Mario pixel art, but I keep adding new colours until it’s too much

[Music] hello there my name's Brandon and I make pictures out of tiny squares and I hope everyone's been doing well I took a bit of a break there through January kind of focusing on other projects that needed attention but I'm back now and I just wanted to ease back into video work with something that's kind of silly so what I wanted to try today was making a Sprite by slowly introducing one color at a time to it and actually having the goal to be like reaching this point where it starts to go a little too far on purpose uh a lot of times when making a Sprite you know you may have a set palette that you're working with and kind of using those colors all at once together so I think it'll be fun to approach it from this workflow of painting in a single color at a time before moving on to the next and just kind of seeing how each one changes the look and then on top of that you know maybe we'll find some sort of Tipping Point as far as the moment where it does become too much so as you can see I'm making a Mario Sprite for this exercise and I'm just trying to make this goofy sort of running pose I suppose taking a lot of inspiration from the Super Nintendo Sprite there and that one by the way I think uses 13 colors total so my goal is definitely going to be to push mine further than that so the line workor version uh I'm just going to refer to as being the first color I know technically a solid background kind of counts as a color but I like to think of this just being like a line work Sprite with transparency so in terms of adding an actual intentional second color I want to pick something that's representative and I think a solid red would be a wise choice here just as far as communicating probably the dominant color that we think of for Mario next I'll add in a kind of beigy tone to use for skin and highlights and this actually brings us into a similar color usage as the NES Sprite and then for the fourth color it feels like a good opportunity to finally introduce the blue overalls and then uh reassign the red into the shirt and this will kind of establish you know his typical appearance from here it's going to be kind of a grab bag of introducing new colors to give more depth into the costuming so I've gone with a white to differentiate the gloves from the skin tone and then added a brown into the shoes for colors seven and eight I started to introduce shade tones that give the Sprite some Dimension so the first one there is sort of this desaturated purple that works as a shade tone for both the red and the blue areas and then the second shade tone is kind of a pinkish Hue for the skin now that I've got some momentum on this single color workflow what I did was to actually plan out the next eight colors ahead of time uh starting with this bright yellow for the buttons which I'm squeezing in right away now because I actually didn't think of doing it earlier during the first eight colors um but most of these new colors are actually just lighter or darker versions of what's already on the Sprites and these will basically just expand the solid areas to be more of a gradient approach of Shades and highlights there's a subtle Hue shift in these tones too uh so for instance the red gets more orange as it gets lighter and the blue gets more turquoisey as it gets lighter and both of those go toward purple on the darker end around this time is where we're in that range of the Super Nintendo Sprite and we can definitely notice that similarity in the level of rendering and honestly this is quite a pleasing range to be in um I don't know if that means that it's all downhill from here uh I'm going to try to keep things as aesthetically pleasing as I can going forward but we'll see so that brings us to the next eight colors uh which for me was where I could feel the ideas for genuine improvements start to dwindle away uh certainly we could keep subdividing the red and blue gradients into even finer increments but I was trying to instead find colors that would serve more of a purpose than that so what you'll notice is that most of these new additions are actually on the darker side and the reason for this is that they're going to be outline color so rather than just using black line work throughout the Sprite uh we can introduce a bunch of new colors that give a bit of tone to the outline depending on which area the Sprite it is so the blue overalls for instance have kind of a deep blue tone for the outline now um areas with the skin and the shirt have a deeper red tone and so on and then past that I I wanted to try some colors that weren't actually represented yet and had no good reason to be there um so I've given myself these couple of green tones and I'm just trying to sneak those into the Sprite mostly to see what happens and kind of by accident I actually really ended up liking the way that that olive green looks as a highlight in the brown areas of the hair like it's giving some kind of interesting lighting effect or something along those same lines the final two colors are these like ambient highlights of pink and teal uh you know I thought they could be uh this like final edition of maybe some crazy colored rim lighting just to do something different uh maybe it's kind of like a rainbow road vibrancy or something something I'm not sure uh either way I I think this probably feels like a good spot to call a somewhat official end point where a lot of the color decisions at least still have some intention to them so let's go ahead and review the buildup to this and I'll come back and then we can explore a few other [Music] variations all right so I did some slight touching up but still sticking within that set of 24 colors this is definitely a bit over rendered compared to what I'd normally do but I think it's actually in a pretty cool spot here it does feel like we started to hit diminishing returns on that final stretch though like on a quick glance it does take a bit to even notice what's different along that bottom row you know aside from probably the bright Rim Lighting on the final ones so I think for me my favorite look is probably somewhere in this middle third like maybe anywhere from about about 10 to 13 was a pretty nice spot um but that's not really like any kind of universal truth about Sprite design that's just a personal preference for this one in particular I guess uh I don't want to leave you hanging on what would happen if we push this further though so I explored another one with 32 colors and I've done that by introducing more in between tones that kind of blend clusters together and here we can especially see the diminishing returns that play where the rendering is just becoming softer and potentially just getting muddied for the sake of it uh on the extreme end of things I don't really know what we could do like short of making each individual pixel a distinguishable color but at that point it just kind of looks like Mario ate too many mushrooms and then jump stop to jpeg or something so instead of trying to go higher in color count I actually got the idea to see what happens if we take the final result lower in Photoshop we can quickly reduce the color count of an image by going up to image mode and selecting indexed color so we can see here there's currently 25 colors um that's the 24 of the Sprite plus one more for transparency and if we change the pallet mode to one of these local ones here uh that'll let us change the actual number of outputed colors so you can see when we lower the color count here the Sprite only shows that number of colors uh again where transparency is included in that total so just playing around here I just want to see what I can get away with as far as being something that's quite low but still sort of captures that essence of the full 24 color Sprite and I think a value of eight looks pretty nice so I've played around with that index result uh which had seven unique colors in it and I managed to manually edit it down to only five colors this is obviously a really abstract design at this point but I like how it does maintain some of that flavor of the final 24 one uh just as far as having these like stylized highlights and things it's especially crazy to compare this to my original five-color sprite from this workup uh you know if you were playing a game it' probably still be better to have that simpler original one but just for the sake of like showing the difference in styling that's possible it's pretty dramatic to know that these two Sprites both have the same color count anyway I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make here I don't think there really was a point Beyond just being like hey colors are cool I guess um so I hope you found something useful or at least entertaining and just seeing this come together and playing around with it and we'll go ahead and close up with some CRT time to see what a few of these look like with that treatment so thank you for watching and take care and keep it square [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Brandon James Greer

Views: 506,368

Keywords: pixel art, nintendo, timelapse, speedpaint, challenge, art, tutorial, hue shift, color, palette, 8 bit, retro, mario, snes, gaming, sprite

Id: BBfT7Aeas5Y

Length: 9min 5sec (545 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 11 2024