Hey Heinn, first of all I want to say I absolutely love your work, and you are my favourite and most inspiring 3D artist.
I'm an aspiring gamedev/3D artist, but texture painting and UV unwrapping have been the hardest topics for me so far. One thing that's particularly hard to understand is texel density. I always feel that despite trying to draw on 256x or 128x, my pixels are always too big to work with. Could you please give some tips on this?
Thanks, and best wishes!
once you .... unwrap.... your head around it I feel like UVing things is the easier part to get higher texel density on smaller textures you basically have to maximize island area and reuse parts of the same texture whenever you can.
maximizing island area usually means making every island as square / rectangular as possible, and deciding where to redirect the resulting UV distortion
some creative vertex color use can help in a pinch too (as ambient occlusion, "fade to black", perhaps even having some black and white sections of the textures that can be colored just with vertex colors)
if you find any ps1 game model visualizers (see here) and especially vagrant story stuff, you'd be surprised by how square everything actually is in texture space