Pixel Art 101: Critique

welcome back I thought it was pretty cool that some of you improved in an old spray and I retweeted it last time on pixel Pete and I kind of want to do an episode where I critique people's pixel art and show them how to improve it I think I'd be a great way for you guys to learn and see what other mistakes people are making that you might be making - all right so I want to have messages and check it out a lot of you actually submitted some art for me to critique which is pretty awesome wouldn't it be funny if I hit you here and it was just like out and I was like live-streaming and it was a big butt hole these are actually pretty good almost under critiquing it's good I just feel like I'm gonna feel like an ass critiquing like pretty good pixel art okay so this is pretty good the only um critique that I would have is that everything is a similar color you don't have hard edges and it also looks like your anti-aliasing too much in case you guys don't know anti-aliasing is here's a line without anti-aliasing here's line with anti anti aliasing it makes it look smoother but when you're doing pixel art usually um it's completely fine for the person to see the pixels there's not really a point in doing such high detail that you no longer see the pixels at that point you might as well not be doing pixel art Photoshop and some programs automatically do anti-aliasing when you when you draw but when you're doing something like this I think it's kind of odd to do so much anti-aliasing for example the edges of this shirt and some places on the hair instead what I would recommend for this piece of artwork is to have hard edges so the hair near the edge you should just go darker you don't have to go black but at least just pick a darker color of the color on the inside and it'll give your art more of an of an outline look and it'll separate it'll set that will help create a visual separation between two elements of your artwork so here's someone that wanted feedback on their outlines and I think this is pretty good use of outline but there are a few neat little tricks that you can do in regards to outlines so let's just zoom in over here and you see how this almost looks like it's it's an outline that never goes in or never kind of shows the form of the object I think it's completely okay for you to have the outline go in a little bit on a couple of elements that are near the edge this piece of artwork is a lot bigger so one picks the one pixel size is actually not the size of this square if you're wondering what the heck's going on so anyway yeah so like right here at the top since this is protruding out it's okay to you know add a couple of pixels here near the edge because it will it will emphasize that this veiny looking thing on this pipe is actually protruding so what I would do is I would add a black outline attic you know just near the edge not everywhere not all over also right here you if you have a dark edge it really creates a separation of death so for example this hole right here it's a lot deeper than the outside edge of the pipe here or whatever it is so what I would do is I would add a black outline here not all the way around just here so that way it creates a nice separation and it looks like there actually is a hole there the rest of this is actually is actually pretty good maybe had you know the same thing that I said earlier which is a black outline in a few places that are that are near the edge or a few places that you want to look like are protruding hey guys I got my first sponsor and as you can guess it's goofy if you didn't know what Scotia was it's basically an online community where there's a bunch of classes on all sorts of topics right and it's pretty darn cheap compared to flight going to college going to college is like 60k Scotia is like under ten dollars a month so it's kind of an insane deal for the amount of things that you can learn on this site and now like during the quarantine it's a pretty good time to just go at it and learn a bunch of stuff now I'm saying so of course I looked up if they had pixel art because I feel pretty stupid recommending this to you if they didn't have fixed art tutorials and they do they actually have quite a bit of Pixar tutorials some of you I think even recommended that I do a pixel art tutorial for Skillshare which would be pretty cool but um yeah like check out this one make pixel art with a sprite a sprites the program that I use and I haven't really gone into super depth into all the ins and outs of this program but yeah it's something that you could learn on Skillshare there's a link in the description if you want to check it out okay so here we have someone that did some gb studio art and in general I love it I think this is pretty good so just a couple of quick things for feedback I see that you're using outline an outline style here with the trees with the house with the bench so I would just be consistent and you know had an outline on this roof all around and then even though you are using outline it's not necessary for things like this door think of the outline as something that is used for an edge or to show death so instead of this black outline around the door what I would do is I would just use dark green here and here in there so you see the difference between these two your is this is drawing a lot of emphasis to the door and the window if maybe like let's say you can enter the house then maybe I would give it a black outline because what a back outline represents is an object so for example these rocks on the floor you know you can subconsciously tell that you're not going to walk into it that it's not like a wall or a big giant stone because it doesn't have a black outline so you can use a black outline as a visual language to represent objects these benches here have a black outline and it reinforces that there are objects however in this case the black outline goes into the middle I wouldn't I wouldn't take the black outline all the way to the middle I would in the case of this bench I would probably remove it here remove it here and do something like that let me actually try to make it look pretty good so I redrew the bench into what I think shows the form of it the best and I'll just explain a few of the things so by adding the shadow underneath it it emphasizes that this isn't a fence and that there is something flat that would have a shadow underneath now I'm saying and then I also separated each piece into two colors and the reason I separated it into two colors is because it lets you know where the light is coming from which lets you know the orientation of the object that you're looking at so over here you can tell that the brighter side is is where it would get more light from which is above so you can tell that this is now this is flat whereas this back piece I made it mostly the darker shade so that you know that it's actually sideways and it's only getting more light from the tippy-top because if we made this entire thing back here white it doesn't really make sense because if the bottom part is pointing up and it's brighter and the side of it is darker well the part where you rest your back that part's not pointing up at the light source so it should be darker and that's why I made majority of it green you can even make the whole thing green but I think that the white at the tippy top is a nice touch to re-emphasize that this object is actually