How to Create Pixel Art in GIMP 2.10

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and in today's tutorial I'll be showing you how to create pixel art using this is version 2.10 point 10 which at the time of this recording is the latest version of but of course before I get into that I want to direct you guys over to my website at Davies media design.com as always we have tons of video and text tutorials on here so definitely check that out you can also enroll in my 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing which is a best-seller on udemy and you could support our channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon and I'll include a link to this as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so specifically for this tutorial today I'll be showing you how to convert a sketch drawing as you see here this is one that I created in using a Wacom tablet and for those of you who have tablets but don't have them set up yet I do have a tutorial on how to do that so I'll link that to this video but I sketched this using the Wacom tablet here and I did have some basic dynamics on here so I didn't do anything too crazy just a really quick sketch here and then I colored this in using the bucket fill tool with the fill by line art selection option checked and if I come over here to the bucket fill tool you could see that right here and I did go over that briefly in my what's new in 2.10 point 10 tutorial so I took this drawing over here this sketch on the left and I converted it over here on the right to a pixel drawing if I hit control shift T that's going to show my guides that I created here and if I go to view show grid you guys can also see the pixel grid that I referenced while drawing this and a few other details you'll notice that we'll get into with this tutorial is that I created a little bit of shading at the bottom of some of these objects here just to give this a little bit more dimension and I also added just a little bit of detail like these white dots going on here and the white dots and the eyes so some basic takeaways of pixel art number one this is going to be an 8-bit drawing so everything that's going to be based on single pixels and it's all usually going to be multiples of eight meaning that when you create your new document it's gonna be eight by eight sixteen by sixteen 32 by 32 64 by 64 and so on additionally you're gonna have limited colors so you want to really make your colors go as far as possible in terms of what they're communicating with the characters that you're drawing so in this case I only had a color palette of probably four or five colors here and I try to make the most of those colors something else is that you want to avoid something called Jaggi so you want the lines you create to look like nice straight even lines you don't want them being all over the place in terms of number of pixels you're drawing and finally you want everything to be basically symmetrical so if you look at my drawing there are a couple items that are off-center but for the most part this is a fully symmetrical drawing and that's just gonna help make the drawing look a little bit better overall so let's dive into this tutorial here I'm not going to do the drawing again from scratch I created a new document for that so I went to file new and I just chose 500 by 500 the Advanced Options don't matter too much but I did have it set to 300 by 300 for the drawing and then for precision you can really set this to whatever I had this set to 32-bit floating point at the time I did the drawing so after you do the drawing you're going to want to create your document for the pixel art this is going to have different settings and these settings do matter so I'm going to for my drawing create a 64 by 64 document and this is in pixels by the way so make sure you do have that unit set to pixels and then for resolution I went with 72 and I did go with pixels per inch for that and the precision here is going to be 8 bit integer and the gamma is going to be perceptual gamma and I'll click OK so here's our document and it's gonna start off really small and actually if I come back here to my original drawing you can see this is actually zoomed in to 800 percent so this is 8 times the original size so if I hold ctrl and use my mouse wheel to zoom out I can zoom all the way out until this is at a hundred percent of the zoom and I'll hit control shift T so this is the actual size of my little pixel art drawing here so it's actually really small here but when we hold ctrl and zoom in we could see the full extent or the full details of our pixel art so I'm gonna come back over here to my empty document here and I'm going to just click and drag this and by the way I have multi window mode enacted here and you guys are probably used to working in sync window mode I think it's more effective when you're doing pixel art to break things up into multi window mode so to do that just come over here to Windows and click on single window mode so make sure that's unchecked and that's going to separate all of your windows into separate windows and that's just going to make it easier to reference your sketch drawing as you're working on your pixel art so now I'm going to hold ctrl and zoom in so now we're all the way up to eight hundred percent so this is eight times the original size I don't want the background color