Everything You Need to Know About ASEPRITE | Pixel Art Fundamentals

so you want to make pixel art like a pro but you don't want to spend seven years practicing like poor little old me this video will be a very purely mechanical overview of what a sprite can do for you starting with the very basics and ignoring some of the less useful stuff by the end of the video you'll feel comfortable with a sprite's tools and understand what some of the more important ones are in future videos we'll be diving into how to use these tools effectively but for now we'll just be covering how they work so i keep throwing around the name a sprite if you bumped into this video you may have already settled on a sprite as your software of choice and are looking into how to get started with it but for those of you who are still trying to choose what software to use i highly recommend it as someone who's used it for literally thousands of hours yikes i really think it's the best pixel art software by a long shot since it's designed with pixel art specifically in mind it has a very clean and optimized workflow and it makes animation so much easier i used to do all my animation in photoshop and wanted to rip my face off but downloading this was a godsend so really pause the video and head on over to steam or their website to pick it up for 20 bucks now i hear what you're saying well they're mr watt designs i ain't got that kind of fortune laying around for software that lets me just place boxes i've got a family to feed well not to fear a sprite is somewhat open source so you don't need to take out any loans if you're a tech nerd or you're just good at following tutorials you can get a slightly old but still 100 functional version for free if you do this i highly recommend you eventually buy it someday to support the creators but if you just want to give it a shot the developers aren't opposed to people compiling it themselves just follow the tutorial from this reddit post i'm not gonna lie to you it seems a bit difficult and i've never done it personally because well i bought it but i believe in you i'll link it in the description below okay now that that's out of the way let's open it up and see what we see you'll first be met with the main menu here you can either open an old file or create a new one let's create a new one we get hit with some options here but you only really need to worry about the width and height this will set the width and height of the canvas you'll be drawing on kinda obvious just pick rgba for now you probably won't need the other color modes and i personally like a transparent background if you want a white or black background later on you can just add it yourself in like two seconds so set your height and width to 32x32 or something and let's get going okay so here we are you're met with an abundance of stuff and it could be a bit overwhelming at first but i'll go over all the important stuff that you actually need to care about so first off on the right we have all the tools do i ever actually go over and click these like some sort of chump absolutely not they all have hotkeys that are pretty useful so i'll just keep a running list as we go along because hotkeys are hard to memorize and i don't want you clicking them like some sort of weirdo first off b is for brush if you hit b it'll select the brush tool you may notice this bar up top changes and we get tons of options whenever we select a different tool it changes up so we'll go over what each tool can do with this first box you can change your brush size this can also be accomplished by holding down control and using the scroll wheel on your mouse if you're using a drawing tablet i recommend going to edit keyboard settings and setting up with some sort of shortcut for your drawing tablet thingy because it's handy to change your brush size a lot we're going to skip some of these other options and head on over to this pixel perfect checkbox because it's important when i draw a curvy line without it you'll notice it's all thick but when i check the box and use it it makes the line all thin and nice it avoids bunching pixels together and tries to string it into a fancy line i'll go into more detail in a future video but generally you want to avoid these clunky looking lines up here so it's a very cool feature i know some other artists kind of hate it but i think it's one of a sprite's nicest features i'd advise turning it on and trying to get used to it but hey do what you want it's definitely kind of awkward at first these other two boxes will allow horizontal and vertical symmetry which is very handy if you're drawing a face or something else symmetrical it can be very useful since you don't have to go back and forth editing both sides you can also move around the line of symmetry like so by dragging the white thingies and guys one more thing about the brush tool that i never see anyone do but you absolutely should if you place one pixel and hold shift it'll automatically create a cool line for you and you can just click to finish the line this is insane and super useful you can make complicated shapes really fast and not have to waste hours placing pixels next up we have the eraser tool if you hit e for eraser whoa another hotkey you can bring it up quickly and start removing pixels there isn't much more to talk about here it erases stuff it also has most of the same options as the brush tool our next tool is the handy shape tool this can be selected by hitting the u key you know u for shape i guess i don't know but you can place rectangles instantly and if you hit shift u you'll see on the right