Character Redesigns

Interesting how I wasn't sure where to put this thread in my own forum.

Okay so, I'd been thinking about this for a while; Fixing some character designs up. I've already successfully done this with a few characters. Smash and Pearl are the main ones. I also did Cutter, Mike, Lina and James. Some of them really didn't need it, but I gave it to them anyway. Now there are only a few characters left who I want to fix up. Those would be Splice and Kyle, I suppose. Thunder and Lightning should be fine, I just need to make sure I did it properly. Electric's sprites are fine, but his drawn pictures don't really express the thickness of his quills as much as they should. Zap's haven't even fully grown, so I'll just leave that. Violet's are plain, but that's purely intentional. (plus she's excused for being a girl.) If anything, I'd give her some more hair. Which would actually be pretty nice, I think. Keela is fine, I think.

So that leaves us with only two people; Splice and Kyle. Now, Kyle's quills are very short, and SHOULD be fine in theory, but apparently they still look too close to Sonic's. Splice's quills were supposed to be rather long, but few pictures of him really expressed the length the way it should. (In fact the newest picture of Electric was the closest to Splice's actual quill length than any picture he'd ever had.) So, as you might have guessed, it was worse in his case.

After a long while, I hadn't really done anything about it because I lacked inspiration. I couldn't think of a style that'd be good for either of them. I'd also grown attached to their current looks.
But now, I think I've managed to get something for Splice. Before I make any decisions, I want--no. I NEED feedback. Here's what I got.



Alright guys. Be honest with me; Am I heading in the right direction with this design?

I don't like it. It looks kind of ugly and unnatural.

With tons of hedgehog characters, it is going to be hard to give them all unique quill designs to make them unique. I'm not exactly sure what to suggest here, but simply re-spriting Splice's quills from scratch using his artwork as a reference could probably make them look unique enough.

In a way, they're supposed to be unnatural.

It's not just his sprites that are the problem, but his artwork as well. That wouldn't change too much.

Spoiler:

And yeah, looking through his artwork I realized that his spines are rather inconsistent. Something about them still bugs me, though. Like, two of his blue spines look like they're coming out the side of his head. It just looks awkward. If you want to go with this design, though, by all means go ahead. I'll fiddle around with the sprite a bit and see if I can come up with something, if that's alright.

Go ahead. And put things like that in spoilers, Kap. Not everyone knows that yet.

I personally like it. It takes him away from that typical Sonic-look-alike look. if you know what i mean XD

However its gonna be a bit hard to figure out how to draw the quills as in how it falls and looks when he turns, face front, you know? its not easy figuring it out by looking at a small sprite 'XD

But bottom line, I like it XD

Yeah, I figured as much. I already went ahead and started making a couple of rotations, just to get a clearer picture on how it looks.


I just need to do the back ones now.

Looks better there, although his hair on the left sprite looks real stiff.

Also, while you're at it, do you think you could make his gloves less ugly?

Yeah, I noticed that. Still tinkering around with it.

It's really hard to capture the right style of shading I had in mind with his gloves. I might just have to revert to the normal shading for sprites only.

Neon tends to be pretty ugly on sprites.