Learn Any Pixel Art Style like a Professional Artist - Tips & Tricks

one of my favorite things about game development is being able to create the artwork for my game don't get me wrong programming is so much fun but there's just something so amazing about trying to piece together and create this world using pixels but one of the questions i get a lot is how do you develop your style or how do you learn new pixar styles and today i want to cover how you can develop your own style not just for pixlr but even art in general by literally copying other people okay maybe not plagiarism but by studying how they make their artwork and applying your favorite things to your pieces so grab your canvases put on your ninja costumes because we're about to steal some art but first today's video is brought to you by skillshare skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of inspiring classes for creative and curious people explore new skills deepen existing passions and even get lost in creativity whether you're interested improving your editing skills for your devlogs or you just want to improve your game dialogue with a creative writing class skillshare has it all one of my favorite classes is logo design with draplin he really does a great job of breaking down logos and making him feel so simple and easy to understand and was a super helpful introduction for me for logo design one thing i really like about it is that there's no ads and they're always adding new classes so it always keeps things fresh and interesting i always say that learning is well worth the money and the great news is that skillshare is incredibly affordable a huge part of game development is self-learning and there's nothing better than actually getting better and accomplishing growth is extremely satisfying and skillshare's online classes make it possible and for the first 1000 of my subscribers to click the link in the description you will get a free trial of skillshare premium membership so you can explore your creative side so firstly we need to talk about the elephant in the room stealing artwork no i don't mean that you're actually going to steal and copy someone's work it's awful it's terrible and sadly it happens every single day let me just put this little disclaimer do not steal this first section i'm going to be talking about where you're copying artwork make sure you do not post this or if you do say that it's a copy or that was inspired by something with that said the first tip for learning any pixar style is through tracing or copying the style that you're interested in doing i used to do this a lot as a kid where i get grid paper and i would take pixel art and i'm trying to recreate it on the grid paper and it really helps you get a feel for the style and how the art is being made what's the process behind it now you may be asking good guess why why am i doing this and here's the thing a lot of art is subconscious the way you stylize things is muscle memory and just things that you pick up over time so step number one is just find a piece or a style that you like and start tracing it or trying to recreate it moving on to step number two you want to learn the rules of the style so every style has some sort of limitation or things set up to make that style what it is for example like a gameboy game has the green color palette or maybe you have a game that has a thick outline around it or maybe it doesn't have any outline at all and it's these combinations of things together that creates that style one fantastic example of this is neutronized jonathan does such an amazing job of having these thick outlines and really very little shading and making the world feel like it has a lot of depth and everything in the game revolves around these outlines and this flat style now if you took that style and you put it into let's say my boy reese's game reese's style focuses heavily on shading and they just clash because they're so opposite from each other now both styles are fantastic but you have to understand that when you're making pixel art you have to identify those things that creates the style so is it the palette is it the dark tones is it the amount of colors you use the shade with is the outline or the lack of outline break down the style and try to piece together how it's built speaking of color palettes the next tip is understanding your color palette fully now you could just look at another game and completely rip its palette but you're not really learning from it it's important to know how color works in order for you to kind of adapt it and apply that to your own style now a few important attributes of color are value hue saturation and contrast and to briefly cover each hue is basically where on the rainbow you are are you blue are you yellow are you green it's this slider that picks between those colors value is how light or dark a color is it's the difference between a navy blue and a sky blue saturation is how much color there is is it really bright and punchy or is it desaturated more of like a gray monochromatic color and finally contrast with your color is how big of a difference in value are the colors how big is the darkest red from your lighter red it's important to understand that if you have a very subtle contrast with your art or that you use lighter value colors or maybe more pastel colors which have less saturation it really doesn't matter what you're using as long as you're consistent about it another thing to consider too is color temperature there is a difference between a warm blue and a cool blue i know that sounds weird but if you mix warm colors with cool colors and you don't know what you're doing you could come up with some weird colors that just don't work together so i encourage you to study the palette that they're using and to try to figure out are they saturated are they desaturated are they warm colors are they're cool i guarantee the more you look and study that palette that it's gonna be that subconscious thing where your brain picks it up and understands it even if you don't and finally my fourth and final tip is learn how to adapt that style into your own now just because we learned someone else's style doesn't mean we can just go out and start using that honestly that's the worst thing you could be doing what you really want to do is to copy and study several artists so that you have different styles kind of floating around so when you sit down to make your piece you have all these different principles and you create your own style maybe you like the art style of earthbound but you wish it had thicker outlines and maybe more muted colors or maybe there's two or three styles that you really enjoy that work well together or maybe they don't and that's what makes them look interesting and the goal is to mix and match styles together and i like to say that you put a fifty fifty percent ratio where fifty percent is influenced by outside sources and 50 of it is something from you that's just completely genuine and fun so those are my tips for you and i want you know that they actually work so if you have any thoughts or questions or if i left anything out that you would like some clarification for please let me know in the comments down below i always love chatting with you guys also a quick shout out for buddy games heath sergeant rybred and the rest of the wonderful patreon supporters if you want to see behind the scenes content or get early access for new games that we're working on please check out the patreon anyway guys thank you so much for watching this video make sure to like and subscribe if you want to see more video from the channel and i'll see you next time for another game dev adventure [Music] you

Channel: Goodgis

Views: 33,282

Keywords: goodgis, ohio, devlog, how to create a game, construct 3, game dev, indie dev, game maker, game programming, game process, how to make, firith, firith studio, game jam, pixel art, Tutorial, art style, find your style, Steal art, Unity, Game Maker, Unreal Engine, Godot, pixel art tutorials, how to learn pixel art, get better at pixel art

Id: vJgkAve9Wis

Length: 7min 49sec (469 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 10 2021