custom for gulch
bern custom
sspl winners custom
holiday edit for vk, original avatar by Turtleye_
holiday edit for zoyotte
holiday edit for akeras
yo you're talented as hell lol, i don't have a request or anything of substance to add but these are insanely good and i was shocked when i saw you were doing commissions and requests for free when this is easily at least on par with what gamefreak's professional pixel artists do if not better. keep up the sick work
Thanks, this really means a lot, as I was doubting at first whether I'd be able to make quality stuff from scratch, but many people have told me they love my customs which is very reassuring. I wouldn't call these gamefreak quality just yet but it means I'm getting at the very least close. I'm fine doing them for free cause I love doing 'em and I would make them for fun if people didn't commission, although I've been struggling to get behind free requests since I'm making a lot of ps commission, for which most people have kindly paid out of their own volition! I'll keep working and thanks again.
I'll say that I'm not at all talented, I have touched certain art things in the past and made moderately decent drawings but nothing I was ever super proud of and I always considered myself "out" of the art crowd, as an external entity that could mostly dabble and appreciate; I also fell trap to the idea that there's those who had talent and I just wasn't one of them, but as it goes all the good artists are good because they made a fuckton of art, and were thoughtful in that process.
these are avatars I made back in september before opening my sprite thread where I pretty much just took full size images of the characters, downscaled them, traced them and put them near the existing mons avatars made by hardworking artists from the sprite project; they obviously did not come out well.
here's an early wip of me trying to sprite wenge kong by editing the existing smasher sprite (reason why the legs do actually look good, none of my merit). I'm still embarrassed looking at this lmao.
most sprites also took me an ungodly amount of time, especially at the beginning. I remember spending multiple days in a row working all day on certain sprites just because I couldn't figure out how to make them look good. It was very discouraging but I pushed on since I was just starting out and I also reached out to turtleye for advice on a few of them. Huge insane amazing shoutouts to my gf who would sometimes sit down at my pc, make a new layer and spend like half an hour sketching over my wip showing me how I can make it look better.
you can never tell what goes on behind the scenes so it's easy to look at the final product and assume the maker was born gifted or has some hidden talent, but that's generally not the case. I know you likely didn't mean it that way @ ren and I appreciate the comment it was just a good opportunity for me to talk about this sort of stuff.
Anyway, if you're someone who is interested in learning how to sprite, here's what my process was:
I started by reading
this and
this, amazing resources to have, then the first thing I did was edit existing sprites
these are still some of my favorites and all I did was edit cacnea and guzma's arm, ginichiyo's arm and alakazam's spoons, and doing a bit of basic recoloring (aka dropper tool on the pokemon and bucket tool on the trainer in the same/similar shades). It's very easy and you can get some good results. The important part is to not go on auto pilot and to actually analyze what you are doing and why certain sprites are made a certain way, idk just use your eyes and notice things.
I also did not want to get complacent, edits of existing sprites can only take you so far, so I started doing bigger edits or complete resprites.
The regieleki, raging bolt and ethan were all made by me from scratch, closely following the original reference. I think jumping directly to making something completely from scratch can be too big a jump, there's a lot going on in making a human pose from 0, for example, or even just picking the right colors. Getting an existing mon/trainer and putting them in a different pose is a really good exercise, and god did it take me a lot of repeating this step to get consistent.
Now I don't wanna jump the gun, I'm no expert by any means, I'm very much so still learning with every work I make, but if anyone wants advice or just wants to share their spriting work my Discord DMs are very open @ raduology.
Thank you to everyone for supporting my work so far I'll keep cooking up customs for a while, I'm very excited especially to contribute to the RBTT and SPL avatars in the following month, I hope you'll like them.
pce!