here being black so if I hit shift B that's gonna pull up my bucket fill tool here and I'm gonna switch the foreground color to white and I'll just fill that in so the next thing I want to do is create a new layer and I'm going to name this bunny because that's going to be where we're drawing the bunny elements here and I'm gonna make sure the fill width is set to transparency and make sure everything else is just set up to the default and I'll click OK so this is going to be the layer where we draw our bunny character next I want to draw some guides here just so we can reference that as we're drawing our symmetrical parts of our character so go over here to image guides and then select new guide by percent and I'm gonna go with vertical first and I'm gonna make sure this is set to 50% and click OK that'll give us a middle guide here and I'm gonna do that again for the horizontal guide so I'll go to image guides new guide by a percent and change this to horizontal now and click OK so now we have guides for our horizontal and vertical Center and that's just going to again make it easier to draw things on either side and keep our drawing symmetrical so now what I'm going to do is show the grid the pixel grid and to do that I'm gonna go to view show grid and now we have a nice pixel grid here it should be one pixel by one pixel so every little piece of the grid here every square is going to represent one pixel if that's not the case for you you can go to edit preferences and come over here to default grid and make sure the spacing here for horizontal and vertical are both set to one and I'll click OK you guys may have to close out and reopen it if those settings don't apply right away but here we have our pixel grid so we can get started with their drawing and the first element that I went with was the head so what I did is I used the selection tool so I'll come over here and grab my ellipse select tool make sure you are an tile icing is turned off here because you don't want any smoothing of the pixels happening here that's what anti Eliason or anti-aliasing I know you guys hate my pronunciation anti-aliasing is to you know create smoothing whenever there are going to be rounded elements in your image so just go ahead and turn that off and now I'm going to click and drag and I'm gonna hold the shift key here to make sure this is a perfect circle or at least close to it and I'm going to release it right there so that the size of my ellipse or my circle here is 22 by 23 and then I'm gonna click and drag this until it snaps on the middle guide there so now we have a perfect circle and what I'll do next is come over here to my past dialog if you don't see that go to Windows dockable dialogs and choose paths so now come over here I'm going to click this icon selection to path that's going to turn our selection area into a path and if I unhide that and hit control shift a you can see now we have a nice perfect circle here so I'm gonna go ahead and Stroke this path by grabbing my path tool and I'm gonna click on that path and then I'm gonna come over here to stroke path a couple of things we have to do here first switch our color to whatever color you want the stroke to be in this case I'm actually going to come over to my palettes because I did create a palette and I'll make this palette available to you guys to download and upload into your and I do have a tutorial on how to import pallets into so check that out if you're not sure how to do it but I'll come over here to my palette because I do have the pixel blending palette selected here in my palettes dialog or my palettes tab and then I'm going to come over here to the palette editor and I'm just going to choose a nice dark pink that's what I used for the outline of my image then I'm gonna come down here and make sure I check this stroke with a paint tool option and I'm going to change the paint tool here to a pencil the reason we use the pencil tool is that the paint brush tool is going to have anti-aliasing or it's going to draw feathered edges and that's going to cause spill over into other pixel areas that you don't necessarily want to draw in whereas the pencil tool is going to allow you to easily draw hard edges which means you can easily draw individual pixels so we'll choose the pencil option here for the paint tool make sure we have the right foreground color and then click stroke so this should stroke a single pixel line here if it doesn't just come over here to your pencil tool and make sure your size is set to one here so just drag the slider until it gets to one make sure also your hardness is turn all the way up to a hundred and you're gonna keep these settings for the entire duration of this tutorial but as you can see here if I hold ctrl and zoom in we have a nice even circle here in terms of a pixelated circle and I'm actually gonna come back to my paths dialog and hide that path and then come back to my layers dialog so this is what I'm talking about in terms of making lines that aren't Jaggi and making sure they're nice and symmetrical so as you can see here here is our center guide we have one two three four pixels to the left and then one two three four pixels to the right and then we go down a level and we have two pixels and over here we have the same and then we go one one one so right here we have one one one and then back to two back to two and then these