here it changed from a rectangle to an oval he'll now play circles and ovals if i handed you the brush tool and told you to go draw a 20 by 20 pixel circle you'd probably take 10 minutes and hate yourself and i would too but the oval tool does it in seconds if you're dragging out your oval and hold shift it'll force it to be a circle same thing with the box tool you can hold shift to mid drag and force it to be square very handy next up we have the marquee selection tool which is probably what i use the most besides the brush he has tons of uses and i'll go over just a few of them here first off you can hit m to open your box marquee you can then drag to select chunk of pixels if you messed up your selection you can carefully line up your mouse with the edge of the weird hypnotic glowy line until the symbol changes and move it a bit then from there you can drag the center of the box to move it around or hit delete to delete it you can also rotate it it's a bit annoying because it can be hard to line up if you want to do like an exact 90 degree rotation but luckily holding shift to make it snap to 22.5 degree increments will give you nice clean rotations as you can see we have a recurring pattern of the shift key making things more straight that's something useful to keep in mind so what are some handy uses for this say you drew a portrait but you made an eye too high you can select the eye and drag it down or you can select something and delete it you can also copy and paste selections which is useful when you have lots of repetition if i had lots of little flowers on the ground or something i could just mass produce them this can be accomplished even quicker by selecting something and before you drag it around holding ctrl and then when you drag you'll drag a copy but if that's too much to remember just do good old copy paste you'll maybe notice that when you select an area and then try to select another area it'll forget the old one what if you want to select a bunch of different things well you can either go up here and click the add to selection button or you can hold shift as you select you can also remove from a selection by holding alt shift or hitting the subtract from selection button also say you don't want your selection to be a perfect box if we want a circle we can either hit shift m or go over here and select the circle tool the lasso is important as well which can be reached by hitting q for a cowboy with this we can wrangle up our pixels with custom shapes i use this very frequently and finally the holy grail of selection tools the magic wand this can be reached with the elegant and sensible w hotkey or the box over here this will select any pixels of the same color that are connected to the one you clicked say i have this drawing of a ball and i want to shade the bottom left of it to make it look dark i can hit w and select this color then carelessly draw with my giant brush tool where i need to it kind of acts like a sort of mask even cooler you can come up here and turn off the contiguous box this box is limiting the power of the wand and it can only reach its true potential once the checkmark has been removed when set to contiguous it'll only select the adjacent pixels of that color as we just saw but when you unclick the box it'll choose any pixel of that color anywhere on the drawing you can then paint over them or remove them all or do whatever you want say i have something like this and i want to put a shadow under where the roof is i can select all of that color and brush over it with a darker color bam instant shadow there are some better ways to do this but this is quick and dirty and i use it a lot one last thing say you want to select all the green here but it's only picking up the exact hue of green you clicked you can essentially lower the wands standards and have it tolerate slightly different colors if you raise up this tolerance value it'll make it so it discriminates less harshly in its color choices it's nice to finally see some tolerance in pixel art software these days okay so that's enough about the selection tool onto the eyedropper if you're using a tool that has a color like the paint bucket or the brush you can hold down alt to get the eyedropper tool do not be a loser and go click on the tool over here you're wasting valuable seconds if you then click on a color that will be your new color it acts just like any other eyedropper tool also note that you can have two colors equipped at once just like photoshop with the brush tool you can left-click to do the foreground color and right click to paint the background color same with the eyedropper eye dropping with left click sets your foreground color and eye dropping with right click sets the background color not super useful but if you find yourself changing between colors a lot it can be handy next up is the paint bucket very useful you of course hit g for a goopy mess to activate it this will fill in paint anywhere in the area much like the wand tool you can increase the tolerance of stuff it'll paint over you can also choose whether it's contiguous or not this will choose whether it will fill out the pool of color or every pool of that color i personally really like using the lasso tool to select an area and then using the paint bucket tool to darken or lighten all the selections just a neat little trick to help shade things a bit faster a sprite also has a super handy grid feature you can go to view grid grid settings to set how far apart the grid lines are then toggle it on and off with control apostrophe this is especially useful if you're making a game