Cyberpunk Pixel Art Scene (Timelapse Commentary)

[Music] hello there my name's Brandon and I make pictures out of tiny squares and for this time-lapse video I've got a piece I was working on this past week which ends up being like a full sort of color animated cyberpunk kind of piece and I thought that I talked about the process to build up a fully rendered piece like this from scratch and also go into some detail about the work and the organization required for the final like animation of it a lot of times like particularly when I was new to pixel art but still even now I'll look at a finished piece of someone's art and just wonder like how they came up with that idea and how it was executed certainly that's different for everybody and eventually you do find what works for you but for me for this piece I just kind of had this idea it's sort of originated from this idea of like a lamppost that we see here where it's got this like traffic light kind of look with extra wires and pipes and signs on it so I just started with that one piece and that object in mind and just continued building up line work of a little cyberpunk street scene leading off of that one idea one of the things that I love about the aesthetic of cyberpunk or like retro-futurism or even steampunk to a degree is like that little bit of extra technical embellishment on recognizable objects like the lamppost and you're not always aware of the exact function that it has but it kind of allows you to fill in the gaps for yourself and sort of imagine what purpose it might have in that world I think that idea pairs really well with pixel art because the art style itself leaves a lot to the imagination since a lot of the details are limited by resolution and end up being simplified representations anyway especially at like a lower canvas size like this piece so this piece here is on a square canvas of 270 by 270 pixels and then I have black bars at the top and bottom for like a slight widescreen look so the Illustrated area itself is actually 2 70 by 216 which just randomly or not randomly I guess I decided is a 5 to 4 aspect ratio and it's not really based on anything in particular other than maybe it's sort of in the range of the Super Nintendo resolution and I know for me that's like a comfortable size to work in for my style of artwork I've actually done a series of well not really series but like a couple of hundred to pieces like this before one of them was a guy like enjoying a burger and kind of a friendly bright neighborhood that had like a subtle futuristic vibe to it and the other one was like a Robocop in KFC sort of peace which if that sound ran with you it was actually based on like a series of commercials KFC had done last year or so and they had Robocop as the colonel and I thought that was just such a weird and random collaboration so I made that peace based on that inspiration from the commercials those pieces though had kind of a new style in process that I was developing which is just based on finishing the main construction of the piece from line work and not even thinking about coloring or shading at that point I kind of think of it like a coloring book like where there's just all this line work in place and then after it's all set you can go through and focus on color after doing the line work is probably my favorite part of the entire process for working like this because it's where like all the imagination and creativity is running and it's still early enough that you can just continue shaping things as you like them so if we're building up the line work here I normally just start with like plain architecture and overall composition of the piece when you don't have any ideas I find it helps just to put plain walls and structures down first and then consider what they could be of course if you've already got something pictured in your mind for the entire piece that's always great to have such clear vision like that but for me like I said all I had a really in mind was that lamppost so it was a bit of searching to find what the scene would be going off that theme of cyberpunk and traffic I thought it'd be cool to have like a flying car somewhere in the piece and really the best spot for it was on top of that small building so that led to this whole thing gave me the idea of making like a small scene of a sort of landing platform or pit stop kind of area for cars for the art style itself a couple references came to mind as I was going about it too one of them was that Netflix series altered carbon which just kind of came to mind like as I was putting this together I guess because of the cyberpunk vibe I was giving it I thought it was a really cool show and it had like kind of a pure cyberpunk imagery to it you know like stark tons of neon lights flying cars detectives doing stuff consciousness being transferred into into data now it's really cool to see a show like that pop up on Netflix I think they got a season to plan for that so that we cool to see as well and the other reference was that movie metropolis like not the 1930s like Fritz Lang version but the early two-thousands are so anime film people thing about that movie is that it deals with heavy themes like class discrepancy robot rights revolution and like technology going too far hurt in the wrong hands then the art style is just so like colorful and almost friendly in a way and when I saw it I was just like yes like yes we did a humanity this is the vibe this is what I loved it was just so inspiring to see cuz I think it parallels really well with what