Pixel Art 101: Bush

it's way too easy to make a bush look too messy or too simple so let me show you how I add detail and still keep form I'm one of the indie developers working on to earth it's a tower defense dungeon crawler and you can wishlist it on Steam now I'd also appreciate if you signed up for the newsletter because we're doing a Kickstarter in like a month and you'll get notified I think probably the most famous bush is this Zelda bush it's so iconic and the shape of it is basically just a bunch of big leaves will draw a bush like this but will also draw a bush that is it more of a typical bush not this not these big leaves that look almost a little too tropical for most games if you need some inspiration you should follow me on Pinterest I don't really care if you follow me but it's pretty dope but I wouldn't want you to follow me on though it's Twitter and I'm Twitter sometimes I post stuff like silly drawings or game ideas okay so I'm gonna do a top-down view for a bush but pretty much just cut it in half and that's what the side of you would look like anyway so this is gonna be our grass color and we want the bush to pop on the grass color right so we need to either make it brighter or darker I prefer to go darker usually you'll see it be darker in most games so over here I just pick three shades of green they're all tinted a little bit towards blue so that way they stand out even more on the grass background okay so next thing I'm gonna do is just get oh god this gives this bush here an outline so another thing that I like to do is change the color of the outline so I like to use HSV hue/saturation value and then I go to about halfway here I'm gonna pick the color of the bush go about halfway to the Alpha and click on the outline here and what I did now is created a really dark color of whatever the color of the bushes and I like to I like the color at the top of the outlines this color and this just gives it more form it looks like there's a lighting coming from above and I love that look it's it's that bit extra that makes your pixel art look okay I think now we can start shading this bush so I'm just gonna go over here to my darker green color it's almost blue but but I like it I like it when colors aren't you know exactly green or exactly blue it just makes things look more natural and more interesting honestly so maybe maybe something like this if you we look over here into our preview you can see it looks pretty good it looks pretty round I might want to go all the way up the sides with the shading this will give it more of that top-down look and then just smooth this you don't want this to be a V you want it to be almost like a U shape and then maybe here yeah there we go now that looks nice and round and now I'm gonna grab the lighter color and remember remember since since since this is top down it so it's almost like that bird's-eye view three-quarter view it's not perfectly top-down but because of that we don't want to just highlight the top of this bush that'd be wrong what we actually want to do is we want the highlight to be somewhere about right here because this right here somewhere over here this is where the top of the bush actually is now I know this kind of just looks like a ball now but you know what the next parts gonna be we're gonna add leaves to this and I'm probably gonna duplicate this and try adding leaves a couple of different ways it'll be interesting alright so I'll start with like one of the simplest ways that you could do this bush and that is just by making the shading not so smooth basically draw a couple of leaves in here what a leaf will usually look like when you're doing 16 by 16 or 32 it's basically just two squares connecting or sometimes just a little z shape like that so now this top shading is also too round so we need to make this look like leaves as well you can sort of just add pixels anywhere to mess it up a little bit but you will want to do what I was saying which is create sort of these like literally draw a couple of leaves to make the bush look less round let me make my eraser one I am gonna take off I'm gonna flatten the bottom I'm sort of squishing the bottom a little bit so that way it kind of looks like it's you know growing going out of the ground not like a perfect ball and I think that's pretty close to a basic bush but it still does have a very very round shape so what we can do actually I like how it looks as though but what we can do it's a to make sure it's not so round is just take the outline and click inside and then remove that spot and now what it looks like is it looks like there's a hanging leaf over on that edge don't do with the exact same spot on the other side on the other side you might want to pick a different spot so I might do right there then also see how nice and round at the top is I can put maybe a point somewhere here maybe here and even with the shading if I take this black color and I put it in a couple of places it'll make it look less smooth because it'll make it look like there's little crevices and there's our very quick basic Bush now let's get a little bit more complicated okay so for this this bush this bush I'm going to draw every single leaf and if you're drawing at a higher resolution this is probably the kind of bush that you'll want to do okay let's move our preview over you can see it already looks more detailed but let's keep it going now I am doing this pretty fast you know you might want to spend more time making these leaves look phenomenal but I think this will this will be good enough for a tutorial you could always go back and spend as much time as you want okay you see how I have a leaf here and a leaf right under it you don't you really don't want to do that you want to do something like this let me explain if you have a leaf right here don't put another one right above it it looks too much like it's like a grid what you want to do is you want to put a leaf here and you want to put a leaf here obviously since these are all the same color you don't you can't see them which is why you're going to have to use another color to divide them you see that and now I can also use this color on the edges here of the leaves to give them a highlight umm I like how this is coming out I almost don't want to work on it anymore because I got another bush to show you one with big leaves so I'm gonna just leave this here sort of like this I think that looks pretty good for a bush some of these highlights might need to go but let's do the next one alright now let's draw the bush with the humongous leaves the Zelda style bush okay so for this we really need to imagine every single leaf and draw one leaf at a time so I'm going to I'm gonna put this color here but I'm gonna fill that in so that way it's really easy to see these leaves and I'm gonna start drawing