upright so the lesson there is to use color to create form and I see that you somewhat understand that because here in the window I can see that it's brighter near the top and the wall here in the bricks on the bottom but yeah just keep practicing and you'll be able to take it to the next level okay so for this piece of artwork here I got a request on how to do mountains so let me show you a super quick and easy trick for shading mountains so what you want to do is just to start at the top of the mountain and sort of in a zigzag go back and forth as you go down the mountain make it completely you know random you want this to look natural so it's okay like you can't really mess up when doing this because it's supposed to look somewhat random just so it is natural and then go ahead and color that and now you can see we have sort of like a nice a nice lighting here nice shading for the mountain and then a little extra thing that you can do is just go into the light parts and draw a couple of draw a couple of a couple of little I don't know how you describe this draw a couple little little thingies chalk up a little of these thingies and that'll make it look even more natural I know that doesn't look great but you guys get the technique so here I have someone else that did the challenge and they wanted some feedback this is pretty dang good so I'm just going oh boy now a few maybe minor things for the shell here I would actually give this black outline underneath then for toads head remember whenever things have different depths I like to put a black outline there so for his hat head whatever you want to call it I'd add a black line there for the piranha plant right here near the bottom where it connects to the stem I would definitely put a black outline there and maybe for the teeth maybe give the teeth a black outline the the high contrast might look pretty good if you give the teeth the black outline maybe it's worth it to remove the inner outline but I would still use a dark color so I would almost leave the outline there just don't make it black make it a dark color and then for the coin here you might be wondering well why would I say about the coin right it's actually going to be the opposite this time I would remove the inner outline even though it is an edge I would I would just use color whenever I'm trying to show form and there isn't sort of like a big depth of difference I would prefer to just use color instead of outline in that case or if you want to emphasize it don't emphasize it with a darker color emphasize it with a lighter color by doing a a glare a glare there this is something that I showed in my furniture video yay someone actually sent me a piece of art that is the correct pixel size the correct pixel density so for this piece of artwork what we're gonna talk about is is shading so for example up here this looks like a flat top right but I don't understand why the back here is shaded that makes it look sort of like there's a groove there so I'll definitely remove the shading up at the top if the person was trying to sort of smooth that how you smooth it is right next to each one of these pixels you just put a a darker color like this you don't actually make it super thick like you had there also right here there is a highlight color and this is a this is great that you should be doing this but if you have a highlight color like this you don't necessarily even need the black outline so it's possible that you at the at the front edge right here that you just use the highlight sort of like in the coin that I just talked about because there isn't a really big depth different whoops because there isn't a really big def big depth difference you don't really need to put an outline here you could just use color to show that form same with this right here it looks like you're using outline too much now it is a style to outline almost everything from the looks of it it looks like you're putting an outline on almost everything things that don't need outline and the con of that is that if you're outlining everything you cannot use outline to represent depth which is a huge advantage of using an outline so I wouldn't outline every single element that you have just use a darker color if you really really want outlines use a darker color so for example if you wanted this this line here just pick a pick a darker blue and all this black outline it creates too much contrast and it almost makes your artwork look messy so I would just do a little bit less huh I'm one of the developers working on dwarf it's a tower defense dungeon-crawler you can wishlist on Steam now there's a link in the description we're doing a t-shirt competition to win a free copy of the game in and the shirt that you design so when designing the t-shirt basically the dwarf kind of looks like this and here's the sprite of what we're looking game so kind of you know make them look like this if you're gonna draw his face and if you don't have Photoshop feel free to download [ __ ] [ __ ] is like a is basically a free version of Photoshop and I'm you know you can use as many colors as you want you're not limited to like one or two colors or whatever feel free to do as many colors as you want and pretty much as much detail as you want so for the specification for the file format basically just send a PNG with a transparent background and if you're in Photoshop or whatever program you're in go to inches make the width 14 make the height 17 and for resolution do at least 150 the color mode keep it on RGB do not do CMYK and for 8-bit 16-bit that's that doesn't really matter look even if you can't draw something super awesome at least you know submit a black and white sketch or something because you could still win and I think I'm gonna pick a winner in about two weeks so just so you guys know in case you don't read the stuff on the site the word is a dwarf that he's got he's got a he's got a hammer that uses to make the towers this is a tower defense game and since he's a dwarf he he he's not actually like super old so he doesn't have a full beard he just got these like big sideburns and in that cool blue hair and then how he powers the the towers in the tower defense game is he's got these he's got these magic power stones is what we're calling them and there's just these like green these green crystals and the enemies into where the enemies are trolls all right the trolls with like really bad teeth you know they don't brush their teeth I'm assuming too many people aren't going to enter so you got a really good chance at winning I might even give away a copy to like the top three or something oh and I'm gonna show the best ones in a video so you're gonna get a shout out thanks for watching feel free to send me some of your pixel art on Twitter if you wanted me to critique it and I can't wait to see your guys's t-shirt designs see if you can guess the canvases I got up this week and I'll see you guys next week deathlike okay please subscribe

Channel: Pixel Pete (Peter Milko)

Views: 164,395

Keywords: petermilko, peter milko, pixelpete, pixel pete, pixel art, pixelart, pixel art tutorial, how to draw pixel, pixel art tutorials, 16bit, 8bit, how to draw pixel art, how to draw pixelart, draw pixel art, draw pixelart, pixel art video game, 8bit game, 16bit game, pixel art 101, pixelart 101

Id: Iyc7kBcf6Go

Length: 14min 52sec (892 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 29 2020