Hand drawn is easier than pixel art | HD graphics vs low-bit vs Hi-bit

if you're a beginner to do the game art one of the first questions you will be faced with is whether to do pixel art or hand-drawn art and if you really like the look of pixel art then pixel art is the obvious choice but if you plan on going for pixel art because it's easier they might actually be making a mistake now if we look at games like HOA or Rayman those games are probably quite tricky to draw and you'd be right to think that going for a style like Haiku would probably be easier but what about if we instead of looking at HOA we look at my style and instead of comparing it to Haiku We compare my style to dead cells well now the answer is flipped my style is clearly easier to draw than dead cells even though dead cells is pixel art just because something is pixel art doesn't automatically make it easy pixel art is just one aspect of your art style you could do one bit pixel art you could have a lower resolution such as Celeste or high resolution such as iconoclass and then you'll also get a slightly different look if your pixel art is also restricted to a tile map and if you go all out with a high resolution and quite a realistic style you will get games like plasmas so depending on the rest of your stylistic choices pixel art should either be fairly easy and simple to make or incredibly difficult one reason a lot of beginners can that quite decent there's also Pixlr but not with hand-drawn art is that they look up the tutorials for pixel art and what they're taught is to focus on the basic shapes and having a good and simple color palette and if you make a mistake you immediately know it's because you failed with the shapes or the color palette so you constantly get to practice fixing those two skills whereas when you do hand-drawn art what you get to make so many choices that you don't really know if the issue is the shape the line art or that you just start your trading the reason pixel art often gets decent results faster is because it's incredibly punishing and it forces you to practice those two skills this is why I so often talk about limiting your style when doing hand run art because if you artificially create the same environment that the beginner pixel artist has they can also get quite decent results with hand ROM but okay a simple pixel art style would obviously still be easier than hand run right well not necessarily let's look at this scene that I made a while back this scene is obviously complex we have lots of tiny details like these bugs running around but what if we strip away all the details then at its core we kind of have this and if we look at this style while this style is hand-drawn it's actually very similar to simple pixel art if we change resolution to 320 by 180 and I will take all the assets and divide the resolution by 6 and we fix up the line art a bit and we'll get this thing this kind of looks like I intended to make pixel art all along even though I didn't so hopefully now you can see what I mean when I say that pixlart isn't entirely just a style it's very much true that there are lots of similarities between pixel art games but that kind of makes sense if we're limited to a resolution of 320 by 180 then we really can't make details and we have to focus on the big picture elements and if we do that then the side looks simple and easier to make but we don't have to draw Pixlr to skip making details we can skip making details but still why do I say that hand run is easier well if we look at this scene we can see one thing that doesn't quite work this demon character looks a bit off why is that well this demon happened to be slightly more complex and detailed than what you can make in 320 by 180. so instead of this demon character we might have to use the mushroom character instead which is slightly more simple and kind of words and this is really the issue with pixlart and why it's actually more difficult than you might think when I do hand run art I can keep it relatively simple but if I make some details here and there then it still kind of works but if you make a low bit pixel art game and you try to make details you can easily make your game look like an absolute mess it's extremely punishing if even one pixel looks off it can make your entire scene look off but perhaps you're thinking that you can't even draw a line and with pixel art you don't really have to draw lines you just have to place a few pixels well you don't really need to have that issue with Android art either look back at this scene if we zoom in and look at it we can see that you could do this style without being able to draw a line when I drew this in I used the future in procreate that straightens my lines for me so it didn't really matter if my lines were wobbly procreate fixed that so if you're drawing krita or Affinity you could technically make all your art using the line tool or use something like line stabilizers which exists in most drawing software I personally use these moving Tools in procreate a lot thinking that pixel art suddenly becomes easy because you don't have to draw a line as in my opinion a mistake this scene actually became quite tricky to replicate because it's actually quite difficult to make this diagonal or organic lines without making it look off because you have so little space to play with each individual Choice becomes much more important it might in some sense feel faster to make simple pixel art because you'll have to feel a canvas of 320 by 180 compared to HD graphics but it's not like you're drawing each individual pixel anyway as draw my line art and fill the shape with the bucket tool but here I can actually make an error and you probably wouldn't even notice it but okay so this tiny resolution might be tricky to get right but what if you do high best pixel art instead so you go for 640 by 360 twice as big now you have much more room for mistakes but you still don't have to draw that much so it should be easier right well not really you see if you look at most of my scenes it's slightly more complex than this style the demon character looks a bit off a slow bit quite decent as I bet but is still a relatively simple Style with very little shading and not so many details but if we turn this scene into 640x360 pixel art we can see that what kind of looked clean and decent now looks quite terrible the lines don't look clean and it doesn't really feel like pixel art it just feels like a low resolution drawing for a lot of people the idea of pixel art is a collection of a few stylistic choices and if you only change our resolution you can