JFierce's. Not so Fire Emblem, Fire Emblem Portraits.

[JFierce]

Guess I'll edit this little intro. Basically I'm reworking every portrait for my hack. Buuuut. I'm not doing it the normal fire emblem way as I prefer to draw them in myself. I usually just wipe the face and hair and work from there.

Until I posted here as you can see in the attachment screenshot. There was a lot of issues. Main issue being something very obvious I didn't think about. Fire Emblem sprites have the light source hitting from the right side. While I put the light source for the hair on the left side. So these conflict. So I'm now instead doing all my sprites lighting from the left side. Characters will have actual noses. Low saturation. No bright colors. A lot of sprites will be based on people I know so they won't be all crazy fantasy designed until I run out of friends lol. So it's not going to look like normal Fire Emblem. But it's still in general Fire Emblemish so ya know whatever.

Just hair and face for now, Armor and clothes I'm going to draw myself later.

But anyways once I rework them all I'll post the bulk here in the first post but for now.

Bottom of the page is where I'm reworking as I go.

Going to post the normal sizes here. Posts below are zoomed in.

Edited April 11, 2013 by JFierce

[Teapot]

You make a terrible FE spriter, but you seem like a good artist.

[Nanami Touko]

These are... hmm. You've got a pretty unique spriting style. It's messy, but it shows knowledge, and a bit of promise. I think if you could smooth out your lines you'd have some pretty great work there. Mostly on your armor and hair. Your faces are actually very interesting, and probably the best parts. All I can suggest for smoothing out lines is to antialias a bit more, reference other works, look at the GBA FE sprites some more; but you'll definitely get somewhere at this rate.

[JFierce]

lol I'll take the hit. Most are based off real people so they won't be very pretty.

[Nanami Touko]

No no they are, I really like them. That wasn't meant to be an insult D:

oh was that aimed at oblivia

oops ; ~ ;

I still like your work, if you refined it, it could be pretty amazing.

Edited April 6, 2013 by seph1212

[JFierce]

I'm all for crits though. Hopefully these shots from the game will be a bit clearer, since they're not getting stretched through irfanview and you can point out some things. Right now there's some issues with their chins I need to smooth out and the hair for a lot of characters I'm going to fix big time since they don't match the lighting.

Hmmmm screenshots are still a bit blurry on my screen dunno how to get that better.

Edit: Always catching each other before posting lol yeah the comment was at the post before you lol

Edited April 6, 2013 by JFierce

[JFierce]

Hell, actually I might as well just make this into a blog of sorts in terms of developing how I'm going to do the sprites. Can get crits and comments as I go to help out. Might as well rework the most recent sprite I did that was edited the most. Funny thing is it's based on the high school version of me. .

The main issue I noticed with the hair was it didn't match the light source with the face. It was bugging me for awhile but now I'm actually realizing I don't want to change the hairs light source, I want to change the faces of all the characters, then I need to make sure I have a mid tone for the hair, so it would be 4 colors which might be difficult. Darkest, Dark, Mid/Base, Highlight.

So first step I guess is change the light to come from the left, so clear out the shadows on the face, add some on the right which I'll refine later. Then added a midtone. Gotta ignore the highlights as I just kept them there to grab the color when I need it.

Edit:

Little bit more.

Edit:

Another revision of the lighting on a different sprite. Going to touch it up later but good nuff for now.

Edit:

Another

This one makes me laugh. Face is from a friend but I just straight up made him look like he was from the Jersey Shore or some crap.

Edited April 6, 2013 by JFierce

[Alabaster]

I really like these omg.

Especially the concepts ♥

[JFierce]

Thanks!

A couple more revisions, NPC is fairly minor just a variation on the original fire emblem, but I guess it's a bit different since the lighting is now different.

[eclipse]

lol I'll take the hit. Most are based off real people so they won't be very pretty.

This is something that I can get behind! Can you rehost your earlier works on Imageshack?

[JFierce]

So far, I've only got a few more done besides what is in the first attachment screenshot of all the faces. But right now I'm in the middle of reworking all of them. So don't have anything else to show just yet. I'll upload em to image shack and drop em in here once I'm done the revisions as I go.

Eventually once my hacks established and a decent ways in (right now I'm only at the end of Chapter 2) I'll just post the full sheets of each face on here and say have at it do what you want with em. But I want to at least get a bit ways into my hack since it's good to let the creator use his own sprites before other people plop it into their hacks lol. (Though the style isn't normal FE so they might not fit unless people follow the same general theme of low saturation, darker values and lighting from the left not right lol).

Edited April 6, 2013 by JFierce

[JFierce]

A couple more + a simple NPC revision.

