Creating a 1-Bit Pixel Art Illustration | From Pencil to Pixel!

[Music] foreign hello there my name is Brandon and I make pictures out of tiny squares and I'll be doing more of that today eventually but for now I'm getting things started with a good old-fashioned rough sketch on paper to plan out a pixel illustration that I'd like to make on my channel I've got a recurring series of one bit pieces that follow various scenarios and Adventures of a cyborg detective boy and these are styled in a sort of low Fidelity Retro Game presentation it's been on my mind to make another entry in the series but recently I've also been wanting to try my hand more at larger pixel illustrations and I've kind of tested the waters there a Little by doing a few manga page pixel redraw videos and things like that so I thought you know why not try a larger illustration for the detective boy series and it felt like it'd be useful to First rough out some things by hand on paper and then use this as the basis for a final pixelated version now compared to pixel art I don't always feel as confident in my hand-drawn work like this it's just not where I put the majority of my artistic skill points as it were but what's more important than that is actually that it's just really fun and quite relaxing too to do this and you know that's more than enough reason to give it a shot I find it to also be a really fast way to figure out composition and get some starter Line work going so that'll give a nice Head Start in creating the pixel piece even if it is a little rough around the edges you can see I'd actually started this one by creating a bunch of thumbnail sketches on some Post-it notes and that's actually really the fastest way to hammer out a few broad compositional ideas I was trying to get something going with this idea of there being like a flashlight beam kind of shining over him and doing this like split appearance where you see his robotic inner workings revealed by that light but I couldn't quite get the flashlight placed in a natural way so I'm going to shelve that idea for now but compositionally my favorites were actually these ones uh here with the boy and the cat in the lower part of the page and then some sort of details placed in the upper area to kind of frame everything out so right here I'm planning out that framing by drawing in a large circle behind the characters this isn't going to be a large Spotlight shape or anything that's filled in exactly like that but it's just sort of a guideline to direct the flow of those additional details and hopefully end up with something that looks pretty Dynamic along that curve as for what that thing actually is I'd been thinking about creating something around a small moment that might happen rather than trying to turn this into like a big Epic movie poster with a bunch of different characters and stuff like that um and I thought it'd be pretty dramatic to imagine some sort of flying robot that breaks into the boy's office and kind of messes things up you know sending a bunch of papers flying everywhere and just generally being chaotic like that I had been playing around with a big swooping cable design in one of the thumbnails so I brought that into the robot as well so the whole thing is kind of like this robotic flying squid except it's more of like a giant vacuum paper shredder kind of thing which suffice it to say would be pretty devastating to unleash in an office that does carry a lot of hard copy documentation and stuff like this in filling out the rest of the space I'm not particularly focused on an incredible level of detail or even necessarily concerned with some of the objects that I'm drawing in it's more just the idea of having a bunch of papers and debris and all that kind of stuff that fill out the space and when I eventually do the final version I can either find some more locked in appearances for these shapes or I can just leave a few things kind of being abstract like that right now it's more just about having this assembly of different kinds and sizes of shapes from the boy being a larger element in the piece the robot squid being kind of a medium element and then the rest being the smaller pieces that dot in the gaps around those so in the end here's where I've landed with that rough sketch and I'm actually really pleased with how this one came out as I said a lot of the finer details here were left a bit abstract but this is certainly more than enough to get us started on the pixeline and that pixel version is going to be Illustrated in White on a black background so to get this into some sort of comparable format I started by inverting the image leaving it as white line work on black then I colorize that line work into blue because I want to be able to make out my white pixels on top of this when tracing things out plus it looks pretty cool like this so that's also a plus the canvas size that I'm using here is 200 by 270 pixels and I've selected that because it's the size that I landed on when I did my magic Knight Ray or 3 draw and I remember that one allowing for a good amount of detail while still looking pretty pixely and even allowed for some text to fit on the page too which I won't really need for this piece but all in all it just felt like a good size so I've scaled down the inverted rough sketch into this space and I'm just doing some loose tracing and filling in with that artwork using the pencil tool the goal right now is just to get everything blocked in and then from here we'll zoom in closer and really get into the nitty-gritty fine tuning of a lot of the angles and curves of the pixeline foreign references as far as the style of this artwork are that of tazuka who created the Astro Boy series and is just generally considered the Godfather of manga and also the art style of the Tintin series airj I think his name is pronounced I really love how friendly and stylized both of those are and even more I think it provides an interesting contrast when pairing that simple Style with more emotional subject matter the innocent appearance kind of