or something with tiles and have lots of art in one file i like to draw new characters in one big file with all the other characters and since the characters need to fit in a 32 by 32 box i like to turn on the little grid option to make sure i don't mess up the next tool is slightly more advanced but is very fun to use say you look at your art and realize ah dang i sure wish that roof was less bright and obnoxious well luckily you can select an area and hit control u to bring up a color editor you can then change its hue saturation value and transparency by dragging some sliders made a slime enemy and want them to be blue instead no problem this is also handy for shading at times you can decrease the value and slightly change the hue to get a really nice shadow after selecting the portion of the drawing that you want to be dark another cool one is the outline tool if you ever want to outline something quickly you can just hit shift o this will outline whatever you have in the layer and you can choose how the outline is formatted you can make a regular outline by just doing the adjacent four boxes or you can make a thicker one by also including the four diagonals you can then adjust the colors here and generate your outline our last tool is more of just a hotkey but i'm going to go over it anyway if you select something and hit shift h it'll flip it horizontally and if you hit shift v it'll flip it vertically this is nice for moving stuff around quickly and avoiding repeating work as you can see my workflow relies a lot on moving things around getting clever with selections and stuff like that i don't even really do a lot of single pixel placing it's a lot of tricky line work pasting and adding curves and stuff yours doesn't need to be like that at the start mine certainly wasn't but i just want to make sure you have all the tools available to you at the beginning so now let's explore the next portion of a sprite now that we've mastered all the tools first up is this little layer and frame tab if you don't see it in your a sprite window hit tab and it'll pop up right now we have just one layer but if we add in another layer by right clicking and hitting new layer or hitting shift n you'll quickly see how this works it's just like any other art software if we draw something on the top layer it'll obscure the thing beneath it we can double tap a layer to make it somewhat transparent if you want maybe for like smoke or something you'll see here that these little circles indicate contents of the layer we can actually select them and copy them to another layer remember how we could hold ctrl to copy and paste selections by dragging we can do the same thing here if we hold down control before we start dragging it'll copy and paste the layer contents we can delete contents of a layer from here too we can also lock them to prevent us from accidentally messing up and we can toggle whether they're visible or not if you want to move a layer you can either cut and paste or you can select it and hover over the little yellow line until the move tool appears then you can drag it to another layer i just blasted a ton of layer stuff at you but the moral of the story is you can delete and move them around really easily you'll also notice that we have the option to add some frames i'll go into more detail in a later animation video but we can hit alt n to add a new frame let's add a few and change up what's in each one i'll draw this simple ball animation when we hit enter it'll start cycling through the frames as a little animation we can do this with multiple layers too and that's what makes a sprite so powerful here we can see in this attack on titan drawing i have tons of frames and layers one layer has the titan's head one has the body one has the smoke etc you may think oh my god what a masochist he's got hundreds of frames but most of them are just the same four copy pasted over and over again again i'll go over this in more detail later but i promise it's not nearly as hard as it looks alrighty on to the next window this over here is the palette window selecting colors is hard and we'll have a video that covers that but luckily palettes are here to save the day pixel art tends to look good with less colors so sticking to a small palette can be really helpful when i started i stuck with a 32 color palette because i was scared of running out of colors and i think 32 is a good starting point i did a drawing a day for 500 days each with a 32 color palette you can find a nice starter palette by clicking this little folder icon this shows all of a sprite starter ballots you can find more on lowspec.com for free if you don't like these but i'll cover that in a later color tutorial go ahead and search for the edg 32 palette and just go with that probably a good choice to get started if you ever want to add colors to it you can just pick your new color say we want to add this putrid obnoxious yellow you'll notice this little red exclamation mark on the bottom here indicating that the color is not in the palette yet you can click that to add it in there and then you can move it around if you don't like how it's positioned you can then save this new palette somewhere if you like as you first start though i imagine you won't really need to be doing this so speaking of that little color selector down there this is where we can choose our hue saturation and value if you don't like this view you can change it to be a color wheel or spectrum or something but i like the default you can see sliding around on this little rainbow here we'll change our hue and then we can change our