The Blacksmith

Time to look at another portrait, this time of the blacksmith! His original portrait was one of the first ones I made (every RPG needs a blacksmith, right?), which you might be able to tell:

He kind of looks a little crazy, doesn't he? For the remake, I wanted him to look a bit less like a madman and more like the friendly, carefree guy that he is in our game. Here's the progress, which is pretty much the same as what I talked about yesterday:

And here's the finished sprite:

As you can see, I changed his shoulders (and the hair) a little between the rendered version and the in-game sprite . As I work on things for the game I ask Teddy and Fred for feedback, and they give me pointers on what to edit or improve. Usually these changes happen while I'm still sketching or rendering the bigger version of the portrait, but sometimes things are more obvious once everything is done.

In this case the shoulders had some funky perspective issues. I personally have a really hard time understanding what shoulders look like from certain angles, and I swear I've had to change the shoulders of almost half of all portraits because of this. Even reference images fail to help me with this issue! You'd think I'd learn eventually, but no. Apparently I have some kind of shoulder-blindness or something, haha! :)

This is just one of the many things I wish to improve upon, and hope to have a better grasp of before we're done with the game!