How to make 2D game art! Simple assets, even if you are bad at drawing

in this video we're gonna go over how to create simple 2d art assets that we could use to create a scene like this this scene only has seven art assets and they took me four to six minutes to draw the method we're applying is quite simple and you could probably even do it with just a mouse i think one of the more important things to do when drawing simple art is to draw simple things so we want to avoid complex objects like cars or buildings and focus on simple objects like balls or rocks or bushes why because it's easier to make and notice mistakes for complex objects for instance our face people see faces every day as soon as you make just a little bit of a mistake on a face people will start to notice it they might not be able to pinpoint what's wrong but they noticed that something is wrong compare that to a rock and it doesn't really have a predefined shape so we don't really have a good expectation of how it should look in this video we're gonna focus on drawing four simple assets rocks bushes mushrooms and trees let's start with drawing each of these i'm going to be using procreate if you have a computer and don't know which program to use i recommend krita it's free and open source we start by making a quick outline of a rock basically a half circle on a separate layer we fill in a base color to save time when doing this i recommend using the magic wand up in the corner and with the outline layer selected select inside the rock if you have procreate it will look blue like this and if you're working with another program you should be able to see a checkered selection this way when we fill in our base color we can just use a bucket tool let's assume we don't know at all how light works the simplest way to make something look okay without making any regards to light interaction is to essentially go top of acid light and bottom of acid dark this won't be perfect but it will look roughly correct most of the time it is what i used in my previous video on recreating hollow knight's art style we essentially imagine that the light source is in the center of the room or center of where we are now if i have an asset where the light is on the top and the shadows are on the bottom i can rotate this asset as much as i want 360 around the room and it will still look kind of okay so you will have a layer setup that kind of looks like this we still keep the selection on so that we don't have to worry about drawing outside of the rock then when we draw the top of the stone we go back to our base color and go less saturated and lighter so when we pick our shadow color we can start from our base color and then just go more saturated and darker now we have our base our highlight and our shadow and we just blend them and we blend using the smudge tool and select the soft brush and we just go back and forth until we have a smooth transition and since we have these on different layers we can go back and shift the colors relative to each other to see if we can get a cool effect i do this by going into adjustments and selecting hsl okay now we just have a circle in order to get that rock effect we go back to our outline and draw small cracks or nicks there we have a rock we can repeat this for lots of different symbol shapes and we can get that sort of rock feeling for each of them next let's draw some bushes for this one we can do a sketch layer first let's do a quick random line lower the opacity of it and then we make a new layer where we create our outline next we just draw lots of connected half circles once again we add a base layer a shadow layer and a light layer we pick a base color sort of not too saturated and not too dark and here we draw almost everywhere where we don't have our outline with the shadow color everywhere close to the outline we draw the lighter color and then we blend we can vary with the bushes quite easily as well now we made half circles but we can also make spikes we can instead of making three leaves on each pair we can make seven but this base principle sort of remains for all different types of bushes we have changed how the leaves look and once again since we have everything on three different layers we can adjust them separately to get sort of the color and look and feel that we want and for mushrooms we have essentially the same process but here the shape of the mushroom matters more we can obviously draw lots of different type of mushrooms but if we just look at a simple one base color light color shadow color and then we blend i think that just adding a small sort of grass or mushroom here and there can sort of add to the overall effect but i think with basically as bushes and rocks you can get quite far if we were to place these assets right now we could get something like this and this could kind of work for some areas but we lack a bit of depth all of our assets are in that medium range kinda small which is really why we want to have some trees so let's make the trees and this is probably the most difficult of the assets but it shouldn't be too hard on a sketch layer we start by making a half circle then we basically make two vertical lines and then we make an inverted half circle now we make our outline and we sort of play loose with the outline to get that sort of organic feel and then we connect the tree to the hill by sort of sprawling out and imagining the roots going into the hill and for the tree trunk we just sort of draw lines upwards sort of wavy it shouldn't be perfectly straight because the normal tree wouldn't be now at the top we draw one or two branches sticking out obviously a tree doesn't actually look exactly like this because the branches wouldn't necessarily go in a two-dimensional plane but our style is simple enough that this actually looks kind of intentional and now for the top half circle we just make an inverted bush and then we just draw random lines and at this point we have a base a tree trunk and the leaves which all have different colors so we could color these on separate layers to make it easier and we're just going to add one more layer that we call a texture layer to make the bark and now when we place these trees we get this kind of effect which really adds to the depth of the scene now we could stop here and say this looks kind of good but we could also just add a watercolor texture on top of it which i've hinted at previously in the video and by adding these textures we can instead of having these type of assets we can make it look like this and if we put all of this together in a scene our game now looks like this i don't know which of these i prefer maybe you prefer one over the other but the principle remains that you can have quite simple assets and make them look sort of cool just by adding a texture on top of it and this texture is just a basic watercolor paper texture the rest of the process is really about staging these things to get something cool i'll probably make a separate video on staging but to reiterate we basically have very very simple assets and very few assets but we got quite far with it and we didn't really need to know anything about lighting we just followed basic principle which is base color and then a lighter color that is slightly less saturated and a darker color that is slightly more saturated and we sort of shaded went from light on the top dark on the bottom and obviously this isn't perfect but if you feel like you know nothing about drawing this can be a good way to start getting something out there that you kinda like and it's the kind of style where mistakes aren't as noticeable because a lot of the mistakes look intentional sort of how i accidentally made this loop on the leaves which technically doesn't make any sense whatsoever but since my style is sort of loose kinda looks like i wanted there to be a loop there thanks for watching bye

Channel: Nonsensical 2D

Views: 61,274

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Id: bKgi6WcXtCY

Length: 7min 22sec (442 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 16 2021