saturation or how juicy it is by dragging from left to right and then going up and down will change how dark it is this brings us to our next window the preview window which is more of just a handy thing to have you can hit f7 or you can go up to view preview to open it up this allows you to preview what it is you're drawing from a distance sometimes when you're all smushed up in the pixels you can kind of lose focus on what it looks like from a distance and realize it looks hideous once you zoom back out to avoid zooming in and out over again and making your timelapse look like you're bouncing on a trampoline you can set up a little preview window to look at this is also handy because you can set this to plain animation by hitting the little play icon that way you can mess with just one frame and see how it affects the overall animation you don't need to keep pausing and playing over and over again so i highly recommend you get used to having that in the corner of your screen next up i wanted to quickly go over some common misclicks that result in confusion sometimes you'll hit ctrl f and wonder why your faithless windows have abandoned you in your time of need ctrl f puts a sprite into full screen mode and while that's useful it can be very confusing if you do it on accident so just hit ctrl f a few times until everything is back to normal you may also hit shift s at some point that makes everything snap to the grid which i think defaults to every 16th pixel or something luckily the developers realize this is weird and put a little button here to press in case you forget that shift s can undo your crimes and then lastly if you hit tab the layer panel goes away if you have tons of layers this can be handy since they take a lot of screen space but it can be confusing if you forget so just remember hit tab to bring the layers back if you ever accidentally make them disappear okay so say you finally made a drawing or animation and you're ready to export it well first off since we're working with tiny little pixels here exporting a tiny little drawing is going to be confusing to the computer and it'll try to blur it for you we do not want that so we usually scale it up at least for regular drawings spread out for games is usually different because your game engine probably expects small pixel art but anyway if you have a regular drawing you want to export hit file export then you can give it a name it'll automatically choose a gif format if you have an animation and if you have a single frame it'll choose a png this is probably okay as is you can then choose how much to scale it up this depends on where you want to post it the maximum width of an instagram image is 1080 pixels so say your drawing is 100 pixels wide to start if it were 10 times bigger it would still be under the maximum and still be big enough that it wouldn't blur so we'll just make it 10 times bigger which is one thousand percent you could probably get away with five times bigger or five hundred percent too it's not an exact science you just don't want it to be make a blurry and it depends on what you want your end file to be you can choose if you want it to ignore any layers or frames and how you want it to animate you can also choose this export for twitter button this button just adjusts the animation to avoid some problems that twitter has with putting an invalid delay on the last frame or something if you aren't exporting an animation it probably doesn't matter let's click export and go to our exported png in a sprite again you'll notice if you zoom in on what was once one pixel it's now 10 by 10 pixels this is because we exported it to be one thousand times as big which is 10 times bigger so when we open this in windows or on instagram it will not be blurry now let's say you're exporting an animation as a sprite sheet instead for your game you can go to file export sprite sheet and choose all the details you want this will depend on what game software you're using so i won't go into a whole lot of detail here but basically it'll put each frame together in this format so you can have your game engine pick it apart and take each frame one at a time so that everyone is my introduction to a sprite i know i kind of blasted a fire hose of information at you but hopefully some of it sticks i know starting pixel art is daunting and there's lots to learn especially without an art background so it's okay if you don't remember all the little tips and tricks i threw out in my future videos i really want to focus more on how to learn on your own and develop your own style without having to follow a ton of tutorials so make sure to subscribe and like this video if you want to see more i'd also like to get some feedback regarding future videos are there any topics you really want to see just let me know in the comments below of course don't be afraid to check out my little pixar indie game cleanup on isle goblin it's still in production but that's my main focus these days and it'd be great if you'd want to check out one of the devlogs or maybe take a peek at the steam page but anyways i hope you found the video to be helpful thanks again for coming by and see you next time

Channel: Watt Designs

Views: 166,256

Keywords: aseprite, aseprite beginner guide, aseprite guide, how to use aseprite, aseprite for noobs, pixel art guide, pixel art, 8 bit, how to draw pixel art, video game art, pixel art tutorial, video game art tutorial, 8-bit art tutorial, watt designs pixel art, pixel art for dummies

Id: Ep-_nJNHPc4

Length: 17min 13sec (1033 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 07 2022