How to Make Pixel Art [Tutorial for Beginners] | Adobe Photoshop

hi everybody my name is jeremy lord i am a freelance illustrator and artist and i work predominantly around themes of kind of japanese pop culture neon vibes a bit of cyberpunk and a few kind of video game references and on that theme i'm going to take you guys through today a quick pixel art tutorial in adobe photoshop so without further ado let's get into it before we get into the tutorial side of things let's take a look at what pixel art is and where it comes from pixel art or 8-bit art gets its name from retro video games so back in the days consoles and computers weren't very powerful and as a result the artwork that they could render couldn't be very high resolution and so you get these very pixelated um art style which nowadays has become a style but back in the days was a necessity for the computing power of these machines and so here you've got this example of a highly sort of rendered artwork done in powerful programs like photoshop and on the right you've got the pixel art equivalent of that so you can see that obviously drop in resolution but this has become a style nowadays another thing to consider when you're creating your pixel art file is how many pixels you're going to include in the image um so here's four examples of some standard sizes when creating pixel art on the left hand side you've got 128 and that literally means it's 128 pixels by 128. this has a lot of information you can really include a lot of detail into this but it also means that it's going to be a bit harder to draw all that detail this is very pixelated it's very difficult to make out what's happening you've got less detail which makes your image a little bit harder to gather information from but it also means that it's a bit easier to draw and this is one of the things that you'll have to balance when you're creating your pixel art okay so we're in photoshop now and as you can see i've started by creating this little sketch of a pizza slice pizza slice because it kind of fits with this idea of video games this is your little health boost it's delicious and yeah it's going to be something that's going to be relatively simple for us to draw so i've got this sketch and i'm ready to now transfer that into pixel art so we're going to start by creating a new file and you'll see that there's a little bit of setting up that we need to do before we can do this so first thing i need to do is to create a new document so i'll do that by hitting command n or control n if you're on a pc and this brings up my new document window where there's a range of different options first thing i'm interested in is going into print because this is going to be a print and then i can go and where it says a4 this doesn't really matter which one you choose here because we'll change this anyways but we'll start with a4 and that's going to set our width to 210 and our height by 297 and and that's going to be in millimeters so these are physical sizes we don't want that we want that to be in pixels so i'm going to hit that and go and select pixels this has now given me the equivalent physical size in pixels so i'm going to change that to 64 by 64. and then the rest of all these options can change can stay exactly the same sorry and then i'm going to go ahead and hit create and that's going to create my little pixel art canvas which is very small for the time being but we'll fix that in a second so if i zoom in here you'll see there's not much happening and what i need to do before i can really start doing this is to see the pixels that i'm going to do so i'm going to select a kind of a neutral color so it's kind of 50 gray here and you can see if i kind of zoom in here i'm roughly at 50 percent on the black and so that's roughly what you want doesn't need to be exact but there we go and i can hit option delete to fill that and you'll as immediately you'll notice that i can now see the actual pixels that are in that image so now i'm ready to start painting and if i use the regular brush you'll see this will happen where i'm definitely making a mark and from a distance it looks okay but if i get up close to this if i zoom in you'll see that this is kind of gradient of black pixels and then slightly sort of darker gray and then lighter gray and then my background color here which is something that will happen if i zoom in on my actual pizza slice sketch you'll see the same thing happening so photoshop does this to smooth out your images and give it this kind of anti-aliasing to get rid of the pixels so we need to bring those back in so in order to do that i'm actually going to use a different tool so instead of the brush tool which lives up here and in your menu i'm going to click and hold and i'm going to go down to the pencil tool and while i'm here you can see that i'm going to set that to 35 so this is literally going to be 35 pixels wide so if i make a drawing here i'm not going to get the aliasing but i'm filling out way too many pixels for my liking so i need to go back into here and go down to my size and literally just type in one pixel wide and hit return and now you can see my cursor here cursor fits exactly inside one of these pixels so that's why it's important for me to be able to see those pixels and then it will fill those pixels and kind of magnetize to those so for instance if you see i've got my kind of cursor here on the middle of these four pixels wherever i'm going to press is which one is going to kind of fit into that so i can't draw in the middle because i'm literally down to the pixels here so pixels in between don't exist it's either that one or the one on the left so that's going to make it a little bit easier for me to see but as i said if i don't have my color in the background i