HOW TO DRAW PIXEL ART GAME CHARACTERS IN PS - TUTORIAL

welcome to Blackthorne prod I'm Noah and this is the first episode to a brand new tutorial series focused on pixel art so I'm sure almost all of you are familiar with this awesome art style used in breathtaking games like ol boy The Binding of Isaac hyper light drifter just to name a few so not only can pixel R be beautiful but it's also a great way to make graphics for your game if you're not particularly handy with drawing and painting obviously making epic looking pixel art world will take time and practice however contrary to other graphical styles you don't need a drawing tablet to get started so as I said in this video I'll show you how to make pixel art using Photoshop in the episodes following this one will animate our pixel art characters make sprite sheets and then import them inside of unity ready to be implemented and so whatever game you may be working on so first things first we need to make a new file with the right dimensions so I'll head over to file new and choose pixels for scale now I can type in how many pixels wide and long I want my canvas to be here if you want to go for something very simple and blocky reminiscence of old Zelda and Mario games you can go ahead and make an 8 pixels wide and long canvas or if you would like to add a tad more detail try 16 times 16 and 32 times 32 64 times 64 or if you want to make a very detailed pixel art character and/or environment go for 128 x 128 I wouldn't go any higher than this 4 pixel arts especially if you're just starting out notice that the more pixels you have to deal with the harder will beats and make your asset look good for the purpose of this tutorial I'll go ahead and make a 32 times 32 canvas awesome let's now draw some pixels to do so we don't use the rush to about the pencil tool which you can find right here by right-clicking on the brush icon with your mouse you can then scale down the size of that pencil to one to be able to draw pixel by pixel obviously you can scale this up if you want a larger nib the cool setting you can use to help yourself out is the pixel grids of which you can find under you sure there's gonna be a big help or counseling pixels again your characters I metric for example another extremely important tool is the eraser which you can find right here it's mode is usually set to brush which as you can see won't erase very properly so to get an effective a pixel art eraser simply set its mode to pencil and now you can tweak its size and rub out cleanly any unwanted pixel last important tool to keep in mind is the rectangular marquee tool which you can select right here with this tool selected you can left-click and drag and once you let go hit ctrl T on your keyboards and now you can move your pixels around the canvas this is especially great when animating as we'll see in the next video now that you know about those crucial pixel art tools let's make a character so the first step is sketching a create a new default Photoshop file and draw nine pixel arts a rough character monster prop or environment they will fit your game worlds or simply that you think will be fun to then pixel art if I could of course also do this for step with a pen and some paper even if you were terrible at drawing having a rough idea of what you'll be making will win you time in the long run and give you much better results for example this is a quick and very ugly sketch I made for my beholder monster without reference chances are high you'll spend a long time minutely drawing pixel by pixel a very weird and ugly looking creation the reason being didn't have a clear idea of the big picture but due to the rather precise nature of pixel arts we're spending loads of time fixating on the little details while making your sketch also ask yourself what this sprite will be used for is it a game character that will then need to be animated or simply a static pixel art drawing if this character will need to be animated it's perhaps a good idea to keep it nice and simple especially if you were a beginner alright now that my sketch is complete I'll head back into my 32 times 32 pixel are aisle and left clicking on my sketch pile I'll drag it here so I can clearly see my handy reference drawing with my pencils like turds I'll begin by making an outline of my character I'll do so with a black color for now of course nothing will stop me in the future from getting my design a different colored outline we're making the outline of your character you can either do so slowly but surely pixel by a lovely pixel or and this is really recommended for larger sprites creates a rough outline fast and then clean things up later one thing to avoid when making outlines in pixel arts is a jagged in other words little breaks in the line that make a look uneven and unappealing it's basically when one piece of the line is smaller or larger than surrounding pieces so for curved lines make sure the decline or incline is consistent all the way through so we'll start for example with six pixels then three and then one these values constantly decrease contrary to six pixels three pixels and