Edited April 8, 2013 by JFierce

[Agro]

can you please stop posting your sprites zoomed in

[Lord of Gabriel Knight]

I like what you did with the guy with the red hair. His eye is different and gives variety. And I like seeing zoomed in sprites, it's easier to see the details.

[JFierce]

lol I just made em zoomed in for 2 reasons.

1) People can give crits easier since you can actually see the pixels.

2) On my screen it's not that zoomed in. my screen res is 1152x864 so it's not all that big, they're not even the size of VBA at 2x size. Didn't really think of other peoples res as it's what I'm used to seeing with friends and such.

The first I was doing is too big though.

Edited April 7, 2013 by JFierce

[Alabaster]

actually, i think spriting is pretty much like pointillisme, you have to see the result of those pixels put together xD

so yeah, imo you should post your sprites at 100% zoom view, if other people want to check your shading they just have to zoom in themselves, which is a thing many browsers can do anyway XD

[Book of Ereshkigal]

Yeah, I kinda wanna see what the sprites look like at normal size. And I'm derping with paint since I can't seem to size them back down right XD

I mean, sure, zoom in to see the more subtle mistakes, but it's entirely possible something else looks odd at normal size.

[JFierce]

True, I'll probably just upload a more normal size portrait in the 1st post then along with the zoomed in on my new post. I'll just add all the ones so far to the top of the thread a bit more shrunk down.

Originally I wasn't going to do 100% but realizing my Screen res might just be a bit too high. So I'll add the 100%'s to the top

Edit: Ok, should be 100% sizes at the starting post while I'm posting 300% size in my new posts.

Edited April 7, 2013 by JFierce

[JFierce]

Couple more plain NPC changes. Just some small stuff.

Like usual now the regular size is added to the 1st post while this is just the zoomed in version.

Edited April 8, 2013 by JFierce

[fuzz94]

This part of the chin, http://puu.sh/2ww9E

looks weird. I feel like that top darker pixel should use a lighter skin tone

[JFierce]

Good spot, It was originally sagging skin on the regular npc in the chin but I think I wiped out the sagging skin on the other side without thinking. That will be edited with my next group.

Hit 2nd page apparently. All the normal sized portraits are on the first page, top of the page. My regular posts are zoomed in pics for a better view, easier for crits and what not. Though I guess I haven't posted anything yet on this page.

Edited April 9, 2013 by JFierce

[JFierce]

I fixed the little sag on the one NPC but I really don't feel like uploading another shot as it's just an NPC. I just removed the sag altogether should be fine. I'll probably fix the smaller version eventually on the main page but, later. Not having a good day lol

Ok 2 more. If your thinking to yourself "Hmmm.... your sprites look too similar to your other sprites". There's reasoning behind that for a couple of these. Then I did a little sprite facing forward for a world map event to add interest.

Whoops added a row of extra pixels at the bottom of that last one. Ignore that green, that's not there in the normal game. Also like always from now on the normal sized ones are in the very first post of the thread

Edited April 11, 2013 by JFierce

[Book of Ereshkigal]

I like the armor guy.

It's just used for the WM? -looks at cut off shoulders-

Edited April 11, 2013 by L95

[JFierce]

lol well it's hidden behind 2 other characters until they vanish. Then it's just showing for a little bit. Either way it's not that big of a concern to me can't be helped lol.

Edited April 11, 2013 by JFierce

[Freohr Datia]

Hmm yeah when it comes to critique, I prefer seeing both normal zoom and zoomed in images~ When it's zoomed in, it's easier to see individual pixels. But sprites can look a little different at normal zoom than zoomed in and I think the most important appearance is normal zoom. When zoomed in, the sprite will obviously look blocky, but it's important to make sure that when zoomed out, it at least looks fairly smooth and not bumpy~ It's harder to tell if shading looks bumpy or not when zoomed in x3 Another thing is being able to tell if colours have good enough contrast for normal zoom or not =o Because when zoomed in it's easier to see the individual colours =D Or maybe it just works that way for me? x3

So yes, I thank you for using both normal and zoomed in images =D Just wondering because I'm being lazy x3 if instead you could include both normal zoom and zoomed in images in your post? Of course it's not a big problem if you keep including normal zoom in the initial post as well! ^~^

I don't think I could offer as much critique in these sprites since I'm used to looking at sprites that are made to completely be in the GBA FE mug format XD But I do agree that I really like the uniqueness of your mugs! When it comes to proportions and whatnot, I'm not skilled at critiquing those since I never studied proportions that much, so it's difficult for me to recognize things that looked proportioned incorrectly x3 All I can really say is that I think your designs look really nice! =o