oh my gosh I'm gonna start drawing with the brightest color and here I'm just going to create sort of a point and there right there's gonna be my tie right there's gonna be my leaf let's move the preview over okay so I'm going to make this leaf stand out is I'm going to shade underneath it and now look even if I fill this in you can still sort of see that there's something there also I will give it an outline and since this is pointy I'm going to put a point right there now we had this other color and I will use that almost as an inner outline and I'll check it out you can definitely see that it looks like there's something sticking out of this of this bush so here we have one of the leaves I definitely think the leaf needs a highlight let me grab this lighter color and the way I'm going to highlight it is I'm gonna highlight the leaf where it bends like right here this is about where the leaf would would Bend before it drooped down if you know what I mean and if you want to add even more detail into a leaf you can you can use the inner leaf color for for that little crease in the center that leaves have the the whatever it's called stem or something this time I'm just gonna use the dark color as an outline now when you're drawing the leaves you don't want them all to be the same height so this leaf should actually go a little bit lower the leaf on the leaves on the edges should end a little bit higher than the leaf in the middle this will give it that round look which makes me kind of want to actually shorten this one right here and maybe I should alright same for this there's a couple of different ways you can highlight these leaves so you can just do sort of like an edge like that this is great if the edge it for like blades of grass or when the hedges are sticking out but since this leaf is kind of folding over I don't want to put it on the edge I'm going to put it near the fold there something like that alright and let's draw the one on the left all right there we go we have three three giant leaves to make it look round what you need to do is the let's say the center leaf is this thick then the leaves on the edge remember they need to be shorter but you should also make them thinner this will give it more perspective and make it look like it's turning sideways or empty so this leaf right here is pretty wide we should probably make it a little bit thinner because it's about as wide as the one in the center so it's a bit it's messing up the perspective I don't think I'm going to add any more leaves down here like giant leaves I'm just sort of implying that that there there should probably go a little bit darker in some of these areas so what I'm doing is I'm adding darker colors into the crevices here let me explain let's say you have a line that you drew and you have another line that you drew right where they meet right here this right here probably is gonna be a crevasse so it's okay to make that spot darker it's okay to put black inside your art when you're shading I do try to avoid it but whenever you need whenever you need that contrast or you want to make something stick out it's okay I'll just show you something for example if I did this it definitely makes this leaf look like it's just coming out at you and that's okay for some stuff like if you have a character with a horn you want the outlines to come into the character but for something like a bush none of these things are really protruding that much so I'm not going to use black for most of the shadows only if I feel like I need to I shrunk it here with color not by actually moving the pixels because by taking away the the brightness of saturation here I make it look a little bit less important so it doesn't make it seem a little bit thinner but um I'm liking this so far I think we need to put a leaf over here and then a leaf over here bam bam oh my god is up okay what I noticed is this leaf should move over because of that checkerboard thing that I told you about we don't want one leaf right on top of another they should move over here so somewhere right here there should be a leaf and a cool thing to do would be for me to make it pop out a little bit so I think I think I can do it like that this now looks stupid I mean it looks stupid before too but I can't have this entire top be the same color and I think that's I think that's pretty close pretty darn close we just need to put a leaf right here this spot looks looks like it's missing a leaf I think we're just gonna do a little basic shape like that to make it look like it pops a little bit more we could erase this spot this is from the front it's almost like a heart shape and then you can put a highlight on it but if you leave the middle if you leave the middle unshaded it looks like that crease that's supposed to be in the middle anyway you get the point I'm imagine that shrunk that's basically what I'm trying to do here in the 16 by 16 I love 16 by 16 I can get a lot more art done a lot quicker so that's why I stick to this size I love these bushes but what we could do with all of these one of my weaknesses is contrast we can increase the contrast on all of these and increase the highlights so check this out you take something like this and we add one more highlight color and usually the highlight color is gonna be a little bit more extreme kind of like this one that we originally picked I'm just gonna go in and add some highlights here these highlights are gonna be near the top you don't want to put highlights you know down here you don't even really want to put highlights in the middle you really want to keep the highlights near the top almost like this area that we drew originally and there we go we've got a couple of Bush highlights there I'm gonna remove the grid oh my gosh I was drawing on the wrong layer the whole time these are supposed to be on the bush layer this is gonna be our shadow and decrease that alpha these bushes look fantastic and you can use them in your game for free there's a link in the description to my itch where you can download all my art assets and use them in your games for free just follow me on edge so you know when I update this and thank you now that I'm a Texan maybe I should start wearing cowboy hats I don't know we'll see I got something pretty cool to show you next week if you follow me on Twitter you'll probably guess what it is can you guess the canvases I got up this week I think that's all thanks for watching and I'll see you guys next week yeah don't forget to subscribe

Channel: Pixel Pete (Peter Milko)

Views: 84,279

Keywords: petermilko, peter milko, pixelpete, pixel pete, pixel art, pixelart, pixel art tutorial, pixel art 101, pixel bush, pixel art bush, video game art, 16bit, 8bit, retro art

Id: XVoFyCPFzkY

Length: 17min 12sec (1032 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 26 2020