How To Make Pixel Art Twitch Emotes ( +Mistakes to avoid )

hello guys today i'm going to teach you how to make twitch emotes but not any kind of twitch emote pixel art ones and while we add it this works not only for twitch but also for discord since the difference is just a size now i know what you're going to tell me but cenge and emos already pixel out i mean they're so small they gotta be well you can have a point but not really you see the difference between pixel art emotes and standard ones is usually visible you can see that it is pixel art and the reason for that usually comes from the process when someone creates an emote that is not pixel art it is made at the highest size than it is displayed between 112 by 112 and 4096 by 4096 and is then uploaded platform which is going to shrink it down this is a simple upload some artists may do this process manually to be able to fine-tune the emote making three exports of three smaller sizes this is the advanced upload the idea here is to work big today and make it small when we do a pixel art e mode however it's the opposite we start small and then we scale it to fit the display size so on twitch where one emote is 28 by 28 pixels we directly create the e-mode at this size and then export it in time 2 and time 4 scale to fit the different types of display you can see the difference between the two because a non-pixel emote will include a high amount of anti-air using those pixels that are here to smooth edges and curves in a small picture and yes i plan to cover this topic in a future video but that's not the point for today a pixel art emote does not have aa or in a small amount that has been hand placed here we can see a comparison between a standard e mode and a pixel art one as you can see those two feel very different this difference may not be as visible with other pixel art modes because depending on the artist the picture might have less contrast between the colors or have more entire lazing making it look not as pixel artsy now before i show you how to make pixel art emotes we need to talk a bit about emotes in general more precisely what makes a good emote because as fun as it is to create an e-mode we still need to think about what it's going to be and if it's going to fulfill its role [Music] so what makes a good e-mode well first of all a good emote is readable you can tell where the emote is with a quick glance so it has to be simple since it's so small it cannot be cluttered with many elements usually a couple maybe three element at most is enough for your e-mode more than that and it would be hard to make everything fit inside of the pictures and it's just going to look confusing once displayed on twitch secondly since broadcasters only have a limited set of e-modes a good one needs to be something that's going to be used often and is not similar to other emotes you already have finally if you want a great emote it needs to be unique having an emote that refers to an inside joke in your community is probably the best kind you can have because it will not look like any other emote on the platform and is going to be used often now as we're about to jump into the process of how to make those pixelate twitch emotes i thought it would be the perfect time to talk about sizes size is going to be an important factor when designing an e-mode because as you can guess they are pretty tiny [Music] so what size is a twitch emote at which emote is 28 pixel by 28 pixel if you're a masochist though you can split those in half going 14 by 14 or even 7x7 but that's usually for very specific kind of emotes they are then exported in 28x28 that's native size 56x56 that's time 2 112 by 112 that's time 4. if like me you're wondering why that is it's because each of these sides are for a specific kind of display 28 by 28 is for web 56 by 56 is for retina display which is a special kind of display with a higher pixel density and 112 by 112 is for large display flat screens and know that this is out of the way we can start pixeling to begin with i take my idea and do a sketch on paper to see how it will look and if it's possible then i open a sprite or any software of your choice and in a sprite i make a 28x28 canvas or a bigger canvas with 28 by 28 grid if i'm doing multiple e-modes i then black out the element with shapes of colors which are going to be the most visible ones displayed on twitch smaller details are not going to be perceptible consciously at least because once again it's so small if an element in contact with the background is bright or dark i like to add an outline of the opposite shade if i don't that element will get confused with the background at this point the pixel art is pretty much done and now it's a matter of editing it by changing small bits here and there to make it read better in the chat for that i use an online website to preview my emote it shows it in the chat box in three sizes as well as in the channel point option you can also change the theme from dark to light to see if the emote works well on the white background of course the link to the website is in the video description it's very handy because you can just take your file and drag and drop it into the website and it will instantaneously give you a preview in the chat then i take my time to look at the preview and try to see what i can improve on then i go back into a sprite fix what didn't worked and i put it back into the emote preview repeating this process until the emote looks good remember it's more important for the emo to be clearly readable and display sized and look good or to be accurate with the description of what's portrayed it's all about sacrificing accuracy and aesthetic for readability it can be a bit hard to make a good pixar emote if you're new at pixel art it's going to be even harder for you but i