“How do you start Pixel Art?”…Here’s what I did!

[Music] foreign hello there my name is Brandon and I make pictures out of tiny squares and I've been doing that for a while now in fact it's been eight years since I first started making pixel art with about the last three and a half years of that making videos here on YouTube I'm often asked about the best way to start pixel art and I often give the same advice which is I say to start by using a low resolution and to restrict yourself to only a few colors and that's good advice I do absolutely stand by that advice but it's the kind of advice that somebody gives when they've been making pixel art for eight years and have in some ways forgotten what it's even like to not know what to do with those parameters having a small canvas size and handful of colors is great but it doesn't really do anything for you when you're not sure what pixel art is supposed to even look like or how it's constructed so today I wanted to retread my first year or so of making pixel art and share not only the way that I got started but also what I think the most important factors were in those early days what you may have already guessed based on what you're watching here is that the way I got started with pixel art was to make Sprites in the style of the NES Mega Man and this footage by the way this is an Unearthed archival footage from back then I filmed this this week for this video and I started these Rush Street Fighter paint overs just so that I had some relevant b-roll for the video my actual first attempt at pixel art was that I made a Sprite of the Hulk in this style and you can see that I knew he needed to be larger than Mega Man so I just kind of kept extending the legs outward at 45 degrees to make him taller I've since remade this Sprite back in a video for my five year pixel anniversary and I'll probably have to do another one at 10 years but as far as getting started it was really helpful to have that Mega Man Sprite to use as the basis for the kind of style and level of constraint that can go into a pixel art character and for me I was particularly interested in emulating that sort of retro look so this seemed like a perfect place to start now I've since come to realize that making Sprite edits and particularly NES Mega Man Sprite edits is quite a common place to start with pixel art to the point that I've almost sensed it to be perceived as kind of cliche to a degree and indeed if you do think of a character you can probably Google them with Mega Man pixel art and there's a good chance that you'll find some interpretation that already exists what's Curious to me though is why this is so common why are there so many Mega Man style Sprites out there 8-bit characters like Mario and Simon Belmont from Castlevania are also iconic representations of that era and certainly you can find similar character edits for them as well but I believe it's because Mega Man has two things that those other guys don't first and foremost his Sprite is essentially a blank character template that shows you where everything goes the entire body is laid out so clearly and contained within this bold Line work where the color divisions of the gloves and the boots make it easy to pinpoint how different kinds of hands and feet could be placed over the Sprite and second of all he's got those eyes I think we're really drawn to the cartoony eyes here because they allow for expression in a character by comparison you don't really get that from the Mario Sprite and even less so from Belmonts plus they each only show one side of their face the Mega Man Sprite presents you with a really nice solution to characterize which is this little 2x2 unit surrounded in white you leave a little space so that it's readable and then there's a 1x2 for the other eye in order to show that it has some perspective and direction to it so with these basic principles I set off to create my own designs but when following this template in reimagining other characters I found that I wouldn't get that far just by following the existing Line work example it becomes necessary to add features that don't have any basis of reference in Mega Man's costume and it's at this point when coming up with new shapes that I started to really learn Pixel Logic for example with the Street Fighter characters here there's things like you know ryu's got a headband what would that look like in this style and guile has that incredible flat top how can I make some angles that capture that same Majesty right and that was the kind of thing that I did for about the first year that I was making pixel art and I was having fun reimagining a bunch of characters as if they were the cast of their own retro games every character face and every little accessory or augmenting piece I made for a Sprite like this was a small lesson in translating shapes into a pixel art style and once I'd created enough characters there was this cumulative effect that was almost like forming this mental library of design solutions for different features and shapes things that could go on to inform not only future characters but also small objects for environment work too I also want to be careful and not give the wrong idea here I'm not really suggesting that you build an entire portfolio exclusively based on tracing and edits of existing work I say humbly while drawing over a bunch of Mega Men it's just that as a beginner you're dissecting and taking in these Styles multiple Styles ideally and I think it's only natural that a lot of earlier work tends to be more strongly derivative even without intending it to be at times these things are sort of like training wheels and eventually we'll find our own intentional stylistic choices to bring to the table for me that jumping off point came when I felt like the Mega Man style Sprites were too restricting too tiny to fit in the kinds of details that I wanted to they have such tiny bodies that wouldn't it be nicer if the bodies were more proportionate and I could fit in more detail and create better poses some of my earlier attempts at this were the Star Wars characters and it was really refreshing to have that extra room in the Sprite sizing especially after having laid the foundation with the restrictive smaller size of the Mega Man style Sprites you can even almost still see the underlying DNA of the Mega Man style in their faces a little bit one of the major pieces for me around this time were these Sprites are made of the faction leaders from Titanfall 2. I remember being up till three in the morning or something just obsessed with making these and how amazing it felt while making them to actually be able to do it and to be proud of it too it was as if I was able to create something that truly felt like it had my own stylistic influence for the first time regardless of the Sprite size or the style that you start with another important thing is just to experiment with the design and see where that can take you and this helps you develop that personal influence that you can have on your work going back to the street fighter Sprites I kept these ones really tightly adhered to that Mega Man template just to simulate the kind of outcome I might have had as a beginner but we can pick one of these out now and try to play around with it like maybe let's start with Blanco because he's probably the one that's got the