Well like I said it's not quite text-book pillowshading(though some of it is) but just a lot of banding. I'm not very familiar with banding but I can tell that something is off and I'm gonna chalk it up to that. Banding is very similar to pillowshading in that you let your lineart define your shading. For example on almost every instance of muscle you've drawing you have your shadows outline the lineart of the muscles.
An example of pillowshading on one of your pieces would be the shading on the minotaur's head when it's facing up:
The shading nearly follows the outline of the head perfectly. Now this can either be poor shading or simply poor lightsource choice. If you choose a lightsource that's directly in front of the sprite even if your shading is correct it's going to look boring and "wrong" like it does here. For lightsources I typically choose top-left, or if I'm feeling lazy and want to copy/paste horizontally I pick above the sprite.
I'd also say your method of shading doesn't help, where everything gradually goes from dark to light. That tends to exaggerate the banding/pillowshading issues tenfold. It might be better to have the midtones be much less prominent(especially on metals where contrast is sorely needed, this shading methods make metals look more like dull plastic). Other things you can do to help is break black outlines within brighter areas of color.
One more thing, while I love a lot of the lineart, especially things like the dragon's head and such, the muscles tend to be sorely lacking. Most of the muscles are very square/straight and really kill any sort of organic feeling. However I'm kind of pulling straws at the advice I can give and if you really want to improve I may suggest grabbing some books from your local library that focuses on drawing anatomy/volume/lighting/shading as all of these things translate to pixel art. You'd be amazed at how well your pixel art will improve after studying traditionally for a while. You may even want to head over to pixelation(wayofthepixel.net) and post your stuff. There are a lot of people over there that will completely draw over and explain a lot of the anatomy/volume knowledge of the changes they make.
Try to also avoid "bad lines" or lines that don't step with a ratio. For example a diagonal line is a 1:1 step, for every step up or down, you also move to the left or right. Isometric lines have a 2:1 step, or for every step up, you draw two pixels to the left or right. This is to avoid a lot of trouble later on(they're VERY difficult to AA, and without AA can look pretty bad). You can read about it a little more here:
http://www.spriteland.com/tutorials/...s-tutorial.htm or
http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/foru....asp?TID=11299
Now, these pieces are fairly large so they're not the easiest things in the world to edit, but I tried my best to do a bit of an edit and to explain some things I did:
09-11-2012, 11:40 AM
goodnight graal.
Linear Mode
