Look upon my mushrooms, ye mighty, and despair.

I am the world's worst visual artist. No, I mean it. Every once in a while, I get it in my head to take another shot at making my own graphics. This always ends in failure, but I keep coming back to the well.

This time, I'm fooling around with Inkscape. I would appreciate any critiques and/or advice about the mushroom PNGs I've attached to this post. What should I be doing differently to make my mushrooms more attractive? What do you think of my color selections? Is one mushroom superior to the other? Am I on the right track, here?

Thanks.

The first things that come to mind for me are border width and the position of the color gradient 'reflection'.

I believe that a thicker border would make the pieces seem stronger, and an off-center reflection would help.

I use Aviary's Toucan to help me pick out colors that work well with each other, maybe give that a try if you feel uninspired by your palette?

I actually did make the reflection on the red one way off-center, but I forgot to re-render it. I'll try a thicker border and see how that looks. I fiddled with everything up to an eight pixel stroke, but ended up going with the minimal version you see, here.

I will definitely check out that program! I can use all the help I can get. Thanks for the feedback.

Here is a site with tutorials on how to use inkscape.
It is specialized for programmers and non artist so I think it will help you a lot.
http://2dgameartforprogrammers.blogspot.com/

Here is a tutorial on how to create a mario-inspired mushroom, but he use adobe illustrator.
But you can still get some ideas.
http://insertcode.co.uk/2012/02/1up-on-manipulating-shapes-in-illustrator/

Here is a site with tutorials on how to use inkscape.
It is specialized for programmers and non artist so I think it will help you a lot.
http://2dgameartforprogrammers.blogspot.com/

Here is a tutorial on how to create a mario-inspired mushroom, but he use adobe illustrator.
But you can still get some ideas.
http://insertcode.co.uk/2012/02/1up-on-manipulating-shapes-in-illustrator/

Thanks for the links. I've actually been reading the first site, and I like it, but he leaves out a lot of details. For instance, his grass tile tutorial doesn't show how he got the great shadow/highlight effect. He mentions it in the comments, but doesn't give details.

The second one is kind of trippy - I actually saw that 1-Up banner, and that was what inspired me to make the mushrooms, in the first place. I didn't know the banner was related to a tutorial. The way he does it is pretty much the way I did it, making it up as I went.

Here is my finished product:


If you need any help in making game art just tell me, maybe I can help. 

Here is my finished product:


If you need any help in making game art just tell me, maybe I can help. 

That's a nice one. I just took another shot at the mushroom and I think I've got the process down pretty well. I always need help with graphics, I am completely hopeless in that regard. I'm thinking about buying some graphics for my space shooter, but it would be nice to become competent enough to roll my own.

As an Inkscape user (and Corel Draw before that), vector art is definitely different than raster graphics. You're doing well though!

One suggestion for your mushroom:
The white spots that are touching the border of the green cap are also overlapping the thicker green like with their thin black lines - resulting in an inconsistent outer border.

The solution would be to duplicate the green cap object, move it above all the white spot objects, and remove the green fill (so it becomes just the border outline). Doing so will let it provide a clean thick line border by obscuring the thinner black lines.

Also, the bottom right spot looks like it may project slightly below cap's shape, you may need to grab that vertex and move it up slightly (or re-trim the spot to the shape of the cap).

As an Inkscape user (and Corel Draw before that), vector art is definitely different than raster graphics. You're doing well though!

Your comments seemed to be aimed at osiaslemuel's image, but would you mind commenting on the ones I've attached to this post?

The ghost is from a tutorial, but I made a few modifications.

The orange mushroom was just another attempt at getting a cool video game mushroom.

The red-and-orange mushroom style character is something I did on my own, using the fourth picture (the green mushroom character) as a reference. Do you think I did a reasonable job recreating the feel of the green mushroom? I had to figure out all my own techniques as I went, but I feel like it actually came out quite well (by my rather low standards.)

Feedback on any of my efforts is appreciated.

Image 2: the light radial gradient was too intense. But the shapes are good.
Image 3 and 4 are great 

Image 2: the light radial gradient was too intense. But the shapes are good.
Image 3 and 4 are great 

Thanks for the feedback. I toned down the highlight in this verion (see below.)

Picture #4 (the green mushroom character) is not mine, I used it as a reference when I made the orange and red mushroom guy.

Much Better 

The orange red is pretty good, but the bottom shading is off by a little bit.

The other one is so flat color-wise that it seems you should just leave out the shading and gradients entirely, its a bit of a mismatch right now. The dark corners on the bottom are a bit out of place in particular. The shapes are great though.