Concept Development: Failures, low pixel and high pixel

Hello,

Havn't made a post in a while so heres a wee catch up of what I have been upto, 

Research

been reading the tutorials I have posted previously and highlighting things i felt useful down in my notebook.

also found a few books, but with £85 for the cheapest £150 for the most expensive i have passed it on to Lynn in the hope that the library can get them instead so fingers crossed.

Practical

I have been upto a couple of practical things recently some good, some bad and some ok. so we shall kick things off with the bad:

After studying into the pixel art theories and practices, I fell into one pit fall of being far too ambitious. what i decided to do was create a 3D fan art image of FEZ (a 3D game but with looks of a 16-bit console) 

Fez gameplay screenshot

and heres where I got too before deciding I was in way over my head,

as you can see i didnt get far but things weren't going to well when it came to the texturing, if the UV was to high in resolution getting the pixels to look right was causing problems. if the uv resolution was to low then the texture would appear blurred.

So 3D environments with pixel art textures are out of reach for me at this stage so instead I decided to go back and do some 2D stuff using what I learned from the tutorials,

 Low pixel image of a devil character i sketched in my sketchbook ( an image of which will be updated when i can get my scanner to work)

And here is a high pixel count of the same devil character, I am not too happy with some of the shading and outline but i think its an approvement from the running banner 

heres an animated gif of the pipeline 

1. First I drew a sketh using the brush tool, of the character directly into photoshop using my tablet referencing the image in my sketchbook.
2. I then traced over using the pencil tool to get the outline of the character
3. *Then i tidied up the outline getting rid of uneven pixels and defined the shape of the character*
4. *I added base colours for the characted*
5. then used shades and highlights to define the character

* these stages are missed out in the gif due to my own poor layer management in photoshop, another area I need to improve*

But yeah thats what I have done for the past few days, expect to see more practical work posted up in preparation for my presentation.

David M