Pixel Art Class - Character Heads

foreign [Music] Pals welcome back to a new video today we're going to be talking about pixel art heads this comes from a request on Discord and if you didn't know that I do have a Discord and people will request videos there pretty commonly by this stage I've got a lot of videos on the channel so if you have something that you think I've missed or that you're particularly interested in and you think others will be interested feel free to drop me a line in Discord in the suggestions Channel and I'll consider it uh basically today what I wanted to do was do a breakdown of kind of some of the research that I've been doing on collecting heads from games that I've enjoyed and seen from over the years and kind of simplifying these things down into something that I can put together as like a series of steps for you to think about when constructing your own head so let's get straight into it foreign T heads uh what can I say basically I've taken a bunch of heads from different games that I've enjoyed over the years and ones that I feel like are representative of as much as you can say about pixel art heads I've mostly stuck to human heads here and I think you know it's one of those things where character designs can be so diverse and pixel art has so much space in it that this is never going to be a guide for you know their full extensive list of everything you can think about with heads and many games uh characters don't even have faces in their heads so take this all with a grain of salt but if you're looking to make something that fits within this space hopefully this will give you some guidance and even if you're not some of the principles that I outline here hopefully will give you some some pointers the first thing that's really obvious to talk about is the fact that the head is a part of character design and its role is the most important in setting the tone for your character and the space it exists in thinking about the fact that the head is kind of like the core of who the character is it's what the player is looking at most of the time and it's how that character expresses right Beyond body language the face the eyes things like that we look at those things for representation and for communication for emotions right and that's a big part of all communication whether it's telling a story or actions status effects things like that it's really important so in order to guide that you should really know who your character is right where they fit into a game or your image even if you're not doing game design right pixel art it's all still communication and you need to have some sort of intent about what it is that you're trying to communicate and that will guide that process so we're looking at guybrush three board here from Monkey Island and it's you know it's easy to just say oh he's a pirate guy let's just make him a pirate but there's a Canon of fiction sort of at the origin of this character that we can think of as like Source material guy brush threepwood is a pirate character in an adventure game made by Lucas games lucasfilms made Indiana Jones and so this kind of like swashbuckling Trope is you know it's it's deep in the culture of the time the idea of swashbuckling as a concept is is pretty deeply rooted in Pirates and that kind of culture and even the adventure game genre is kind of predated by the adventure book genre and specifically the Choose Your Own Adventure books so you know going through a story and picking down path to sort of Forge your own outcomes that's basically what adventure games are and so because of all this background culture it kind of behooves the creators to be aware of all of this stuff right and to play off of it right a lot most of Monkey Island is satire there's a lot of kind of jokes and humor and a lot of that humor comes from acknowledging these Source materials basically that all is part and parcel of character design and in Sprite design which we'll get to in a sec so thinking about your character's identity and how you want to portray them in the game one really base fundamental thing is to think about how much space you want to afford that character so considering the budget for the Sprite how many pixels tall can they be inside of the gameplay and also how much of that should be the face you're here presumably because you want to draw features of the face on the head and so you at least want to have enough space to draw some eyes so on that topic looking at you know old pixel art as long as there have been faces in pixel art up into more kind of modern Hindi stuff as little as having a two by two square for each eye is pretty common and about an eight by eight minimum for a face it's pretty much the the standard or at least a starting point that you can then build off so the approach that I would recommend to you as a beginner although this won't cover every different kind of face you can do but as a start start with a bald head shape that is roughly the size that you can afford for your character that you think that you'll need for your budget then figure out where the eyes will go the eyes are kind of the window to the soul they're the most important also think about where the hair will go on the face if it comes down over the eyes or anywhere near the eyes oftentimes the The Fringe Of The Bangles will serve as eyebrows for characters with longer hair mouths can be optional depending on whether you want to create an expression where the mouth is relevant like surprise so you can see here these are Sprites from squaresoft this is from Final Fantasy VI but also this template got used for Chrono Trigger as well and square was pretty consistent with how they drew their faces you could take this approach where you've just got this simple head to start with and then this idea of stacking two pixels for the eyes and then two on top for the eyebrows it's very very common even games like Terraria use this kind of approach and then noticing how the hair here creates a bit more of an expression by actually coming over the eye and we also almost have this like innocent look where the kind of like we got this kind of like lifting of the eyebrows by virtue of having The Fringe come over the eye and note that you know we can always change things in frames where we want to show a specific expression so you're not limited to not having a mouth if you want