Shipbucket

Blows dust off of account and starts coughing

No, I haven't been keeping up with the Dutch update for WoW, why do you ask?
Original overhang shading.

Alterantive overhang shading.

Started working on this one around Colo dropping his latest iteration of the Alaskas, but the above mentioned update of WoW breathed some new life - and aesthetics - into the idea, which is the same one as always, though I'm allowing myself to run away a bit more with the displacement and costs here.

If I remember correctly the Springsharp report sets her at about 18 000 tons standard displacement(I'm inclined to say it'd be slightly more, but heck), with full load exceeding twenty. She ships nine 238mm/54 rifles and twelve 120mm/45 DP guns, with a generic mix of 40- and 25-ish mm light AA. She's good for 32 knots, with an armoured deck of 90mm and belt of some 190mm. The hangar should, with a bit of vaseline and good will, fit two smaller scout planes, though I suspect one of them would spend most of its time on the catapult.

She'd be laid down about 1937, commissioning date in the image.

There isn't a whole lot to her being Burgundian beyond my current geeking about the Armagnac/Burgundian civil war. I wanted to stick a flag to her and name her. As the St Andrews Cross has been deeply associated with the concept of the Burgundian state since the 15th century, I chose it as the flag. The Spanish usage of the symbol actually comes from Habsburg claims on Burgundian lands, for those of you who are interested.

Cheers all.

Where is my bloody mask

interesting concept, it have been a while since I have seen this drawing style!

Quite a solid effort, although something about the drawing has a sort of flat affect. I can't immediately put my finger on it. Shading around the life rafts might be one example--right now they feel sort of two-dimensional and "pasted on".

Yeah, I noticed that to. The shading are obvious to light.

Excellent drawing. Great to see Your new works KHT!
I guess it might be due to rather small contrast between shades of the main grey color (highlight/basic/shadow/...) and generally the dark greys look "sharper" (while lighter greys look more faded).

And one more thing that now came into my mind: the decks (which on this drawing take a significant space, visually). Typically the color of the hull is slightly darker than of the superstructure (giving them certain visual distinction), but same can't be said about decks (for obvious reasons a matter of quite rare plan views and stylistical peculiarities they might ewoke was therefore much less discussed) - perhaps it would be sensible to have main deck painted in darker shade(s) than upper decks (following the hull/superstructure distinction)?

Thanks all for your suggestions. Back to school I suppose.

I've done a quick rework of the shading, using stronger shades of the main gray for directional shading(I think I've used this palette since 2014, about time someone said something about it ), and added some shading to the life rafts in particular. Not sure if I'm quite satisfied with the latter, so criticism on how to represent it better would be appreciated.

As for the decks... I'm actually rather satisfied with the current colour palette, and I feel like going with lighter shades higher up might have the opposite visual effect, where the higher platforms - which would be closer to the viewer - would "pop" less, and instead appear more bland, and potentially even "sunken" into the rest of the image. In my experience pixel art is more about tricking the eye to see the desired effect than "accurate" portrayal as such, and darker colours generally stand out more.

I would focus on darker shade, the lighter shade. but also on shading under overhang.

Good to see you back in action KHT.

A few years ago we wouldn't have thought twice about minimal shading these days it seems to be all about the shades.

_________________
Hood's Worklist
English Electric Canberra FD
Interwar RN Capital Ships
Super-Darings
Never-Were British Aircraft

KHT - first of all, sincere apologies if You felt we were picking on You. That's Your personal design, your color palette, your shading and your decisions - and all of these are "within prescribed standards".
Just since 2014, and esp. in recent years, while "formal standards" remained the same, the perception of "what looks good" has changed - leading to rather wide adoption of different window color(s), less saturated underwater red etc. So Your palette and shading choices are of course formally ok, but since the matter (of "nowadays many Shipbucketeers could feel it can be done differently") was raised by Erik, then we (HeuHen and me) joined.

As for the decks... I've made a small experiment (small, because I don't have any "own works" of large ships with plan views ), and I have to say, that I kinda like the result. In the logic of SB-shading (which isn't exactly the same as Real-World-shading ) one could say that upper decks are more highlighted because they are closer to source of light (yeah, so much difference for the sunlight... ).



Of course there is an important visual difference with Your drawing - Your cruiser has wooden planking, mine are just flat metal surfaces. And I would certainly not encourage You to repaint the sizeable deck area just in order to test it, especially when You're not convinced to the idea in the first place.

(On a note - when I set my color sets, I have the brightness values of different shades of any given color set by regular intervals - usually by 20 units - whatever they are - unless the color is too dark to let such intervals before going down to zero, of course, and with exception of the darkest shade used for the non-right angles and the like, which is darker by bigger margin - usually by 30. For the "upper deck shade" I've altered value only by 10 units)



HeuHen raised the issue of shading under overhang. Indeed, that's something that can be thought of - You've used a very dark shade to mark overhang shade, but just 1-pixel thick stripe of it. Perhaps it would look better if You'd use not so dark shade, but wider - 2 or even 3-pixel thick?



Yeah, there is a finite amount of pixels that can be squeezed into any given amount of space and some Artists here might have already reached that wall (like Maomatic, I'd say) and some others are not far from it, while with the shading improvement there seem to be still some uncharted lands left.


P.S. There IS one nit-pick I have to make: there are lots of (pink-colored) alignment lines left all over.

I'm not at all offended, and do not feel as if I'm being picked upon, I've just got a self-depricating sense of humour. I've been gone for a fair while - at least in terms of drawing and posting - and it's inevitable that I've become somewhat rusty, or even fallen behind in regards to artistic conventions. I'm only glad to recieve solid advice on how I can improve my works.

I've redone the fore/aft shading as adviced, but posted two different versions of the overhang. I'm not sure I'm entirely sold on lighter, double line thickness, but it does add something. Might dig more into it, maybe take a few cues from more recently posted works.

While I'm inclined to stick to my top view palette, your take does look good as well. Might be something to consider.

A yeah, alignment remnants is what you get when you edit your drawings drunk at one AM, I suppose...