can't see where my pixels are going to go so i won't be able to place them so that's the kind of the basic premise of my pixel art so i'm ready now to start painting this and create my pixel app and as you can see i've got similar lines but i'm also going to need to do the same thing to my eraser because if i hit e on my keyboard you'll see my cursor now is again gigantic and if i erase i'm going to get the similar kind of thing so this one's a little bit different this one doesn't live in the actual eraser tool there's no pencil here but you'll have to go up to here where it says mode brush and we'll change that to pencil and then again same thing up here we'll change the size down to one pixel and that's going to mean that when i go in and erase i'm erasing single pixels in a nice clean edge like so um cool so i'm ready to go i'm ready to start drawing but i'm going to bring in my pizza slice in first and so i'm going to command c copy that and command v control v to paste it in so it doesn't look like anything's happened but this is because my pizza slice sketch is much bigger than my pixel app because it's a much higher resolution so i need to diminish the size of this down to my actual canvas so i had to zoom out quite a bit in order to do that you'll see that i'm going to lose a little bit of the detail that's simply just because again i've got such a difference in resolution that i'm going to kind of lose that but it doesn't matter i can still kind of see what i'm doing so now i'm going to lower the opacity of this so up here in our layers panel you'll see this little slider this is gets used quite a bit when i'm drawing so i'll just lower the opacity down and you can see now in my image that that's lowered the opacity and now i can start painting with this so i'm going to start with the yellow we're going to paint the cheese first and then we're going to start filling this up so i'll speed this video up a little bit switching to a time lapse and you'll see the kind of the whole pizza take shape so let's go [Music] okay so that's it i'm pretty happy with how that looks for now um still got a couple of things to fix up on this but the the bulk of it is here so again you can see i've added some little kind of herbs on this and they're literally just a square which looks a little bit funny if you zoom in it becomes a bit of a mosaic mess but if we zoom out it starts to make a lot more sense so again these kind of pixel arts are a style but they they're not necessarily meant to be viewed up close because that makes too much sense you need to kind of keep a bit of a distance from them to see what makes sense and there we have our little pizza slice all finished up but this isn't quite ready to be produced yet because i've created this at 64 by 64 pixels wide that means that in the real world this image is absolutely tiny and if i do command option i it'll bring up my image size panel you can see that is the case in here where my image is literally five and a half millimeters wide and tall as well so if i was to say send this over to a client to make stickers or print this on t-shirts or posters they really can't do anything with this because this is literally half a centimeter in size of the image so i need to fix this before i can actually send this off or produce this so we'll do this by increasing the size here and the main thing that we're going to look at is this here where it says resample so by default this is set to automatic and what we want is to bring it down to nearest neighbor hard edges and i'll show you the difference i'm going to leave that to automatic right now and you'll see what the difference is going to be so i'm going to make this um let's say we want this to be i don't know we want it to be 20 centimeters wide we're going to put this on a t-shirt so we're going to go with 200 millimeters by 200 millimeters and you can see immediately in the preview what it's going to do i'm going to hit return okay and that's made my image bigger but it's also because photoshop has to create extra pixels and extra information it kind of blurs the image a little bit so we don't want that so i'm going to undo that and i'm going to zoom back into this again because our image is tiny and i'm going to bring that panel back up so command option i and where it says automatic here i'm going to slide this down to my nearest neighbor hard edges and that will preserve the hard edges in the image and then i can go back into millimeters and say 200 and you can see here in the preview that that is nice and crisp and that has kept my pixels exactly as they are but my image is now 200 millimeters wide so this is ready to produce and send off to a client and be printed on any support that we want so that's one of the the main things that you need to do here when you're creating pixel art is always remember to finish it off by bringing it back into a normal size for production values but for now here's our little pepperoni cheese melted pizza slice all done up in photoshop that's it for our little pixel art tutorial in adobe photoshop i hope you enjoyed it and got something out of it thanks for watching take care and we'll see you around you

Channel: Adobe Asia Pacific

Views: 1,774,002

Keywords: 8-bit art, artwork, pixel art, pixel art guide, pixel art photoshop, pixelated, pixilart, beginner pixel art, easy pixel art, how to create pixel art, how to do pixel art, how to draw pixel art, how to make 8 bit art, how to make pixel art, making pixel art, pixel art brush photoshop, pixel art editor, pixel art sizes, pixel art software, pixel art tools, pixel art tutorial, pixel art tutorial photoshop, resize pixel art photoshop, simple pixel art

Id: 9OfeNDukXm8

Length: 11min 15sec (675 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021