Isometric Pixel Art Practice

[Music] hello there my name is brandon and i make pictures out of tiny squares and today i'm doing a bit of practice with isometric pixel art which is a really popular style of pixel art but it's something that i don't have a ton of experience with so this is kind of one of those extremely overdue points of practice for me isometric art is a unique style where you create a fixed three-dimensional appearance by building out your illustrations using angles if you've ever sketched it like sort of that quintessential 3d cube on paper that's essentially what we're doing here but with pixel art there ends up being a few other considerations just in the way that the pixel segments and angles can be aligned with each other the most common structure you'll probably see for isometric pixel art is to build out kind of the let's call them the x and y axes using segments that are two pixels wide while the vertical axis remains perfectly vertical with this approach there's sort of a locked perspective without a vanishing point so you're actually able to build out as far as you like in any direction and some of the best examples of this art form are where people have created like kind of entire city grids uh and it's also been used a lot for strategy games since you get kind of that vast three-quarter overhead view one of the main considerations i found when building out using the two pixel wide segments is to pay attention to how the corners are lining up for most of my blocky structures where i wanted to have sharp 90 degree corners i've also used a segment length of two pixels at that corner transition between the two angles and so if you're going to add in an edge line to that which i've done here with my art you kind of have to decide if that line is going to be towards the left side or the right side of that middle segment since there is actually no exact middle with this scheme i've opted to use the left side of that segment for my lines it just kind of looked better to me so every time i had to make a corner like this i would keep that part of it consistent so as you can see i'm starting to create a blocky structure using this approach and this is going to end up being a small building eventually although at this point in the time lapse i hadn't really considered what the theme of this place was going to be but for now i'm just kind of building up the line work and adding different sizes of blocks and also trying out kind of different angles to things just to make an overall structure that is more interesting visually and this approach of the initial blocking is also just giving me a feel for working within the perspective of this style what i found with this style was that i really needed to make sure that the placement of these objects was like on each point of the grid and so to keep track of like the depth and the placement of these objects i'd often start by bringing a new line to where it meets the wall in the floor because i know that that's like the origin and then i bump that segment out using my arrow keys just kind of going over by two and down by one and kind of repeating that pattern until i moved it away from the wall once the main angles were in place i'd kind of measure it to make sure it all feels consistent and then join those angles together with vertical lines merge the layers and then just erase the pixels underneath that you are not supposed to be seen anymore or i suppose if you were kind of coloring at this stage also you could just color over them in my case though since i was focused on playing around with the style and the perspective i've just kind of opted to use my familiar workflow of doing all the line work first before moving on to shading and color it was interesting though trying to get a feel for what sorts of angles and connections you could make in this perspective like when you're doing kind of a flat or side projection type of perspective if you use a corner to corner line of pixels that creates a 45 degree angle obviously but in isometric that same line becomes a shallow angle i guess probably about half of that or whatever maybe 22.5 degrees or something once a lot of the geometry of the building was in place i decided it was time to actually give it a theme and because of all the blocky additions the architecture here felt kind of cold and mechanical to me and so the idea that i settled on was to make it into a mechanic shop so right now i'm actually just trying to figure out how to make a large angled wrench that ends up being kind of this floating hologram logo for this place i actually remember spending most of my time here kind of making this with my head tilted to 45 degrees just trying to see that everything was staying symmetrical along that angle my top down perspective video which kind of had me in a similar situation as this one i said it's a good exercise that you should make a junk shop since it'll force you into making a lot of different kinds of objects so that's kind of what i'm trying to do here with the mechanic shop just sort of fill it out with a bunch of stuff for additional practice making different kinds of details and shapes in this style [Music] one of the trickier things was to get a hang of circular shapes since they're going to kind of be skewed by that angled perspective right what i tried to do here was just sort of freehand something