I love about pixel art which is that the details are simplified and stylized and in a sense kind of like cartoon uh fied if that's a word it leaves a lot of room for the viewer to imply whatever realism they like from what's provided so yeah that was kind of the direction for this piece and I was thinking about those themes and just wanted to convey like a small slice of world-building kind of in that style like not to try to cram in so many narrative details and obvious things about what this world is and really just keep it focused to what we can see and what's on this landing pad pit stop area and I think everything like the aesthetic of it and the level of technology that we can see in the piece does enough to imply what the greater world could be and the rest of the details you can just fill in yourself like just kind of let your imagination run with the world that's presented in this slice so here's a look at the completed line work and at this point it's just about achieving that coloring book style where there's like a really clear structure to everything and you could almost just take a paint bucket tool and like drop colors into every little section that's not quite what I do but we'll get into that now often if I just go selecting random colors and dropping them into the piece I find it really easy to lose track of what's what and like how the geometry and the shading play together so the best way around that I find is to shade the entire piece first using grayscale tones and then using some clever technology you can actually modify those grayscale tones and cast color into them but we'll get to that in a minute so for now what I'm doing is using the palette of nine grayscale colors which if you've got like a HSB color selection tool all I've done is just made a palette from only the brightness value set to like 10 20 30 etc up to 90 the reason I don't include 0 or 100 in this palette is because those would be full black and full white and I find I like sort of a softer look when the contrast doesn't extend in that range and also it'd be two more tones that I'd have to worry about painting with and I like to keep things limited for pixel art you could take the same idea but only use a palette of like four grayscale tones if you wanted and that would actually be similar to like the shading level of the Gameboy for example so when this step we're not exactly coloring the piece per se but we are painting in the contrast of everything that is like how light or dark each component of the drawing is going to be it's kind of simple in the sense that you just have to keep deciding things like you know hey how light is this guy's jacket gonna be like well I know it shouldn't be the same brightness as the wall because then you might kind of blend together with the wall so let's just make it darker than that and with the way that I've constructed the architecture here with this sort of like side view I just pick a direction that the ambient light is casting so all the walls facing one direction are light and the other face of the wall is the darker side which does a good job implying depth and lighting without even doing any kind of complicated shading it I also use some of the middle tones from this grayscale palette to start adding some kind of a background skyline to the piece what I like to do is just use the selection tool to define like big blocky areas of shading and then I go in and either keep adding to it or erasing from it just to make more complex shapes for the buildings I also wanted this scene to have a bit of a foggy look to it so I just kept the details of the buildings like really flat and simple as if there's not really a lot that can be made out through the fog and normally when I do a skyline I tend to make it even across the whole piece but I kind of got fancy with this one I had the skyline like sort of angle or like descend in height towards the middle of the piece and I was hoping that would kind of draw the eye towards the car and then from there just kind of have some overall visual flow I normally don't put that exact level of thought into the composition so I hope it reads like I intended at the very least I think it looks cool anyway okay remember when I mentioned there was an easy way to convert those grayscale tones into a certain color well if you work in a program that has filters or layer blending modes you can do something like this in Photoshop I just create a new layer and fill that entire layer with like the general color that I want for the overall look in this case I'm choosing like a darker mid saturation blue cuz I want to go for a bit of a like a nighttime feel then when I toggle the layer blending mode and select the color option it basically just applies that color over my grayscale drawing and maintains the level of contrast that the grayscale had but now we're things got kind of a blue wash to it since it'd be kind of boring for each shade to be the same kind of blue what I do from here is go through and just lightly shift the hues around and pull the lighter tones towards cyan and the darker ones towards purple and just keep the mid-tones in that blue range this way there's actually a range of colors within the piece in a subtle way and I think it's just a more interesting and natural look since it's no longer like completely monotone so this is just sort of a fast way to choose kind of an overall color cast of the entire piece okay maybe this process wasn't really that fast until here like if you're planning to work from a premade palette this