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Author Topic: Deon's dwarven graphics (partially done)  (Read 7344 times)

DragonDePlatino

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Re: Deon's dwarven graphics (partially done)
« Reply #15 on: January 21, 2015, 05:44:25 pm »

  • The light and dark colour selections for shading are too similar. I think your set could improve the most by fiddling with colours a little. I like Dawnbringer's palettes here and here. This example from DragonDePlatino shows off improvements partially stemming from nice colour selections.

Mmm...on the subject of palette selection, I would actually advise against using Dawnbringer16 or Dawnbringer32. I used to absolutely love those palettes, but nowadays I've found myself leaning towards older high-contrast palettes like the NES or SMS palette. Palettes like DB16 and DB32 are fantastic, but they're more suited for full-screen demoart and they have really poor contrast when used in smaller sprites. Here's the palette I've been fine-tuning for the past few weeks working on my graphics set. It's a pseudo-NES palette called Contrast32:



My philosophy in making this palette was to have more contrast between colors at the cost of color blending. There are 8 ramps, with 4 colors each. The left side of each ramp has a lower hue to the right, so there's a subtle hue-shift if straight ramps are used. There are a lot of ugly colors in there that are rarely used (like cyan or bright green) but they work well for things like profession colors and such. There's also arne's excellent 16-color palette (look at page 10 for the newest version) which is worse than Dawnbringer's, but much more suited to small pixel art.

So yeah, whether or not you use these palettes is up to you, but all I can suggest is that you NEED to use a palette with projects like this. Having a pre-defined palette when you're making graphics will speed up your drawing process immensely and create a lot more unity in your graphics. Also, remember that indexed color mode is your friend! :D
« Last Edit: January 21, 2015, 05:47:22 pm by DragonDePlatino »
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