How to draw Gorgeous Game Assets

if you want to know how to draw 2d environment assets like these then you came at the right place hello kayakus here many people ask me how i do my art so i think it's time to show a little bit how i draw rocks and grass for my games why only rocks and grass you might ask well i believe that rocks are most important assets if you want to make any kind of environment just look at how many rocks i'm using everywhere drawing a rock or stone can seem quite difficult since rocks can come in many different shapes and forms and there is no right way of drawing them i never understood how people draw rocks like these like oh some formations and faces should be random since its nature and stuff but then how do i shade it if it's random i have to understand how the object looks in 3d in order to shade it properly so we are not going to do that since we don't know how to draw properly my tip is to use the spheres and round objects and remove faces completely a sphere as an object is probably the easiest thing to shade properly and it's really hard to mess up and by just moving the light source around you can make the object face different directions and completely ignore all of the problems that come with perspectives unlike with boxes and faces if you are like me you can use spheres and round shapes for all of the assets in your game and never bother with perspectives at all and it seems that guys from team cherry thought the same thing with hollow knight just look how many round shapes are there so start by making a sketch and a silhouette with a dark color the sketch is always nice to have just so that you can orient yourself where the details should be however if you are feeling like a mad lad you can skip the sketch and go straight for the silhouette also try thinking about these rocks like their environmental parts with which you are going to construct the environment by this i mean to come up with interesting and reusable shapes like these for shading with the lighter color use the textured brush like this one and reduce the opacity in this way you can cheat a lot of detail without much effort in case your rock formation consists of multiple smaller rocks use the eraser to clean up the edges make sure that you are always shading first the objects close to us and then slowly make your way into the back otherwise you will have problems when cleaning up the edges this brush is from a brush pack from mark brunette a cool artist guy who is giving this out for free so link in the description below if you want to download if you have trouble figuring out where to put the ambient occlusion and shadows like i do just add another layer on top color it black completely reduce the opacity and use the smooth eraser to erase the important sections of the rock in this way the only thing that is left is going to be the ambient occlusion and shadows and you didn't even try to do that to make this weird shaped object look more like a rock add cracks using the black color if you have trouble making straight lines like me now is your time to shine embrace those imperfect lines since it will make it more natural [Music] now using the overlay layer and white color add some highlights and make those cracks pop now since i think that the rocks are too dark i'm doing the same thing but for the whole rock meaning overlay layer and painting with the white color this always amazes me but every time i'm not quite happy with the drawing just add some brightness and contrast and everything looks good all of a sudden also feel free to experiment with different colors using hue and saturation component [Music] another thing that you can add to make your stones even more beautiful is grass again start with the silhouette and try to make natural grass should follow the shape of the rock don't think about the details too much for now this should just be the main shape of the [Music] grass shade the grass but now use the softer brush i use this one which looks kinda like a fog but you can use whatever you want [Music] use the black layer again erase some parts to treat some shading now you're thinking hey this doesn't look like a grass at all and you're right but we are not done yet now merge all of the grass layers into one if you are scared of merging layers like i am just duplicate everything and disable it if you want to have some backup modify your smooch tool remove the softness and make it distort 100 of the picture something like this prepare to lose a piece of your soul and use this tool to make each individual blade of grass and if you think that this is tedious just imagine how much i died inside for making this [Music] if you survived through this step then start erasing the transition between grass and rocks to make it more smooth and last but not least add an overlay layer and make some nice highlights with the yellowish color [Music] and that's kind of it now you can do what i like the most and that's to experiment with hue and saturation for both grass and rocks in order to get some different results [Music] if you really have patience you can always add some smaller highlights with the overlay layer i personally like using the spray paint brush to add some more detail quickly don't worry if some of the rocks don't look as good as the others because it happens to me as well i would say that the most impossible thing for me personally is to make all of the art the same quality what i like to do is to draw multiple rocks and assets at the same time true not all of them are going to be the best ever but some of them are going to be amazing keep repeating this process until you are happy with the results you can also draw grass separately from the rocks and have two versions of each rock with and without grass for some more variety when building the environment i hope this video helped you in some way if you want to check out these rocks and art style in action check out my devlogs for medacium as well as ascendum which you can wish list and steam right now and if you want subscribe to the channel since i will be releasing more videos like this one where i show how some of the stuff in my games is made that's it for me i'm done and until next time you

Channel: The Caecus

Views: 101,785

Keywords: game art, art tutorial, how to, game assets, game environment, stones, rocks, grass

Id: rS-ugTfIoGw

Length: 7min 59sec (479 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 25 2021