to add a mouth because the character is emoting you can add it in you can change the size of the eyes you can do all kinds of things typically including the nose is something that we associate more with Western inspired animation anime tends to leave the nose out entirely unless they're a major feature of the character like an old granny might have a big nose so basically start with the essentials like the eyes and be prepared to leave a lot out if something's really really important you can always add it in a portrait later so like an earring or a nose piercing or a scar those are things that you can kind of leave for later and on that topic I think it's really important to recognize that you know art styles for video games these are deeply linked not just in the literature culture of the places where they were created but also the animation culture so thinking about squaresoft and specifically for Chrono Trigger the creator of Dragon Ball Akira Toriyama he was the lead concept artist for Chrono Trigger so you have this new medium of video games coming out through the 80s and 90s becoming more and more of a visual medium not just little dots on the screen but you know having actual characters and who is going to animate these characters right who's going to design them naturally it's comic book artists manga and cartoon animators and so um yeah the the referencing is kind of undeniable and the influence is is there that comes out in the Sprites and you can see here right less emphasis on the nose unless we're in a portrait and then we see in a very small nose things like the the way that hair is styled you know having like pieces of hair super duper common in Akira Toriyama designs and it makes its way all the way into the Sprite here with uh with Chrono now what's critical about this is it's not just about how Sprites are designed but how they're animated too so true to the tradition the proportions can be changed really easily and warped for specific poses so don't worry about creating this structure that you can't change I think a lot of the time with games whether it's 3D modeling or just even Sprite art sometimes you know you make something and you take so much time to design its geometry that changing that geometry for a specific scenario feels like something that you want to avoid doing whereas in cartoons and animation you know this something that you do constantly so the idea of you know warping something or changing its proportions it's it's super duper common and it's something that would be done a lot for the purpose of communicating specific emotions it's it's not an extra thing to do it's part of what it means to animate Sprites so don't be afraid to Omit details in some Sprites and then add those same details in other Sprites so we've talked a lot about the brief and the approach and how to use features to communicate certain things but I want to talk about now the negative space so the skin and the space where there aren't any features and how that gets used to create a structure as well so here is a really good example I would say in something like Chrono Trigger where we have four Sprites we have different perspectives and those perspectives have different amounts of facial kind of volume visible to me I would say the side on Sprite is actually very very difficult to read because there's only like one one two like one two three four five six pixels of continuous skin in the entire Sprite everything else is kind of like got some hair over it or is an eye or bits and pieces and it makes it hard to read this right you know that it's a face you kind of know what you're looking at because of the context but I think in and of itself this head is not particularly well constructed on the other hand I would say this Sprite is really great I think the amount of space that we dedicate to the skin gives us a bit more opportunity to create an expression that actually feels like something so notice how the highlights on the on the cheekbones here actually create that impression of a yawn we actually feel the skin kind of like tighten a little bit here you can see that light up even without adding more pixels to the mouth right you don't have to have these and you would still need that many pixels to show the mouth but the highlights are the ones that actually do the work in creating the structure in the face right and the fact that there's you know a fair amount of pixels unbroken pixels dedicated to the face means that the separation between the face and the hair is really clear compare that to say the Final Fantasy Tactics Sprites the face is mostly eyes and there's really not a lot of opportunity to do more with it right we don't have any more space we can use to create expression we can do things like open a mouth but it's not really going to come with a lot of human emotion on the flip side we go back to this western style where we've got less of an emphasis on line work so there's no outlines we've got a lot more space to play with with skin tone look at how abstract this is right it looks like a cluster of pixels when we zoom in and it's hard to really read but if you zoom out you can really see that squinting and the expression that taking the tension again on the face you can see how much the different tones and shades create the sense of structure and shape even though there's only one maybe two three four pixels dedicated to like facial features so at the mouth the nose the eyes and finally I just want to point out you can also use light to create features that otherwise wouldn't be there at all so here in Metal Slug we actually have the nose in a lot of these Sprites literally just being one pixel of light right it's just the tip of the nose being expressed there but it does enough right it goes far enough to uh to really create that structure it's just a tone change it's not an additional pixel like here you can see that the face it almost looks like we've got like a nose that's being drawn out of uh kind of like a Homer Simpson style nose right where it's coming out from the face right that's one way to do it but where we don't have that space just that little extra pixel of light gives us the opportunity to perceive a nose where otherwise you wouldn't have one and this is something that I do in ignia as well right I try not to give too much texture to almond my main character's face because he's quite