that looked approximately correct and then i go in and shift the circle around one pixel at a time to try to find the right pattern in this case the circle was for a large wall fan so once i had that framework in place i filled it in with the fan blades and again i just tried to eyeball their initial placement before cleaning up and refining the line work when adding text at this angle i just tried to have the right side of the letter sit one pixel lower than the rest it kind of works best for letters that have like two separate legs to them if you get what i mean uh like the capital r here uh when the the right leg of it can sit one pixel lower than the left that kind of gives you an easy perspective to work with i was actually thinking that an alternate way to approach text might be just to write it out perfectly even and then kind of select and shift different parts of it down by one pixel so that'll probably be something i have to try next time logo on the sign here is meant to be a little mech suit um it's kind of abstract right now but it gets a little better once the color's been added to kind of break up those individual pieces there as with a lot of my work i couldn't really help myself from leaning this into a sci-fi aesthetic so rather than this being like a car mechanic and having car parts kind of scattered everywhere i've decided to throw in like mech parts just with the remaining space here to finish off the line work and by the way the canvas size that i've used for this piece is 180 by 180 pixels i've just found that to be a good default size for me like it's not too large not too small and i like that it scales up exactly six times up to a total size of 1080 by 1080 which is usually pretty good for posting on instagram or whatever and maintaining the clarity alright for the coloring here i'm just dropping in flat colors for now to establish the main color of each surface and then i'll go in after for more intricate shading i've used a basic scheme of having most of the surfaces that are facing to the right in a dark tone the ones facing to the left in a light tone and then the top surfaces kind of in that default mid tone this really just helps accentuate the geometry by kind of reinforcing the direction that these surfaces are facing whether they're mainly catching the light or facing away from it the palette that i'm using here is called oil six and it was made by graphics kid on low spec i almost wanted to say the graphics kid like some sort of wild west outlaw but anyway i found this palette while browsing low spec i was just trying to find something that would fit with the theme of this being a mechanic shop so not only do i think these colors look great for this theme but the name of the palette also really just sealed the deal for me i've really been enjoying experimenting with other pixel artists palettes lately uh since it kind of opens you up to colors that you might not have otherwise landed on and what i like about this palette is that the saturation just feels like it's in a perfect spot it's fairly moderate but there's still quite a strong punch to the colors and i think the reason for this is because they step over quite a wide range of hues you know all the way from that bright yellow down to the purpley blue and there's only six colors total so they each kind of get to occupy their own distinct space so overall i just found it to be a really well balanced palette uh so you know thank you to the graphics kid for this one so at this stage i'm just doing laps around the artwork to introduce a variety of shades across the objects to break up the flat tones and bring a bit of dimension and shading to these objects even though working within the structure of isometric is still pretty new to me i'm just approaching the coloring and detailing like i would for any other artwork of mine so i'm finishing a lot of this off with some weathering and texture just to give it a grimy feel a lot of this is placed fairly randomly around the edges and then just kind of tends to read better from a distance one of the interesting finishing touches i discovered during this phase was just to break up some of the line work using the color from that surface so instead of keeping the bottom line as a solid two pixel line it's kind of like a dashed one pixel line and i think it looks especially nice for objects that are sitting on the ground or for breaking up line work that borders two edges anyway let's go ahead and take a look at the final piece so here's the isometric mech shop here we go [Music] all right so i also finished this off with a couple square floor tiles um just a bit of additional decoration i thought would be kind of fun for this style and we'll close out with some crt time so thank you for joining me for this isometric practice and if you happen to be a master with this style feel free to leave me some tips in the comments so thank you for watching and take care and keep it square you

Channel: Brandon James Greer

Views: 247,291

Keywords: pixel art, tutorial, speedpaint, iso, 3D

Id: A0SvOecD5DM

Length: 10min 4sec (604 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/arfbrookwood]

I love this talent. Thank you for the inspiration!

[u/walter-wallcarpeting]

Really cool. Looks great and the little animation at the end was a nice touch. Thanks!

[u/fieldofvision_]

Thoroughly enjoyed it.