technically see each individual pixel but it doesn't really feel like pixel art some aspects that people associate with pixlart are really Nostalgia for early game art and back then you didn't just have restrictions on resolution but also color restrictions so if you look at some Modern games that emulate all the game art quite well like downwell this game has restricted color palette with only two colors or one bit pixel art and we can see that if you can only use two colors but still wanted to display Shadows you would solve it by adding dithering so alternate black and white and now from afar it kind of looks great so even though we only have two colors we can kind of pretend we have three colors and if we alternate the ethereum techniques you can actually get even more shades and because something like tethering was common due to graphical limitations it also kind of started to feel like pixel art so one thing I could do to make this terrible hybrid scene feel and look better could be to add a lot of dead ring so let's do that so we adjust the line art color to be slightly less harsh we can add this quite strong diver to indicate shadows and maybe we can even do a slightly less harsh there as well and we probably have to adjust these really white assets that look terrible as pixel art to make them slightly Bluer and add some there and then we just do this to all assets now if we look at this scene it kind of looks a bit more like pixel art still not perfect but I guess it kind of works and obviously we fixed it here there's no reason to use dithering it just made it look a bit better as pixel art but hopefully you recognize something with this the original scene was simple and looked good when hand drawn but looked terrible when converted to pixlart and we need to add shading and a lot of work to the lines in order to make the scene look decent and if you still think it looks terrible it's kind of making my point this isn't easy and it takes time if I genuinely wanted to make this type of pixel art style it would actually be more difficult and time consuming to make but the difficulty doesn't even stop there I made this original scene to discuss readability so this scene has an incredibly messy background since we're working with HD graphics I can actually blur a lot of it and now it looks significantly less annoying but for this pixel art version we can't really blur it without making it look bad so we need to stitch this in significantly better in order for it to not look cluttered we can obviously still rely on some atmospheric perspective but we still need to make sure this dish has seemed better when making our pixel art scene compared to our normal scene ideally we should make sure the stage are seen well even if we do hand-drawn art but once again with hand drama art we can kind of get away with not doing things perfectly it's more forgiving so when we went from 320 by 180 resolution to 640 by 360. it became slightly easier to make diagonal and organic lines but it didn't really become easier overall in general making a 640x360 resolution looked decent can be extremely difficult if you look at the game like dead Souls the characters look pixelated but the background barely looks pixelated at all this style is incredibly difficult to pull off same goes for Blasphemous if you compare simple pixel art with complex hand-drawn then obviously pixel art would be easier but if you compare apples to apples and actually compare a simple style like Super Meat Boy with a simple thigh like Celeste then I think that having that high resolution will make it more forgiving and easier to make and if your pixel art snob and want your game to be limited to 8-bit depth or you want it to be Pixel Perfect and that doesn't make it easier with that added restriction it can quite easily become more difficult for you to make the art look decent for instance in my normal art I can just make some simple textures and add some nice particles to my scene and for the simple scene I can make a really tiny square and get some particle effects but I'm also kind of limited to just this texture same for this hybrid scene if I add some soft particles like these ones to the scene it kind of starts to look a bit off so now I need to make some particles that really feel like pixlart once again added difficulty but perhaps they have to artificially made this difficult for myself when I chose the resolutions 360 180 and 640x360. why did I only pick those resolutions well because there aren't that many resolutions that scale well with 720 1080 and 4K monitors which is quite important if you want your game to be played on a computer or the switch and I want to add here that we also often associate pixel art with tile Maps even if I use a title map beneath my game art I rarely restrict my art to a tile map but you can still do that I've done it here or we can look at Super Meat Boy it sticks fairly close to other map for almost all its art but making a tile map game look good is once again not easy the reason my art doesn't look tile map even though I do use a Time map is because it can be quite difficult to make it look good but if you want to do it you can do it for hand-drawn art as well and granted it's not like there aren't downsides to hand-drawn art there are one of the biggest things you need to think a lot about when doing hand-drawn art is probably performance but those can be handled with some time and effort and you'll have technical issues with pixel art as well even if they aren't necessarily performance related but if we're strictly comparing the time spent drawing actually I doubt most pixel art would be quicker to do than my style if we look at this huge scene that I covered in another video I spent on average around 15 minutes on each asset if it did actually take me three hours pass to do hand run art and only 10 minutes to pixlart then pixel art would probably be worth considering but as it stands it's not like it really matters it will be a relatively negligible Improvement in the grand scheme of things so my main point with this video isn't to say that you should avoid pixel art and if you have already done Pixlr for a while you'll probably find it easier to make than hand run art but just because something is pixel art it doesn't immediately make it easy or quick to do pixel art is significantly more difficult for me to make than hand run and that might be the case for you too thanks for watching bye

Channel: Nonsensical 2D

Views: 16,295

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Id: LMmZnCsE6HM

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 27 2023