two lines are obviously the same back to two one one one back to two and then these two lines are the same so it's perfectly symmetrical and there's nothing Jaggi going on here next I'm going to draw the eyes so to do that I'm actually going to come over here to my palette editor and grab that black color or we could just hit this icon here and I'm gonna come back over here to my drawing and I need to figure out a good placement for my eyes and because we can't draw circles really with pixels it's just going to be a grouping of squares I'm gonna try to create the best circle I can so what I'll do is I'll just click and draw two pixels right there and then click and do the same here and the same here and the same here and actually let me just lower this and this is another thing with pixel art is that sometimes you have to hit ctrl Z to undo what you just drew and then just redraw it so here's our eye and we want to do the same thing on the other side so again we'll just draw two pixels at a time here and obviously the issue with this is that it looks a little bit creepy you know it doesn't look Q is supposed to be a cute bunny here so what we'll do is we'll fill in just three of the four pixels here within the eye and what that does is it leaves the little white pixel and that just makes it look like there's a little shimmer in the pupil of the bunny's eye so next I want to draw the nose and another issue with pixel art is that if you want to draw a triangle it either has to be a really small triangle that is going to be about three pixels or it has to be a pretty huge triangle and in this case we don't want the bunny to have a gigantic nose so we have to kind of offset the triangle or at least that was the solution I came up with so if I come over here I'm gonna choose another one of my colors so in this case I'm gonna go with this pink color you can copy that HTML notation or again you can download my palette and what I'll do is I'll just create one two three four pixels here and then next what I did is I drew two pixels right here and then I drew one pixel to the left of the guide so this pixel is actually going to be offset from the center of the guide I could draw an additional pixel right here or I could just forego that bottom pixel there altogether this actually doesn't look too bad but this is just what I did for the original drawing and I liked how the original drawing turned out so I'll just stick with that and by the way if I hold ctrl and zoom in here you can see that my pencil tool is going to take up an entire pixel here it's going to take up exactly one pixel if I come over here and adjust the size of this you can see that it'll take up way more pixels that way and let me just turn this down a little bit more to about three so in this case you can see it's taking up a different amount of pixels for you guys if you're struggling to get the right size let's say you turn the value all the way down to one but it's not actually taking up a single pixel you may just need to play around with the size of the pencil tool until it does take up one single pixel it doesn't matter what exactly the size is set to so long as it only draws on one single pixel so I'm gonna turn this back down to one because one does work for me and then I'm gonna come over here and click on my black again and for the portion right here the little line going down from the nose all I did was I drew a straight line down and then to give it that curved look here so this is curving but it's obviously really difficult to draw a proper curve going on here in a pixel art so I'm gonna hit ctrl Z to undo all that all I did was I added a couple of pixels down here and that just created the illusion that this was sort of curving off at the end so hold ctrl and zoom out so the next thing we want to do is draw the main body of the bunny here so I'm gonna come over here to my palette editor and I'm gonna grab that dark color again because that is going to be our main outline color so we have a shape here that is sort of an oval shape and so what we need to do is we need to draw an oval using these pixels so I can always do like a quick sketch here and just sort of map out where roughly I want to draw the shape so something like that and then you can hold ctrl and zoom in and in this case I'm gonna make the first part here the same width of the head the bottom of the head here and then I'm going to break it off like so so anytime you have to have the line go downward you're gonna have to create almost like these steps here with the pixels so usually it's up to your discretion as to how many pixels you want to use to convey you know a step down or to convey a curve in my case for this drawing I like to use two so I did one two one two one two and then from this one I'm actually going to go down four because I don't want to keep going off forever to the left otherwise he's gonna look like a really overweight bunny but I still need to come over a little bit here so I'll just put one pixel right here and then from there I'm going to draw a large line downwards because we do need to cover a decent amount of ground here and I don't want steps going all the way up and all the way down this bunny it'll start to look weird so what I'll do is I'll click on that last pixel we drew and I'm gonna scroll down a little bit and you guys can count out however many pixels