allows you to be caught off guard when delving into darker and more mature themes at times so this illustration was a bit of an attempt to land somewhere around that sort of style and it also allows for a nice translation into one bit because that sort of simple shape language can be conveyed through larger solid clusters of pixeline like for the face I've done this kind of split appearance showing his human side in the solid white and then the cyborg under detailing in black with white outline defining some of those key features a lot of times when I'm making one bit work I'll keep things kind of simple and use a lot of solid forms sort of as if the entire shape is lit up but for this piece you know probably due to the size and just the roominess of the canvas here I was trying a lot more to play with the high contrast Shadow idea where you're kind of just seeing a lot of the areas where the light touches I'm not sure actually if we'll get to see that in this particular footage because I did spend a lot of time sort of working the full form of that cat and then later erased a bunch to make the Shadows but it's kind of that idea of like putting a flashlight under your face uh or wherever the light source may be and just picking up whatever those highlights are and this often leads to some really dramatic looks one of the things that really caught me by surprise in this way was when I was rendering the boy's coat because originally I actually just sort of pictured this being a light coat like maybe your classic Brown detective trench coat or something like that basically going for those Rick Astley Vibes right but as I was creating the Shadows here rather than this being a light coat with shadows on it it actually started reading to me more as a black coat that's picking up highlights uh sort of like a glossy black vinyl coat or something like that and I love that idea it's more of like a Billy Idol or a Roy Baddie sort of vibe and it was this sort of exciting and refreshing overhaul compared to how I'd always thought of this character to look and I've said this before but it's actually really important when designing pixel characters to think about what they might look like Beyond just their small Sprite appearance and a great way to do that is with these sort of larger portrait illustrations and while I did already have a portrait to go along with its design I suppose it was also still quite small and it didn't really fully explore the appearance there so yeah I was just really happy to find this one along the way another notable bit of rendering was on the cable 10 drills for the robo squid kind of thing so originally I plan to have these little curved lines or seams that run along the cable uh kind of just like you know classic cartoony appearance for those but I quickly realized this was going to be a bit of a nightmare to guarantee that both the lines and the resulting shapes and curvature of the cable and stuff would still look alright and not super janky in this pixelated form and I even tried you know hiding a little bit of it using a shadow to run along the thing and see if that works but I didn't really get too far with that appearance so what I decided to do was to take a two pixel eraser and just erase these thicker strips from the cable and that left it more as these smaller segmented units that make up the full tendril it actually reminds me of how they did Doc Ock in Spider-Man 2 uh where it's like a bunch of these small metallic sheet type of pieces and that allows for the whole arm to still like articulate while still being this uh metallic solid kind of thing so I had those going and then I filled in the gaps between them with just a few pixels just to kind of suggest a bit more of a connection or like a main through line of that entire arm the final thing then is to fill out the rest of the space with those smaller details and actually finding some detail for everything this time around I've got a few key pieces like obviously there's the papers that are going to be swirling around and then this one right here is kind of a small vignette of a city skyline just to play with what could be shown in these sort of smaller pockets I kept referring back to the rough sketch and particularly some of the thumbnail sketches as well because what the thumbnails are really good for is that uh because they're so scratchy and rough even though there might not necessarily be intentional details within them sometimes you can kind of find things in that noise sort of like seeing faces in the clouds so they're kind of fun to pull ideas and textures from another thing that I've used to pad out the spaces here is to add shapes in this sort of checkerboard dither pattern and that ends up looking really nice from a distance because it sort of adds this other dimension this sort of 50 brightness it's kind of like having a gray tone to work with even though this is just a black and white palette so with all this coming into place uh let's go ahead and take a look at how the final piece came out here we go [Music] all right and there we have it uh the office getting invaded by a paper shredding Robo squid as can happen and the detective boy looking appropriately astonished which also tends to be his classic response to scenarios that he finds himself in anyway in addition to this white on black appearance I've also experimented with few other colors which were kind of inspired by stuff that's like glow in the dark or blacklight responsive and I think those are looking pretty cool too we'll go ahead and close out with some CRT time and take a look at a few close-ups here so thank you for watching and take care and keep it square [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Brandon James Greer

Views: 42,490

Keywords: pixel art, pixel art tutorial, tutorial, speedpaint, timelapse, art, 1-bit, black and white, drawing, illustration, character design, manga, comic books, how to make, retro, cyberpunk, noir

Id: vxPNOGFbBN4

Length: 11min 37sec (697 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 23 2023