The ice should be grayish blue. I checked in Phendrana. Other than that, yeah.
Ice/snow is extremely reflective, so shadows are far less apparent. Low contrast really is the way to go in snowy/icy places.
Look at Troid’s Phazon ooze.
What does that have to do with anything?
I was trying to figure that out, myself. 
Actually, ice is highly REFRACTIVE as well, in addition to possesing important chromatic and point optic aberrations, which means that, even if it has an important amounf of reflectiveness, any light that goes through the ice will be heavily distorted, both geometrically and chromatically, and that will lead to HIGH shadow and coloring constrasts. And if you don’t believe it, just look at an ice cube under natural ambient light
Note:
There is only snow/ice on the ground, so most of the light comes from below. The light source ought to be from the lower leftish.
Mason:
The contrast between the darkest and lightest shades can’t be that low on practically anything unless it is really flat.
That only applies to ice itself. The ambient light in the area is really high due to the snow, which pretty much means the light source is very, very large and spread-out. And since the brighter light source is coming from the side opposite the snow, that means there are practically no shadows.
Yeah, 072, it can. If you had a very diffuse light source, there could be about that much contrast. I will agree that this sprite has a bit too little contrast given the situation, however.
If we’re looking to be this accurate, there will have to be alternately shaded Samus’; one for Phendrana, one for Magmoor Caverns, one for Chozo Ruins, and one for the darker, high-ambiance areas…
I can look out my window right now and tell you snow doesn’t create that little contrast…
Phendrana snow had little contrast. I’ve just checked.
I’m looking out my window, and I gotta tell you, there’s not a lot of contrast. How little/much, I can’t say, but it’s definitely significantly less than in normal sunlight.
Ice has lots of contrast: (especially when surrounded by both dark and light objects, like it is in the Hall of the Elders (snow and statues/walls))
http://www.trengovestudios.com/images/icicles.jpg
http://www.sz-wholesale.com/uploadFiles/Fl…%20cube_550.jpg
Unless it’s ugly ice, but nobody wants ugly ice:
http://www.mccullagh.org/db9/d30-30/dripping-icicle.jpg
The snow outside looks pretty solid white to me. It’s like this:
http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/discoverthis/super-snow-a.gif
We weren’t talking about ice. We were talking about the lighting effects of ice on its environment. In terms of ice itself, yeah. It’s certainly reflective. That’s something that does need fixed in the sprite eventually.
Oh. I see now. My bad.
Just a reminder that we’re into our last two weeks for this month’s round. The Artifacts are due Sunday, February 24th.
Sorry, I was on vacation and I didn’t have the chance to check your posts. Contrast is, as usual, too low. But the light source is top left, becuase of the crack in the ceiling. For this statue, I would basically need a ripped 3d model picture.
I don’t have much time tonight, but expect improvements tomorrow.
Ooh, improvement. Not bad so far. 
Actually, I believe you can request 3D models from MP by PMing DarkHunter16 (see this topic), but that was a long time ago. If we could get a model-requesting system worked up, though, that’d be something neat to add to the first post.
Speaking of the first post, I have some ideas for next month. Firstly, it should have the maps of the world in them. That’s important for seeing the directions the rooms go in and how they’re connected, which could have an effect on some Artifacts.
Also, I’m going to try to split up the Artifacts into categories each month, depending on which ones pop up. That’s assuming I still have them selected randomly, of course. I might try out a monthly theme, in which all the Artifacts are from one area or something. Suggestions would be appreciated.
I’ll definitely be reorganizing the master list of Artifacts. Some Artifacts should be combined together (like as we already found, runic symbols were separate from runic symbol gates for some reason), while others need to be split apart. Tilesets in particular shouldn’t be one Artifact each, since I left them to include more than just tiles. As long as it’s split into general categories like “flora”, “snow tiles”, “misc. lab details”, etc., style clashes shouldn’t be an issue. The same person might end up doing them all anyway.
Looking at how things have gone, maybe 6-8 Artifacts a month would be better for now. We can bring it up when we have more people to participate. We haven’t even made an attempt to recruit people yet, but two non-team members are participating already, which is cool.
Speaking of that, we don’t really have any written standards for becoming a team member… So I think having one Artifact accepted by the team and then claiming another would be a fair requirement for joining through this topic. Sound good? Either way, looks like we’ll be gaining two new members soon.
Sorry for the random giant post.
So you’re going to post a map of the game, and set a theme for the month, and from that we do certain Artifacts? Sounds good. I suggest that the theme should be Magmoor. I’m sure there’s a lot of work to do there. After seeing your finished Phazon crate, I’m pretty confident that you could do an excellent lava sprite =).
UPDATE. I did a Phendrana Temple column to kill time.
=O
=O? Check for yourself. If I know these things, it is because most of the detail and colour done for my sprite have been revealed by the aura created by the crack in the ceiling. I spent several hours spinning around the statue, running back to the PC, and going back to the 'Cube. I eventually realised the aura going down on the statue would give me extra detail. That is why I think that that the lighting is top left, because the light falls on the statue, AND because I’m certain it is.
NOTE: Now that I think about it, the light only falls on the mound of snow, not on the statue =(. So you’re probably right. And I babbled for nothing.