#2: He's honestly a little bit creepy with that stare, more "perv" than suave, but that's cool, could see a bit of an older gent with that face.
From the first time I saw that "Smoking Pipe Man" clipart I recognized the look as being rather creepy, perhaps even sinister. Though, the idea that it was a "perv" look never occurred to me. But, yeah, I thought his stare would work well for a GH character.
#3: A like it, though honestly "he" looks a little feminine on the left half, whilst the right side looks a little bit.... off. The arm is too slender, whilst the sleeve looks like it's in a different style to the other, more visible, arm.
Yes, I realized even before I released #3 that the arm looked a bit... off. It did look kinda skinny to me. However, I was thinking of this character as a slim teenager type with thin arms. And anime-style tends to be a bit out of proportion. Though, perhaps I should have worked with it more before releasing.
2. The shading on bpsdapper's cheeks looks kind of smudgy, it might look better if you used line art to convey the contours of his face.
That's probably the result of drawing the character in pencil (based on an ink sketch), scanning into the computer, then trying to shade and color the result. Maybe some day I'll try to get a PC drawing pad. Anyway, I might try to clean up the lines a bit later, but I'm just not up to it ATM.
3. I can't figure out what's going on with bpsspikey's hair. The hair framing the face looks okay, but the outer edges look kind of weird and 2-dimensional.
I must have erased some of the points on the end of the hair spikes in an effort to make it sharper and less pixelated. In my altered version (below) I tried to add some of that back, as well as add more shading.
The two human portraits mix cel and non-cel shading. To me, that just looks off (and I'm not sure the light sources are consistent, either).
I agree that mixing cel and non-cel shading in a portrait makes it look... odd. I try to avoid that. Except that we're supposed to make these portraits in an 80's cartoon style (which means cel shading would be more appropriate), but my drawing technique in pencil tends to come out in non-cel shading. I'm still learning how to correct this inconsistency.
And spikey-head's hair needs more shading, period--the lack is what's making it look flat.
I tried to add a bit more in the updated version below. But I'm not sure how to correct it further. I can manage to shade some types of hair, but I'm finding it crazy difficult to shade his crazy spiked hair.
The robot has consistent cel shading with an upper-left light source, which is part of what makes it look better than the other two.
If I'm not mistaken, the original robot was generated in a 3D modeling program and was given cel shading of some sort. That's probably why the cel shading is so perfectly consistent.
Anyway, I updated spikey hair's portrait. This version has a corrected right arm, the shading on the jacket was made to be more in-line with cel-shading, the position of eyes made even, a hair spike moved out of the left eye, the hair spikes given more shape, and the hair given a bit more shading.
Before:
After:
In-GameBefore:
After:
Anway, thanks for the feedback.
