Isometric Pixel Art Tutorial | Photoshop CC

hey everybody its Julian or flow graphics here and welcome to another Photoshop tutorial today I'm going to be showing you how to create isometric pixel art I so like you can see on my screen right now this is something I quickly whipped up for this video so I'm going to be showing you the techniques on how to actually create the isometric view sort of make some isometric tubes and whatnot and how to actually start to texture them make them into buildings and also teachers and stuff about shading and lighting so you can make things like that the tree in the house and whatnot so yeah let's just get straight into it I'm just gonna open up I'll just close this document first um I'm just gonna open up a new document so we're working a pixel idea so we can make it pretty small um just gonna make it let's say 80 by 80 pixels just an RGB 8-bit color is great for me so I'm gonna hit okay so once you get your document open I'm just going to hit ctrl + let's zoom in a little bit here now whenever I make pixel art I to work of a darker background that some reason just I don't like staring a bright white background so it's gonna double-click on this background layer make it into a normal hour keep control U and I'm just gonna make it nice and dark so I go sort of a bit bit sort of nice are easy to look at I think so before we get into this something it's really really important with pixel art is your color palette so like you can see in the top right hand corner of my Photoshop I have some sort of color swatches that I've made so this is actually sort of like a custom color swatch palette color palette that I've made specifically for a game that I'm working on and what I'm making sort of like a retro pixel Rd game at the moment and these colors work really well for that so I'm just gonna use these colors here and something that I'm going to do fall of you is actually leave a download link to this actual color swatch there's this specific color palette so we've color palettes it's not just as straightforward as just picking colors and using them there's actually specific ways that you sort of can use the certain colors to make it look better so I'll leave it download to that and if you want to follow along exactly you can actually use the exact colors that I'm using so let's just get straight into it so we've made a new document one thing I'm gonna say I always say this about all my pixel art tutorials if you have a pixel grid and you don't like it you can go view show and then pixel grid and I'll come up with this pixel grid if you don't like it you can turn it off if you do like it you can turn it on I don't use it because it's a subtle million so I'm going to turn it off but first thing let's create an actual sort of the angle that we're going to create our isometric sort of viewer so I'm just going to cut in you lay here I'm gonna go to my brush tool make sure you're in your pencil tool so just hit B on your keyboard click and hold on a little icon and we've got our pencil tool so it's gonna click on that so that's how you make pixel art you've got to use a pencil tool otherwise the brush you can see even if you've got the hardness all the way up at zero and it's nice and small it still has this sort of weird rough edge so we're gonna just use a pencil tool here so the first thing is creating our actual sort of isometric tile so we get to choose whatever angle we want to work with now so I'm just going to turn on my rulers so view rulers Socrates and I can just gonna click and drag out these rules to make some guides so I can see sort of the exact center of my document so what I can do now is whilst selected on my sort of pencil tool I can click I'm gonna hold shift and then click again basically just to make a diagonal line sometimes when you have the guides it doesn't like to do it sort of snaps into the guide someones go turn the guides off for a second and all I'm doing now is just making a diagonal line holding shift on one side of the document to the other again these guides are really annoying sometimes because it actually it actually snaps to them all I needed them for was just to make this diagonal line right here though so I can turn them off if you don't know how I'm hiding them and showing them it's just ctrl semicolon sort of to the right of your L cave just control that hides that hides it and shows it so right now it's gonna hit ctrl J to duplicate this line I'm gonna hit ctrl T open a transform right click flip vertical enter so a few commands to remember there but all I did that for is so I can now flip the line and if you don't know what we're doing here we're making a tile so we're making a diamond someone's gonna hit ctrl e combine them together hit ctrl J to duplicate it ctrl T to transform it again right click right click flip horizontal and then we're gonna move that over here so it just made a perfect little diamond and then ctrl a to merge it again so I'm just gonna fill this up a color now get my paint bucket tool and just click the centre of that something to know is if if when you filled it it sort of made it bigger by a block probably cos anti-aliasing is turned on so you can just turn that off on your bucket tool and it won't sort of add any extra fill so now I've got a tile here so this would basically be an exact sort of like top-down look of eval scene I guess so what we can do is keep ctrl T command T whatever you're using um if you hold alt if you didn't know this whilst transforming it does it equally on both sides so we can sort of do this now to get an idea of how we want our tile or whatever to look like what sort of angle maybe you want a really high angle for isometric sort of pixel art maybe you want a really low angle whenever I'm working with pixel art specifically I like to use this angle which is basically an angle of two pixels goes up so you can see on