It only took me about three days too. <_<

For a while, I've wanted things like voice acting and character portraits in my games. Who doesn't? I scrapped voice acting because you need some pretty expensive equipment (which I have but disregard that), and some half-decent voice actors. I don't know any half-decent voice actors.

So I decided to try my hand at character portraits to make dialog a lot less bland.

Now, this is my first time doing anything like this, so while I appreciate constructive criticism, here is a disclaimer.

DISClAIMER

I do not consider myself a graphics artist. I understand I suck at sketching and pixel art. I understand that I don't have color coordination.

In the next sketch, I understand the hands are messed up. I understand I haven't prioritized body proportions. I understand that I use black outlines for everything (though it looks a lot better than I thought it would).

…So don't repeat to me what I already know. Things like coloring tactics would be helpful, or use of tools or what. Just people who are experienced in this pitch in a bit before I make my next sketch.

Background

Remember my game, Terminys? No? Who were the ones complaining that a poison flower was too hard? Now do you remember? I thought so.

Terminys is a modern, story-driven action-RPG. And as of now I'm putting a lot of emphasis on characters. This character you'll see here is named River, and is a sylph, a humanoid creature who is more capable of Ether than humans are. She appears in the prologue, which many of you played, and stays as a party member throughout the game.

So let me open with the sketch. I did it by hand on a normal sheet of paper with a normal mechanical pencil and a normal eraser. Needless to say, the quality isn't the highest.

I know. It's huge. This thing only took up about a sixth of the page too. But I went over it and darkened every bit, and when I scanned it, it came out way lighter than I'd hoped, so light that Illustrator could hardly trace it.

I knew I had to ink it, so I grabbed InkScape to trace the outlines, and colored it in GIMP. And here's the result.

It turned out a whole lot better than I thought it would. Originally I was going to add a lot of detail, like in the hair, but I decided to be consistent with the game, and leave everything pretty much two-toned.

And yes, the image is anti-aliased. Many, many times. You can see how blurry it is.

The thing is, when GIMP imports paths from InkScape, it screwed them up, so I had to do a lot of tracing by hand, which is how River's hands ended up so badly.

Disregard that, look at the rest.

Now, constructive criticism and suggestions would be great. Because I do plan on doing more of these soon.

EDIT: It looks a lot better smaller, trust me. But when I import it to GM (320x240 window), the pixel quality makes it look awful. I haven't tried scaling it down outside the sprite window yet.

Other than that, it actually looks okay in game, but the features are slightly distorted.

AS EXPECTED.