down you want to go so my case I'm going to go down about ten or twelve and you can see down here it's actually going to count for you how many pixels down you're going so I'm gonna go about 12 and I'll click right there and I'm not going to finish the bottom portion of the shape because we do need the feet right here as you can see in the original drawing to sort of come up a little bit so that's going to cut off the portion of the body so I do want to leave a little bit of room for those feet and then after we draw the feet we can go back and finish connecting everything but now I'm going to come over to the other side and just make sure everything is symmetrical so what I'll do is I'll just go one two and I'll just go over to again and I'll hold ctrl and zoom in sometimes it will snap to the guide if that annoys you you can go over here to view and check snap to guides and then I'll turn that off and so now I need to draw a line right here and make sure that these stop at the same point and then go over one and hold the shift key to be in straight-line mode and then click and that should draw all your pixels in a straight line you want to make sure you avoid something where the pixels go like that that is a mistake that is not something you want in your drawing usually unless of course you're doing it intentionally for artistic purposes but just make sure that when you are drawing these straight lines and I'll hit control Z to undo that and undo that just make sure when you're drawing these straight lines that they don't get cut off and start a new line now we need to decide where we want to draw the feet so I'm going to go to pixels from the left of our senator guide here and then I just counted up five or six pixels from the bottom and I'm just gonna start this right here and now I'm going to hold the shift key to draw in straight line mode and I want this to be five pixels total so I'm gonna go up we already have the first so second third fourth and fifth and I'm gonna do the same thing over here so I'm going to go over to from the middle hold the shift key and just make sure these are the same height so now we need to draw the part of the feet that's going to curve inwards and obviously we cannot draw curves with the pixels so we got to figure out a creative way to get these pixels over to the left without it looking too square so what I did is I just went over by one pixel and then I just drew two pixels here and I just did that three or four times like so and then I'm going to draw a one pixel here hold the shift key and go over one two three so I'm actually just gonna stop it right here where the main portion of our trunk of our bunny is here and then from here we need to come back around as the shape of the foot does here so I'm just going to draw a pixel here to start bringing this down and I'll draw another one right here and then I'll hold the shift key again and I'm gonna go down this time by six pixels so I want to go down a little bit further and we're gonna do the same thing over here with the two pixels at a time so I'm just gonna go one two and in this case I don't want to draw as many as I had going on here so I'm just gonna draw one more and now I need to bring this over here to the original portion of our foot so I'm going to click once here hold the shift key and I'll draw it to about right there and now I need to connect these last one so I'll just draw one more pixel right here and there is our foot obviously this doesn't look great right now so what we need to do is we need to erase this portion so to do that I'll come over here and grab my eraser tool and you'll notice I have my size set to 1 here my hardness is set all the way up to a hundred and if I come down here I turned off the smooth stroke option so basically I put all the options on or turn all the options all the way up that are going to make this eraser brush as hard as possible so that way we can get it down to a single pixel and now I can come over here hold ctrl and zoom in and just erase these excess pixels here and hold ctrl and zoom out and now I can see our foot looks a lot better so we're gonna repeat these steps over here on the right side so I'll hit N on my keyboard to grab my pencil tool make sure I have the right color selected hold ctrl and zoom in and now we can just copy exactly what's going on over here and click right here hold the shift key and then click right here to create my last pixel now that we have our feet I'm going to close off the loop here for the trunk of our bunny so I'm gonna come down about three pixels and just draw in these pixels right here and if I hold ctrl and zoom out you can see it's starting to come together of course I need to erase these pixels right here so I'm going to grab my eraser tool and I'm just going to click and erase those two pixels next we're gonna draw the ears of the bunny again these are going to be rounded so almost every part of this character is rounded which makes it a little bit difficult but it's not anything we can't get through so now we're going to come up here to the top and we're just going to use the same technique we use down here to make these look rounded by just you know having them go up in increments like that so I'll come over here and find a good spot to start my ears so I'll start with right here and I'm gonna hit the end key on my keyboard to make sure