my screen right now every two pixels it goes up it's just a nice angle it's it's pretty similar to like your standard sort of isometric angle I like to use this you can choose whatever angle you want I suggest choosing an angle that is sort of like a set degree pixels so rather than going sort of like three two three two it just sort of looks a bit ugly make it go up by two or by three or by one or by four pick a solid number so you get like a nice clean edge so now we basically have a platform for whatever we want to create now and we've got a really good starting point so let's say I'm gonna make that little grass platform that you saw at the start of video what I can do now is just hit ctrl J I'll turn off this top layer for now and then now we've got a duplicate of this layer then hit ctrl J again and just hit the arrow key down on my keyboard a couple times just to sort of move it down I'm gonna hit ctrl e if you didn't know this if you just got one layer selected and you hit ctrl e it'll automatically merge the layer below it into that layer just a little sort of shortcut to save time so if you can guess what I'm gonna do now I'm basically just going to keep hitting ctrl J move it down ctrl a ctrl J and move it down I'm just adding some height to this layer because this will basically be the dirt for that sort of cube so I'm just duplicating it whatever height I think that's a good height there and I'm gonna move to the bottom my page now I need to make it look like dirt so double click on this layer one thing that's funny about these color swatches here actually is I don't have any Bret I don't really have many Browns I don't really any dirt in the game that I'm making so let's just come up with our own dirt so I'm going to create sort of like yeah I think that looks good there okay so I just added a color overlay now we're gonna duplicate it ctrl J go to my marquee tool or and your keyboard and then delete go back into the layer style and then I'm going to change a color overlay for this back layer to a sort of lighter brown so something like this let's say that's good okay and then now we've got the both sides to our cube I'm just gonna select then merge them so now if I turn on this grass layer again you can see we have our nice little cubes I'm just gonna move that down a bit and then I'm just gonna add a color overlay to this and make it one of these nice grass colors that we have here let's pick this color cool so we now have a grass cube isometric in pixel art it's amazing um yeah you might want to fix up the bottom if yours was like mine but just for tutorial purposes it looks good so now what we're going to do is I'll add sort of like a little edging to the grass some highlights so you know when you're over you're doing pixel art you want to sort of usually have your medium color so you sort of base color highlight color and then a shadow color usually you tend to stick between three colors for most sort of objects so for example and then sometimes four but it depends so hard to explain but let's say here's this grass panel here that's just facing upwards so I'll just pick like a highlight color which would be this lighter sort of green and then on this highlight color I'm just gonna draw some sort of lines around the edge and then I'll pick a shadow which is the darker green and we go like that so now we have a highlight and I think I hit the blue instead but the blue looks really cool no no it just looks like that cool so we got a shadow and our highlight so it's basically like it's sort of like a three-tone sort of grass here with this dirt we have a highlight side and a shadow side it's not just one panel like the grass so I'll pick one color for the highlight here so let's pick like a nice sort of yeah whatever an orange uh-huh and then you could highlight with the orange and then with this the darker side you can maybe pick a darker color and then do some shadows of that so all the highlights of that whatever you want so go we've got some cube you can choose to sort of highlight do whatever you want with that like I said I don't really have any dirt colors in this color palette so you might just have to sort of construct the colors yourself for the dirt but we've got some simple grass here now let's actually create a little house so we can just follow the exact same sort of guides as what we just did I might do it manually so I'm just going to go back to my brush tool let's select a nice sort of gray light gray and I'm gonna just start sort of making these little two pixel increments so this is the angle that I chose for my pixel art whatever angle you did to sort of recreate that angle so I'm just going in here doing little two pixel lines and now what I'm going to do is do exactly what I did with the grass hit ctrl J ctrl T flip it horizontal drag it to this side it will make sure it lines up so I'll edge sort of lines up with the bottom of the grass here which it does and then I'm gonna ctrl J and ctrl T and right click and flip vertical it's a lot of commands to remember but I trust you guys you can do it and then we're just gonna select all these layers ctrl e to merge again so we just made this little square in the center of our grass um and we can follow the exact same thing now this is something to really remember whenever you're using Photoshop in general but especially for pixel art because it can be pretty tedious and time-consuming so you want to do whatever you can to save time and that's really important you don't spend all day doing something when there could be a much more efficient way so to do this I could sort of manually go in and fill all the thing or I could just do exactly what I did before ctrl J move that up ctrl a ctrl J move it up and you can keep sort of doing this process where it is duplicating it and moving it up until you whatever you know height that you like for the house is good