then four pixels of course don't spend too much time counting each and every pixel even if your outlines aren't perfect at first with practice all that was said a moment ago will come naturally to you once the outline of your character completes it's time for coloring of shading and details however if you're planning on animates in your character you'll probably want to do so only with the outline and then color out each individual frame see in detail in the next video the reason being it's a whole lot simpler to tweak the movement and proportions of an outliner than doing so with a character that has been colored shaded and lips nothing could be more frustrating than rubbing out all that hard work because your animation doesn't feel right even if you're planning on animating your character stick around since we're going to take a look at some cool techniques to bring to life your character with color and shadows that you'll use anyway further down the pipeline so let's walk out the characters and main colors you can do so nice and fast with the paint bucket tool just make sure that this and the Alliance box is unchecked or you'll get some unwanted Pixies bleeding out from your outline flare out with various color combinations and once you're satisfied let's move on to shadows if you've watched my video on painting 2d game characters and drawing cartoony style ones you'll know the drill pick a light source which I usually place somewhere above my character and paint out your shadows in the opposite direction of that light source notice that you can actually paint these on a separate layer if you're worried you'll ruin what's already been drawn out your shadows should be a darker shade of your initial color so why do is I grab my eyedropper tool accessible right here which will allow me to select some color on my canvas once my color selected I'll head over to the color panel and choose a darker shade of that color using it to paint my shadows if you want softer more detailed shadows you can repeat this process choosing a slightly less dark color and using in fact to give shadows a nice gradient effect be careful not to do too much of this though or you run the risk of getting a very blurry looking sprites which can go against the crisp awesomeness of pixel art let's now add some lighter punches to our design again I'll grab my eyedropper tool selects my main color and this time in my color panel choose a lighter shade of that color using a highlight parts of my character directly hits by the light source Univ course also softened these highlights if you so choose notes that for shadows and highlights you could use a technique called dithering which basically consists in painting only one out of two pixels for some cool retro effects of course this all depends on what style you wants for your game now comes the time for details if you'd be making a small pixel art game character on an 8 x 8 or a 16 x 16 s pixel size canvas for example you won't have much room to add anything if you'd be working on something larger add with the white specular dots wrinkles and or even tweet the color off your outline but black outline like this looks cool and makes the character of popouts it doesn't feel very realistic if realism is what you want or simply don't like black outlines you can go ahead and change the lines color to better match your other colors for example here the top of my creatures head is a light red so I'll select that with my eyedropper tool and grab something slightly darker for my outline and I'll continue doing this for the rest of the outline excellent we've just completed the first part of the process making the static pixel art drawing again if you aren't impressed by what you've come up with that's totally funny now just keep creating and you'll eventually become a master at the craft if you want a cool community to share your creations with come and join the blackthorn prod discord server you can also join the pixel Bailey community and have fun creating on a daily basis pixel art and animation which you can share with and get hold of feedback from anyways I hope you enjoy the video and keep in mind that the next episode on animating your pixel arts game characters with Photoshop will come out very soon if you want to be absolutely awesome you can go ahead and support me and my channel via patreon like these top supporters hitting the like and subscribe buttons would also be so appreciated with that said stations [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Blackthornprod

Views: 1,112,366

Keywords: blackthornprod, pixel art, game art, tutorial, ps, photoshop, drawing, game characters, unity, adobe, sprite sheets, beginner, easy, how to, HOW TO MAKE PIXEL ART GAME CHARACTERS IN PS - DRAWING - #1, crisp, animation, indie game dev, making, creating, coloring, shading, shadows, lights, outline, pixeling, duelyst, hyper light drifter, binding of isaac, pixel art in ps, basics, step by step, art, character design, mouse, how to make pixel art, draw pixel art, retro graphics, mario, zelda, 8 bit

Id: qzvYu48kw5Q

Length: 10min 36sec (636 seconds)

Published: Fri May 25 2018