I have my pencil tool selected so I'm gonna start right there and then I'm gonna go over to so just like that but I need to start coming down because I don't want the ears going way too far out like that so I'll start coming down here and I'll just keep going here to about right there so we've got about four steps now and we need to start coming down so what I did is I sort of flipped the two pixels at a time thing so now we can come down like that because I do need to continue to come out word as I come down word to sort of give it that look as it has over here in the sketch so we'll just go down like that and make sure that we go down by an individual pixel here and then I'm going to click and create a pixel right here hold the shift key and I'm gonna go down here let's go about right here so just above the horizontal guide here and I'll go ahead and click to draw that and now we need to come back over here because the ears do of course loop back inward so to do that I'm just going to continue drawing two pixels at a time here so I'm only going to draw two and then I'm going to click right there to draw a pixel hold the shift key and just draw it over here until it attaches right here to the trunk so now we have the outer portion of the first year I'm just going to go ahead and draw the second year the right ear in our case you know looking at the screen the buntings left ear so I'm just going to repeat that so that I don't have to figure out how I did that again for later on so let's just get that out of the way now so I'll click right here hold the shift key and now I'm going to in the same manner I did over here just draw some steps so now we have a nice even set of ears here now we need to draw the inner portion of the ear right here and again that's going to be curved so I'm gonna come over here and what I did was I just use the eyes right here to start and then I went down to three and then I clicked here on the fourth and held the shift key and I'll go down about 15 pixels here and then I'll go one two and let's put the third there and then hold the shift key and just close that out so now we have to close this portion off here so that it looks like it does over here so what I did is I just sort of chose an area over here drew a couple pixels and just went over here one and then held the shift key and drew this all the way down like that so this part is up to you guys I mean the whole drawing is up to you but this was just what I found that looks best and also what I did was I filled in this area because I felt like it was way too much blank space and I just sort of threw off the drawing here so I just went ahead and filled that in of course we need to repeat this portion over here on the right so we'll go ahead and do that now there we go so the last thing we need to do before we start filling in the details here using some shading and some colouring is we need to draw the arms and the way I drew the arms and the sketch the arms were kind of laid out and I found that when I was doing the pixel drawing it didn't look as good that way it just looks sort of blocky and awkward so it looked a little bit cuter it looked a little bit better on the character to have the arms inward it looked more like a bunny that way so I'm just going to draw the arms inside of the main trunk here the main body of the bunny so to do that I just counted one two three four five pixels from the center line there and I'll just hold the shift key and drag this down a bit I don't want to drag it down too much because we do need to make the you know curved part of the arms here so I'll just go over let's say two pixels like that and actually I'll just come over like that and come back up and hold the shift key and just bring that up there so it connects and actually that looks a bit too small so I'm gonna undo that and just go down one more level and then come over one and then click here to come back up so that looks a little bit better and I'm just gonna do the same thing over here so I'll count one two three four and click right here on the fifth hold the shift key and go down until these two are even and then come over and come back up alright so now we have the bunny the full head body all of the extremities so now what we want to do is come in and start to color this artwork here and you guys can color the artwork on a separate layer or if you don't care you can just do it on the same layer which is what I'm gonna do and I'm gonna mostly use the bucket fill tool to color this in as well as the pencil tool and of course I'll be referencing the palette that I set up here so let's start by hitting shift B and that'll bring up our bucket fill tool here and I'm gonna come over here and choose this sort of lighter pink color and just click once to fill in the ears here and you can see over here I have this set to fill similar colors and that's how I'm able to fill this in so easily and now what I need to do is I'm going to hit the end key to bring my pencil tool back up and I'll hold ctrl and zoom in with my mouse wheel so we need to color in the portion of the feet down here and I decided instead of using a gray color I was just going to use the same color I use to stroke the artwork here I just thought it looked a little bit better so for this I just sort of loosely drew in the area and I didn't follow any sort of pattern or anything I just