entire step of developing the contrast and greyscale and then casting color onto it isn't necessary right but sometimes building up colors from scratch like this is useful for controlling the exact look that you want for the piece so here's the final look for this initial coloring step with just the hue shifted blueish palette I kept the saturation fairly low so the next step is going to be adding the color accents for all the different colored lights throughout the piece and having low saturation color to like the main structure everything like this is going to ensure that when we add high saturation colors for those lights and signs they're really gonna pop and just add a lot more interesting color around the whole thing so for the color accents I created a new layer and then I just kind of keep doing laps around the piece and adding colors mainly just to things that are illuminated I keep the color selection pretty small as well and just went for really bright colors like cyan and paying kin yellow and green and I mainly worked with just two layers for this overall look so one of the layers was just for adding the straight color accent and then I use the second layers set to like a lower transparency I think it was about 15 percent opacity that I used to create like the glow look around the lights and for the most part that's just the same color you see on the light itself but I drew it outwards a couple of pixels for the light just to create like the appearance of a glow sometimes you see often is like people will use a glow effect in a program like Photoshop on their pixel art and I've done that before and just it just kind of puts a glow but then it adds like a gradient to it and since it's pixel art what happens to the gradient is you end up getting this weird like banding effect where you can see every layer of pixel that's a different transparency I guess you could also resize your artwork first and then add a glow effect and you get more of like a realistic sort of glowing pixel look but it's really all just like your own stylistic choice right and for me the solid transparency is kind of my preferred blow look for at least this kind of art style and making here so let's just jump ahead and take a look at the final animated piece and then I'll come back after and show you some of the behind the scenes of how the animation actually works all right here we go alright so here's how the animation looks within Photoshop along the bottom or all the frames that I've added and if I click on a frame I can adjust which layers of my drawing are visible and the position of those layers within the canvas it's really important to have well-organized layer structure for everything here just so you can easily like find the specific thing that you want to animate and have it be separated from the other parts of the artwork so let's take a look at something simple like the traffic light flashing it's three different colors what I've done is just set up each of the colors its own layer and then for each of my 20 frames I can choose which of those layers are visible or hidden so for the first few frames I have them turn off one at a time and then most of the other layers they just sort of combo up in different ways sometimes for things like this it's nice to establish some kind of a rhythm to it but since it loops anyway you kind of get a nice repeating effect either way so this wall animations around 20 frames well not around 20 frames it's exactly 20 frames long and it's got a seamless loop which kind of helps it feel longer if you just sit there and watch it I guess early on though it's best to establish things that you want to scroll across the screen and need to line up in that seamless way so for this one that's like the fog layers in the background so the furthest layer of fog there it has cloudy bumps that are kind of built from a circle shape that was exactly 20 pixels wide so when I nudged that layer over by one pixel for every frame of the animation after 20 frames it ends up in the starting position of the bump that was next to it so kind of loops in that seamless kind of way sort of like a repeating tile I guess similarly the other fog layer uses a circle width of exactly 40 pixels so for every frame of animation if I move it over by 2 pixels after 20 frames it ends up back at that starting position again you could also do a look for the fog or smoke where it also changes shape in addition to scrolling but that's kind of another added layer of complexity and I just wanted to keep this example pretty straightforward so yeah that's kind of how the fog layers cycle every 20 frames and helped establish the total frame count anyway that's just a small taste of the animated work I think what I'll do is sort of plan on making like a full animation tutorial at some point I think you can see how involved it can be to plan out the math behind a full scene like this so if you're still watching at this point thank you I've got a special treat to finish it off if you're still here I can actually output my laptop over to my small CRT TV and actually through some imitation scanlines over this animation and so playing through that TV it ended up being kind of a cool look for this animation so I'll end on that so thanks again for watching and take care and keep it square [Music] you

Channel: Brandon James Greer

Views: 132,765

Keywords: pixel art, timelapse, tutorial, cyberpunk, sprite art, 8 bit, photoshop

Id: wxyr53YRiiU

Length: 14min 34sec (874 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 11 2020