Trying to colour a weapon

[Drago del Fato]

Well this is one of my few tries at spriting and from what I see, it's not THAT bad. And I need some help at colouring the weapon, I'm interested on how to actually do it so that it looks like a weapon, as you can see I tried it and its not as good as I thought.

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Hope somebody can at least tell me what how should I color it?

 

[regi]

It's a tad pillowshaded, which is something you want to avoid (the hair is an example of this). You should also work on smoothing out lineart before coloring. I'm not an expert pixelartist, but I can point you to a few tutorials to improve: check out this and this.

 

[Drago del Fato]

Thanks, I was looking for something like this.

Are there any tutorials specialized in pixeling armors and weapons?

 

[regi]

Not quite sure, but search the Helpful Links thread or just google it. Good luck!

 

[theGoldenMoon]

Try adding an extremly light (nearly white) gleam on the blue part just to make it look more like metal. Also, your dithering is great but not quite appropriate. Metal is a surface that shines and is smooth so there's no need to dither. Dithering tends to leave quite a rough texture. It's looking great though. Keep up the good work! :grin:

 

[moxie]

You're generally not going to want to dither metal like you have there like, like theGoldenMoon said. You can show gleaming by doing solid shading in very high-contrast colors.

There's a lot of unneeded dithering on other parts of the sprite, too. Dithering is used to show certain textures, like wood, and it can look pretty weird otherwise. It makes your shading look kinda... busy and all over the place.

Try to decide on a definite lightsource and re-shade while blocking in your solid colors first, no dithering. You'lll probably end up with something more coherent and less pillow-shaded.

(also it's super nice of you to enlarge it so we can see it up there, but you can just use