kind of went with whatever looks best to have this whole area filled in so that looks a little bit weird so it will take some adjustments to get this to look the way you want it to look and I'll hit the shift e key to switch over to the eraser tool and just erase that so I think that looks pretty good as the final product so now I'm gonna hit the end key again and make sure that I have my right color selected here and I'm just going to make sure these two are even so now is the portion where this matters because we need these two to be even so that everything is symmetrical all right so hold ctrl and zoom out so everything looks nice and symmetrical so now I'm going to go through here with the shading and what I'll do for this is I'm going to grab my lighter gray color here but this color is still a little bit too dark as you can see it's too close to the outline color so I'll hit ctrl Z and what I'll do is I'll come over here to my foreground color and make sure I have this set to HSV and then just drag the V slider which is going to stand for value until we get a nice light gray color here and I'll click OK so what we're doing here is we're drawing shadows so you want to determine where your light sources I decided that I like the light source being above the main object or the main character I just thought it was easier and it looked a little bit better so that means I'm going to draw the shadows opposite of the light source so it'll be below so I'm gonna go to the bottom portion of each part of my character here and I'm just going to start by drawing some random pixels here and we'll go back and erase any of these that we think don't look that great so this is obviously too much but I'm just going to leave that for now and come over here and if you do accidentally draw over the pixel like I did just there you can hold the control key click on one of your pixel colors there and then just replace that so hold ctrl and zoom out so right now this doesn't look great he almost looks like he needs to shave or something so we're gonna hold ctrl and zoom in a bit hold ctrl and grab a white color or at least try to and or we could grab a racer actually and just go ahead and erase anything that we think is a bit too much and I'll hold ctrl and zoom in and I'm just gonna erase that pixel and then these pixels as well I think these go out a bit too far and we'll add a last bit of detail to our character by hitting the N key to come back to our pencil tool hold ctrl and zoom in I'm just gonna add some white dots here that just almost looks like you know pieces of light shimmering off of this and I'll also just add a few white pixels over here again it just adds a little tiny bit of detail it makes it look a little bit better and let me just add one line of white right here I think it looks too much like he has a floating head if we don't do that so we'll just add that one line right there and that also added a little bit of dimension there and the last thing we can do and this part is optional is we can add an outline around the character just to again give it some more dimension or just help it stand out a little bit so I'm gonna grab my dark color here and I'm just going to fill in the pixels above here and in this case I'm actually gonna fill that pixel in and as we're drawing our outline we're just trying to determine how we want these shapes to look so for example everything is going to be round for this character so I don't really want to close off that pixel right there because it makes it look too pointed so hit control Z so we'll just go down the line here and just add a second set of pixels and that's just allowing this to have an outline you and then we'll finish this by drawing this all the way up here and make sure we draw that properly you can always hold the shift key I'm not going to outline any of the inner portions here of the character I just want to do the outer portion there but now I'll hit control shift T to hide the guide and go to view show grid to hide the grid and there is our final pixel character there so now you can export this to whatever file type you want just go to file export as and choose your file type I'll just go with the jpg for now so I'll name this pixel Bunny and I'll hit export and I'll just turn the quality all the way up to 100 hit export again I do recommend going to file save and saving this as a dot xcf file because that's going to preserve the layers here but otherwise that's it for this tutorial hopefully you enjoyed it if you did please subscribe to my youtube channel at youtube.com slash Davies media design you can visit my website at Davies media design com you can enroll in my best-selling game 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy and you could support our channel and help us grow by becoming a patron on patreon and I'll include a link to that as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 83,831

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, gimp graphic design, gimp photo editing, gimp 2019, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, pixel art, GIMP 2.10.10, draw pixel art, pencil tool, create pixel art, game art, game design, sketch to pixel art, sprite, pixel sprite, sprite design, wacom, sketch, tablet drawing, drawing tablet

Id: 3C-prYJMoRE

Length: 30min 27sec (1827 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2019