most room for improvement in his original design he's got a little sharp tooth poking up that I like but that doesn't really exactly fit into my interpretation here because the eyes in the mouth are butted up right against each other so I might just select the top part of the head and bump it up to give myself an entire row of new pixels to work with so the tooth fits fine now but now it's weird that the white of the tooth is blending with the eyeball so let's just get that eye shape out of there all together maybe and come to think of it this version of blanca is depicted with entirely Whited out eyes anyway so maybe there's a different way to arrange the black and the white here to give it more of that look the other thing of course is that he could be larger than this so again I'll grab certain parts and drag them out just to create more space then I'll do my best to fill in the gaps by connecting the existing colors and shapes the hair was another thing that's quite rough so I'm noticing now this flow of how it rounds quite closely over the back so I'm gonna try to fill that out a bit more and find that kind of shaping to it I've also added an extra Corner pixel in some spots of the black line work because I'm finding that that makes it look a bit more spiky and that really fits for him the final thing then is to maybe find a bit more of an accurate posture for him kind of hunching over rather than standing straight up for this I started by turning the hands forward more like the reference pose and then selected the head and dropped it one more pixel over the body from here I'm continuing to play around with some of the other finishing details like maybe he could look bulkier maybe the feet should be larger and more monster-like and slowly what comes out of this is actually quite a departure from where it began I found this little thing with the foot connecting up to the knee there so he's got sort of this squat Crouch kind of stance and it's interesting because it's not much taller than the original Sprite but he feels so much larger because he's wider and he's almost having to crouch into that same height all right well let's try another one I think I want to try guile because I think it'd be nice to capture his fighting stance and that's going to require putting those fists up and having one of them partially cover the body and this is something I used to avoid in my earlier work to the point where it kind of elongate Limbs just so they wouldn't have to get in the way but this is all right what we can do is work out the arm coming from the front and then just copy paste this over the Sprite and nudge it into somewhere that looks appropriate and doesn't cover up the face and once again I think we can try something different with the eyes the big cartoony look really does take up quite a lot of room so I'm just gonna try sizing them down and creating something a bit more focused for Kyle I also wanted to see if I can make the flat top more Dynamic by just tipping It Forward at a slight angle I've also added this motif of using a dotted line to help separate the hair from the head without being the full weight of a solid line and it also gives it a bit of texture in a way too I've used that again along the feet except in that case it's used to convey the grip on the combat boots and that sort of stuff where single pixels are so effective and multi-purpose like that that's one of the reasons I recommend starting with small size pixel work as a beginner at this resolution it really doesn't take much of an adjustment to see quite a dramatic effect like that in an angle or a small detail on a Sprite so it's really worth playing around with the contouring here and there and just seeing what it looks like eventually you get more of a feel for it and have a better idea of what to expect or what kind of control you're looking for but even a bit of trial and error in the meantime is a good way to find those Solutions so you can see with the whole crew now just how much more the Persona we're able to capture by thinking about those ways to improve by deviating from those starting points and just like how there was a lot to be learned about translating shapes to even make those starting point Sprites there's an entire other education in taking those through this Improvement phase now you can imagine that an alternative way to reach the same result could be to plot out a circle with some eyes on it add some shapes for the hands and feet and that might offer just as much as the Mega Man template did the benefit of that template though was that it was providing some built-in guidance on the character size and the way that color is applied but we can learn how to select those sorts of parameters as well if you recall my second piece of advice for beginners was to try using a limited set of colors and I just want to show you an example of what that looks like I'm giving myself the task of recoloring these Sprites Now using a maximum of only three colors each for Sprites that use Line work quite prominently like this this usually comes down to using black white and then some accent color and you can almost pick any color that you like and it inherently looks interesting when it's the focus against the dark and a light color like this I also have a lot of fun just actually being constrained and deciding on the exact color themes to represent each character's costume and compare with those Originals the color limits here have their own kind of charm and they also force you into just reevaluating how to be resourceful and repurpose the colors and creating all the detailing you can see actually that it wasn't until doing this that I got the idea to add in some highlights for the hair and this is mostly because I was just looking for a way to create more Dimension from this limited palette if you want the real Pro tip though instead of using a pure white as the lightest tone try using something that has a slight Hue to it in this case I've got this yellowy color that's used for some of the skin tones here and this is a great way to squeeze in another color into there and it's really pleasing to look at too because it's a softer contrast than would be the case when using white all right well I think that's about as well as I can cover my early experiences in pixel art and the approaches forward from there like anything there's probably no one size fits-all solution and this was what happened to work for me and set me on my path I wanted to pay it forward for those of you interested in getting started with pixel art and I prepared this empty character template using some of the principles discussed in this video and there's also a handful of colors there to get started that are adapted from the NES style ones that I used today so there's gonna be a link down below to download this image at its original pixel resolution and I hope it can be helpful to some of you out there just as the Mega Man Sprite was to me all those years ago so thank you for watching and take care and keep it square [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Brandon James Greer

Views: 209,682

Keywords: pixel art, timelapse, speedpaint, tutorial, lesson, class, beginner, easy, sprite, retro games, indie dev, canvas size

Id: WUlgvNe4BLU

Length: 12min 42sec (762 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 25 2023