Making pixel art using CMYK only!

[Music] hello there my name is brandon and i make pictures out of tiny squares and today i'm going to be making some pixel art with a limited palette inspired by cmyk famous for their work as the fundamental colors of printer ink beyond that though i think it's just a great little color combo so i've sketched out this super sentai power rangers kind of idea using a black marker and some highlighters in those colors and i wanted to see if i'd be able to compose a sort of big budget movie poster kind of design with this idea so i roughed this out a few times just to hone in on the composition and the one that i like the most is this one here because i felt like it had a great balance of the central character and the flow of the scarf against the rainbowy trail there to get started i've brought an image of my rough sketch into photoshop and i've scaled it down into the realm of pixel art so i can trace over it directly the canvas size i'm using for this work is 180x225 this may seem a bit random at first but uh the maximum image size that you can post to instagram is 1080 by 1350. so basically i just took that number and divided it by six which led to that very reasonable kind of pixel art resolution so i'm going to go with that and then when i'm finished i can just scale this up exactly six times and it'll be a very compatible resolution for posting online in this first phase i've traced in some very rough pixel art lines following those of my rough sketch and the sketch by the way i usually make those really small like this one is just maybe like a little two inch thumbnail doodle and i do that because it's only meant to give a rough compositional idea but with it being so tiny i also consider it to be kind of like a low resolution way of drawing in a sense so in that way it hopefully lends itself to the stylization and restriction of pixel art now consequently after tracing a rough sketch like that a lot of this line work is only approximate so i'm going through the image now to solidify the construction and punch up the level of detail this mostly entails fine-tuning the angles and the curves and also thinning out certain lines that came in a bit thick or kind of excessively overlapped just due to swiping the pixel brush over the canvas that being said though it is nice to have intentional differences in line weight throughout a piece it can often provide some balance dimension and contrast to it so it's good to look out for spots that could be thickened up a bit and i've played with that for certain pieces here that just have a bit more perspective or shading to them and as i mentioned this is going to be a cmyk inspired color palette so where i started for that was by just dropping in a default palette where each of the cyan magenta and yellow were set to a full 100 respectively however these full value versions of the colors tend to be a bit too punchy for my liking so i've kind of taken those and toned them back a little bit to be what i'd consider kind of a more pleasing balance between them this is probably a good thing for all of us actually because just viewing this footage the default cmy might just be a bit too strong and vibrant to keep your eyes on but when the piece is done we can take a look at it in those default colors as well as my custom tones here so thematically whenever i'm working on something with a limited set of tones like this i like to consider how they might inform the content or the narrative of the artwork itself in the case of the cmyk tones here one of the things that popped into my head was that it'd be really nice for making a variety of brightly colored fruits and that kind of led to this entire parfait idea that's in there right now the other thing that tends to happen when i'm confronted with a limited assortment of vibrant colors like this is that i tend to think of making super sentai characters with that palette since it always just works so well to create this entire team from those colors with each one you know in a different color so in this case i've already roughed in the magenta and the yellow rangers and i've also tried to tie these together with that fruit theme by having their helmet designs actually styled according to a particular fruit i'm not sure that they've actually ever run an official you know like fruit themed power rangers team but it feels like it could work quite well uh more than anything though these rangers in my artwork tend to resemble the kind of styling seen in the sun vulcan series particularly because of the scarves which i always just thought was a really sharp look and as we've seen it's quite useful too for kind of directing the flow of composition as well another common element with sentai formula here is that there'll be various villains or kaiju-like monsters to battle and in many cases they'll have been selected by the head villain or something like that so for example in the case of mighty morphin power rangers rita repulsa has finster sculpt enemies out of clay and then those become realized into full living monsters what i'm making here is kind of a play on that idea where there's this little kaiju and kind of a stuffed animal appearance and that eventually would go on to be a full monster it'd just be such a great like visual that the villains might actually source these out of a claw machine or something like that but i'm kind of writing the lore as i go so we'll see how that plays one of the things i wanted to clarify real quick was with regard to the use of cmyk since this actually has implications for making physical prints and things like that so you'll see i'm actually still just working in the rgb color space which is totally fine because it just means i've got access to the full range of color as i see fit but if you're preparing something for print you want to make sure that the colors you've selected are actually able to be recreated through printer ink for instance if you chose a super saturated green there's really no color combination of cyan magenta and yellow ink that's able to recreate that color on paper save for maybe some custom pantone concoction in photoshop and hopefully most editors if you select a color that's outside the possibilities for cmyk printing you'll see this little warning icon show up next to your selection if you're just making stuff for a digital display this doesn't matter and you can ignore it but if you need to print it you'd have to tune that selection into the cmyk gamut i only mention all this because i had been selecting custom colors for my custom cmyk palette and in the spirit of print media i decided to select colors that were cmyk compliant uh rather than only being those that were achievable only through the wider rgb range now let's just pull