also think it's a great exercise for beginners because the constraints are so harsh so if you're having some troubles don't worry it's normal and you'll get there at some point i wanted to close this video on a few examples of bad pixeled emotes to give you an idea of what to avoid no these are more bad emotes than bad pixel arts but i think it's still important to see what they fail so we can learn from it okay so i'm recording this with another microphone so i hope it sounds okay the first mistake i want to cover and that you absolutely want to avoid is a lack of contrast in your emote so what i mean by that is if you have multiple elements of similar color if they're not separated well enough it's going to make the e-mode hard to read so here on this example that i've made an image of mine that i slightly modified you can see what i'm talking about because the hand is blue the color is blue and the helmet is blue and so it makes the emote hard to read because you can't really make the difference between the color on the hand instead you read it as there is this one shape that's doing that kind of thing and then you don't really understand what it is same thing with the skin and the hair the hair is blonde and the skin is light skin so you don't really clearly make the difference you can see at this display size where the hair ends and where the skin begins but once displaying the chat it's so small that it's kind of going to blend together as one thing even if to use screen to eye you can see the difference you want to make this as clear as possible right because one it's going to be easier to read but it's also going to make the image more appealing so the way to fix this is if i go to the next frame see i got rid of the color here and so now you clearly see that this is a hand or at least you can tell you can kind of guess that this is hand and it doesn't get confused with the color anymore and for the hair and the skin i just added this cast shadow here that's going to separate it and now once displayed in the chat you can clearly see the difference between the hair skin the hand and the coat okay the second mistake i want to talk about is not taking into consideration the lightly so i know most people use dark theme but there's still people out there using the light theme if you don't take those people into consideration the image is not going to be able to be read on this white background so here we can see this character is waving frog here that's my logo um the character is waving and he's wearing a white shirt but since there's no outline if you put it on a white background it's just going to blend in right and yes you can guess like there's something going on around here because obviously the arm is not coming out of nowhere but it's still better if people can see the shirt right it's going to be more appealing and it's also going to be easier to read so the way to fix this is to add an outline and same for the green as well i mean the green is probably going to be easier to read but since it's a very light green i kind of prefer to add an outline on it as well and no it's gonna work both on light theme and on dark theme because on dark theme well you're not gonna be able to see the outline but it's okay because you can still read the emote and on the light theme however you're gonna be able to see the shard because the outline is there now and it's eliminating it from the background the third mistake i want to talk about is having too many elements and i talked about that in the beginning of the video as well as the outline if i remember correctly but basically here you can see this emote well first of all it's very ugly i don't care too much about that because it's just a quick example i've made but also there's too many elements right you have this guy with a cool sunglasses shooting a shotgun there's a star in the top right corner there's a gg on the middle bottom and he's wearing cat ears for some reason it's way too confusing the image is going to be way too many thing at the same time and uh yeah it's if you want to use it as an over-the-top emote well yeah i guess it kind of worked this way but usually you don't want to go far down right you want to emote that's like clearly okay this is a this is a love emote this is hard emote this is a sleep emote this is uh high emotes like emotes money emote i don't know and you only have a few elements right because if you display this in the chat you can't really tell here because a sprite is not really like doesn't get to the exact same size it kind of gets blurry when you vote it's it's kind of hard to tell what the emote is so the way to do that is to first of all you you gotta throw stuff out so you're gonna get rid of some of those elements so here i got rid of the gg i got rid of the the stars i got rid of the cat ears i kept the shotgun and the sunglasses and i changed the shirt because um the shot was blue so it would have been confused with the gray from the shotgun so i made it a light green and i added an outline since it's a light color and now it's way easier to read and it works way much it works better as an emote that's what i'm trying to say that's it for this video guys don't hesitate to subscribe if you enjoyed the video i got more like this one coming and give me your feedbacks in the comments this is my first time doing this kind of content so any kind of criticism will help me get better okay i really gotta go now because as you can hear i'm losing my voice i'm very tired of recording this i'll see you in the next one and until then keep pixeling [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Sansh

Views: 2,055

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Id: 6yvT4kLf3Ek

Length: 12min 53sec (773 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 14 2021