you're gonna pick that height thing than middles annoy me so there we go now we have our house now I can just go back to the marquee tool or M on my keyboard select half of it ctrl J to duplicate color overlay let's pick a nice dark grey yeah yeah why not let's pick this gray here okay okay BAM we have the start of a cube so let's just do the top of this cube so we can just do let's pick a nice light gray something like that yep that looks good and then now we can just do the same sort of lying down following the two pixels so sometimes if you hold shift you can sort of guess it sometimes you might have to do it manually but usually what I do whenever I'm sort of just like free handing lines like this and I want them to go you know at the specific grid I'll just freehand it and then I'll just edit it after free-handed it so I've got that now now I'm just going to duplicate it like I've done with everything else flip it I did this on the same layer as the Brat as the gray whatever so let's just try and do that see we've got pretty close there like that and then we just want to cut it in here is that's what I meant before is sometimes you just have to sort of find a happy medium between free-handing and doing it yourself so get this call that and call that in that's good enough that's good enough let's just pretend that all lines up perfectly which it does it but it's good enough and then it's gonna color this all in if you didn't see what I did there I just ctrl click on the actual the main cube so I can just fill in this top layer Betty's yard I have to go perfectly around the edge I can just fill that in like that then we have a cube it's actually not lined up properly let's ignore that let's pretend it does line up properly actually now I can't do it it's just it's hurting my brain too much I'm just gonna really quickly push those pixels out okay now it lines up so we have a cube and we have some grass awesome so let's make it roof so what we want to do now it's making new layer now I'm gonna go for a nice blue let's have a blue roof on this thing so I'm gonna basically follow this line that we just did with the side of the house and Oh perfect so it's really nice when you do that when it discovers the exact angle you want now it's going to pick the midline of the roof so I think this is the mid line drag that up a bit and then I'm just going to shift click between these points so we get the angle the roof and then what we can do again is control J copy this roof over to the other side of the house I think it should sit like that yeah and then now we can start sort of fill it in so I'm gonna pick a nice light blue I'm gonna go into a new layer so don't go over the top of this and then I'm basically going to be control clicking a little box in between all these and then I'll fill it with a paint bucket tool BAM and we have one side of our roof create a new layer again let's create this sort of the shadow side over here so I'm just shift clicking in between all these points that I've created BAM and then paint bucket this side should be a little bit lighter actually because it is on the top of the roof so let's add a color overlay and let's make that that's sort of medium medium blue color yeah that'll do and then go do this last little side here I'm gonna fill this in manually pick the dark blue get that sometimes when you do this shift-click it doesn't always sort of perfectly do it so you may have to sort of fix it up but now we have a little roof so you basically whatever you're doing pixel art you just want to make sure that it lines up as best as possible for the sort of the main stuff so it was important that this bottom of the roof was at the right angle but with these sort of side things you can just sort of eyeball it if you want it doesn't always have to be perfect so that's something that is really really important when you're doing this sort of work is everybody really concentrates on making it absolutely pixel perfect every angle lines up exactly it doesn't have to it really doesn't have to whatever looks good is fantastic go with that so yeah now we've got a little house and we could just do the exact same thing like we did with the grass if I wanted to add some sort of brickwork textures in here maybe I pick a lighter color and I could sort of maybe not that gray maybe this here and I could go in here and then sort of make some like little brick patterns or something look like they're coming out of the stone so you could go in now and then add all sorts of little details I could add some more highlights over here look like this sort of bricks coming in of it I'm just really quickly doing this so don't expect it to look like you know some amazing artwork but yeah and then you could go with your highlights I could maybe do a highlight along this little edge here maybe another highlight along this edge here it's always important to sort of choose where your sun's coming from and stick with it so obviously my sons coming from the top left so all my highlights are going to be on the top left on this left face and on and on the top face as well so I got a little house here let's start making a tree so I'm gonna go with the same brown colors I did with this grass for a trace I'm gonna create a new layer if you didn't know who I see selected on your brush you can also hold down alt and it turns into a color picker it's really useful if you didn't know that I've probably just changed your life and then I'm just gonna use my bracket case it's a scallop my brush little bit here and I'm just going to draw a tree trunk so let's just draw a cool little tree trunk going over here so yeah and then I'm going to hold alt again click on this light brown like you saw before you could actually hold ctrl click on a layer it selects the edge pixels of that layer so instead of having to sort of perfectly go around the edge and line it up now it