back on this real quick and take a look at where we're at and i'll just toggle on the rough sketch so that we can see the progress against the scope of the original idea [Music] so i like how this is coming along so far there's obviously quite a few patches missing because the rough sketch despite being filled out entirely didn't actually have a ton of concrete ideas as to what those details were it was just kind of like shape filler uh so i'm gonna need to target the top left the bottom right and the bottom left and actually come up with some stuff that can bring this theme together one of my favorite things with this project was actually just in general this task of creating an entire collage style pseudo movie poster design kind of thing it's definitely a bit of a graphic design challenge to find the right assembly of these details so that they all complement one another and flow together well but some good references for this sort of thing are of course the big budget sci-fi and action movie posters and despite their sometimes being similarities in layouts or color themes you often find really great examples of design hierarchy there like you know having a large prominent main character and then kind of cascading down into the secondary characters and so on and then even these kind of small snapshots of like vehicles or locations or references to things that you might only understand the context of by watching the movie so that's a lot of what i try to keep in mind here you know with the first bits of design a lot of the larger forms had been roughed out and so the pockets that remain are really good for squeezing in medium and small details that can also reinforce and expand upon some of the existing imagery one of the other themes i've been toying around with here had to do with radios actually so this idea actually kind of started because i drawn the magenta ranger wearing a special ring that was kind of emanating these lines so i was thinking oh that might be cool if it was some kind of a sonic ability and likewise it'd also be useful if the rangers obviously could communicate to one another maybe via these built-in radios in their helmets so that also could kind of explain why the helmets might have an antenna on the side too aside from also just looking cool obviously so in this way i wanted to incorporate some pieces of radio looking hardware that might come into play within the story uh now there's actually kind of two major themes at play we've got the fruit and now the radio theme so there's kind of a risk of muddying the imagery i suppose but i think it's an interesting opportunity to actually end up with an original sort of aesthetic um you know this might be a bit of a reach but you could even consider how there's kind of like you know a natural fraction of potassium in bananas for instance that exists as a radioactive isotope uh you know a bit of an alternate use of the radio word but i feel like there's always something to play with there for kind of mixing themes like this okay with all the secondary details added there's not really a ton of remaining space to add anything too detailed so what i'm doing to plug some of the gaps here is just dropping in a few small shapes and backing colors behind some of the existing work in order to play a bit more with the tonality i'm using a checkerboard dithering pattern for some of the shape work because it provides kind of a lighter look overall that won't compete as much with the existing forms when you're using a limited palette like this you could even mix two different colors of the palette like if you did a checkerboard of cyan and yellow that might give somewhat of a green appearance when viewed from a distance i didn't quite go to this level of tone mixing for this one because i wanted to keep the look fairly color blocked and prominently feature the individual colors but that's always a nice thing to keep in mind for working with limited palettes nonetheless the final step here is going to be to use the cyan tone to add some shading along things that are white i already had a bit of this shading logic in this piece with the parfait and the little egg there and i liked how it looked so i thought it would tie everything together to use it along the rangers as well additionally it works really well to soften or blend the junction between the black line work and the white fill so with all of that coming together let's go take a look at the final piece so here's the super fruit radio rangers i'm working on the title but we'll go with that for now here we go [Music] [Music] all right for the final piece i've squeezed in a few kind of easter eggs to the idea of print media like with these cmyk color strips and little registration marks throughout uh just to have a bit of fun with that concept uh the other edition was this small bust of a character named k you know we had the rangers populating cm and y so it seemed like there should be this kind of cool and mysterious suit for some kind of k ranger as well and as promised here's a comparison of the final image in an original 100 cmyk palette compared to the custom ones that i've been using the full tone colors certainly pack quite a punch it's almost a bit too much when viewed on a computer screen and that's coming from someone who typically likes to push vibrancy pretty far so yeah you can see just that difference with everything being a bit toned back and a bit easier on the eyes with the custom palette at this point i talked about the print theme so much that i felt it was only fitting to get a few test prints made of this uh so i had this done real quick at a local shop this is my uh with my custom cmyk colors but i also decided to test out a few variants as well so here's one uh that's kind of in a retro game boy inspired coloring uh sort of a neat alternative and then here's one where i've swapped out the cmyk coloring for something inspired by rgb instead and i thought these were a fun little print idea something in this eight by ten sizing or so so i've made these available on in print uh a lot of my existing work was on redbubble but it wouldn't let me go down to this particular size and i quite like it so i've set up an imprint shop and if you're interested you can find these prints over there and i'll leave a link down below for that and of course we'll cap this all off with some crt time so thank you for watching and take care and keep it square [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Brandon James Greer

Views: 47,555

Keywords: Pixel Art, CMYK, Printing, Color, Art Challenge, Timelapse, Speedpaint, Tutorial, Canvas Size, Super Sentai, Power Rangers, Tokusatsu, Retro

Id: Q24eUkZ9grA

Length: 13min 51sec (831 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 04 2022