded the wrong edit . fixed now.

It's true you didn't AA to the max. That is because to be blunt, your sense of what AAing is is off, and so you do not do AA correctly in many places. Your application of AA looks more like blur in many places; And in some places, applying AA would not have changed any pixels, though you have done so (In these areas, eg. the eyes, there is quite noticable blur.)

In brief , antialiasing is a way of approximating sub-pixel shapes; the most common (and best looking) of these shapes is a triangle which spans from one 'stair step''s outer corner to the next 'stair step''s outer corner.
This means that at one corner, the opacity is 0%, at the other corner the opacity is 100%.
See this illustration:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v449/neota/tech/aatut.png

Antialiasing in pixel art approximates the opacity gradients with the available colors (see the version just to the right of the top left corner.)

Curving modifies this (see the top-right corner; it's corrected for curving); but mostly, triangular AA looks best and you hardly ever need something that is very different from triangular AA.


An edit demonstrating how the AA could be improved on your pic. I added two buffer shades as well:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v449/neota/edits/aatut-mmink.png

(It could be improved considerably beyond that. I've certainly missed some places.)

I edited it some last night to make the eyes a little bigger, they seemed too small.

And not enough AA?  Wow ... ... ... Well then, I guess my definition of too much AA needs to be reworked.

Actually I don't think you AA'd this enough, alot of the lines seem very jaggy and segmented.

Pretty cool. That's not that much AA, it could be much more.