forces me to do that so I can just go down the side of this tree now and do my sort of highlight so I've got these little roots here make sure to highlight them like that that looks pretty good and bam we've got a tree so I'm gonna do a branch coming out over here like that maybe I'll add a little highlight on the edge of that branch too that looks pretty good and then let's do some leaves so create a new layer I'm gonna pick this dark green I'm going to do some bunchy sort of leaves come on over here obviously like I'm just filming this as a tutorial I don't have all the time in the world so I hope that you guys would spend a lot more time than what I am and you could really make it look awesome so if you're complaining about mine doesn't look like an absolute work of art I'm trying to do it as quickly as a possible give me a break so yeah no one's going to fill in some leaves again ctrl click and let's start doing some shading so remember our light source is coming from sort of the top left so I'm basically just going to be drawing sort of semi circles from the top left so we're making this little sort of curved sort of section on the bottom of all the different parts of the tree that is the shadow so I'm just going to go in here like this so you can see this sort of like this Crescent sort of part that I've got going on where all that it's sort of different section of leaves have this little shaded part like this I'll do it here as well okay I think that's looking pretty good for now so obviously you could make it look way better if you had more time and then I'm going to get the highlight color as well and then we'll do some sort of circles in the center for some highlights like here it is a tree so you wanna make it look sort of puffy so make sure these highlights are sort of rounded if that makes sense and then maybe we could do some little spots sort of off the place to make it look like it's got some sort of leaves coming out it's got a little bit texture this I might do that with that sort of shade green as well do a little bit of texture and then BAM we have a little tray and we did that really quickly so it doesn't look as amazing as the example at the start but you can sort of get the the gist of what I'm doing I'll probably stick to usually a base a base sort of color you sort of your base color a shadow and then a highlight and it'll probably make your life a lot easier we need to sort of starting that pixel art to just stick with to those three colors and then if you want to go in more detail and depth you can do more stuff but for a tree basically you can make a really awesome looking tree or just three colors and that's it it'll look awesome so usually in general trans stick to your base color a highlight and then a shadow and then just quickly before I wrap this up I'm gonna give you a little tip as far as choosing those colors so thank that can look really cool to sort of maximize that retro pixel outlook and just make it color pop a lot more you may not have noticed this because you might be using my color palettes which already sort of exist but if you actually change the hue of the color depending if it's a highlight or a shadow it can really make it pop so this tree is a perfect example if I select this shadow color here let's put that down so if I go the color swatch you can see this shadows basically like a turquoise it's almost a blue now if I select this mid-tone and draw a little line and then we'll go to the color swatch it's a bit more green now it's not is less blue and we're going a bit closer towards the green and now if I select this highlight color and we'll go to color swatch now we're sort of in the middle of the green so what and you can even make that more you could you could probably drag that close to a yellow and it would exaggerate the fact even more so what this creates is a really cool sort of popping effect where basically your shadows are a bit cooler you've always sort of edge them towards blue and then your highlights you always make them a little bit warmer so you're edging towards sort of yellow same with the roof here so maybe this blue I would make it a bit more of a warm blue since it's a highlight so I'd drag it a bit more of a turquoise color with this deep blue I'd make it a bit more purpley so if you do that sort of coloring for your pics light it will really make it pop and it's gonna look amazing so that's something just to remember be it in general that we've pixel art it's really this time so I could spend you know a whole lot of time now adding in detail you really just need to know the basics and how to sort of create the isometric shapes how to line it up how to use the brush tool how to use all those basic things once you've got that down the world's your ace your oyster you can just go for it it's basically how much time you put in is what you're going to get out of it so if you make any cool pixel art from this tutorial tweeted at me you know post a link in the comments or whatever I'd love to see it I think my Twitter's in the description so tweet me a picture every pixel art I'd love to see what you will create and as always if you have any ideas for future tutorials or anything like that be sure let me know in the comments I love all of your feedback I'm always trying to figure out ideas for new tutorials so it really helps me out when you guys help me out with that so like always I hope you have an amazing day everybody it's been Julian or flow graphics see ya

Channel: Flow Studio

Views: 250,778

Keywords: Flow, Graphics, JulianBall, Julian, Ball, Design, Speed-art, Tutorial, Speedart, Photoshop, Illustrator, C4D, speedart, giveaway, gfx, branding, logo, design, graphic, graphicdesign, youtube, banner, art, digital, vlog, video, film, australia, Adobe, Creative

Id: zcD5AljC8x4

Length: 21min 28sec (1288 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 18 2017