young well I don't have a lot of texture but I do have a difference in tone right here where I want the nose to be perceived if you frame his face with it that's a nose right so I'm doing something similar in my game as well and uh I think it's really important to not neglect that negative space and using a bit of texture to create features where otherwise you wouldn't see them so let's do a little bit of sprite prac now uh and create a head in a Sprite that doesn't have one yet all right okay so here we are in a Sprite and I've created this character I've done a bit of a bit of a head start on the body and a bit of a brief in my own head about what this character is going to be so this is kind of like an insect inspired villain for like a Sci-Fi game or something like that um she's like a powerful woman she's a businesswoman and she uh she's kind of like calling all the shots maybe she's running the corporation that the main character is infiltrating or something like that so she's very powerful she's quite a feminate and we're going to create a head for her here I've just sort of started with a basic head size this is something that I usually go for something like here I've got like 11 pixels high and like nine pixels across it's very common for me I might sometimes go even smaller and we have enough space for you know the the two pixels High maybe three even if you want to make them really cute as well as we've got we've got some hair we want to put in and we can create some structure for some some facial features as well so it's important to think about first where the eyes will go um this is this character is is designed to be quite mature pixel art in general can be quite cute and juvenile and so take that into consideration um we're not going to go for photo real which would put the eyes you know maybe around here in their position and maybe like even smaller for the for the size something like that even I don't really want to go that way I still want to go cute but comparatively less cute so uh cuteness in eyes and their position on the face generally speaking the further south and outward from the center they are the more cute it looks I don't know why but that's just the thing that people do um when you go really far out it just looks like a child and the more kind of collected and up into the center the more kind of like uh you know adults especially the smaller you go the more adult they look let's put them I was going to say like right around here it's still where I want them to be we're not going to make these double wide but I feel like we want to create that structure of that rounded face here anyway so I'm going to dedicate four pixels to this just for the time being I don't think angry is what we want I think we want something kind of like disinterested maybe we could use some um some accents here to kind of lay on a bit more makeup around the eyes you'll notice here that I'm actually using quite subtle tones it's one of those things where skin tones in my game I generally dedicate a lot of of depth too so I've got lots of Shades to work with so in my palette if I pull from different ramps I have you know 10 colors that I can use for skin tones and that's because you know I want to sort of have as much control as I want I want to you know have representation where I I can and so it's a good idea to to dedicate a little bit more depth for skin tones so that you can have that extra control I think we want to create some hair here I want to do more with the hair we could start with just like a general color I'm not going to go with blue but I think blue is just just there for like a placeholder while we design the hair so we could go for something short but I think I want something a bit more extravagant or even powerful yeah yeah something a bit more Halle Berry the spikes are kind of interesting I wonder if we could do something with the insect motif uh maybe even have like a antenna almost out of here it could be interesting another approach we could do is something more like this like white kind of like Storm from uh from X-Men although I think the white hair on a dark skin characters it's not overplayed but it's uh it's been done try not to go too Super Saiyan the antenna maker kind of uh almost namekian from Dragon Ball uh maybe we could do something a little more subtle and still go with the same idea but maybe just less a single Pixel and if we do oh that's kind of cool isn't it maybe we can get the phone out of the way just just for now and uh focus a bit more on like this and this I feel like this idea of like kicking out at the back although I really like it as a hairstyle in general I think it's too protagonist something about it so I kind of want to go a little more no-nonsense and a little sharper as well I feel like it's we've gone a bit too soft and round maybe we try to pull the hair back more there's also the idea of sort of darkening over the eyes to create a bit more of a Sinister look oh I like that quite a lot and if we are going to do that do we go with I think the blues actually served us pretty well or do we go green green was cool too Keeps Us in that Matrix space that's uh we're getting pretty Chrono now aren't we oh the highlights I think that's looking great I think that's pretty much exactly where we want her to be nice although now notice the the tone is quite similar in actual like brightness or in like the perceived brightness so here I'd actually go darker to create more of a break and be mindful when you're playing with colors here this idea where we have one color and then a dark color darker color darker color in such proximity this creates essentially a blur and you want to really avoid blurring the more clean and specific you can be with features specifically so like it's one thing to have you know lots of different tones around like uh areas where you're just talking about structure and light but when we're talking about like showing a feature like uh an eye having something that should be a clean line be smeared create this effect that the that there was some kind of like sampling or filtering that's happened with the image it doesn't look very good so like here the the high contrast between this color and this color it creates a stronger shape and it's easier to read if we were to try to kind of smear this with colors in between Suddenly It's it's not as nice to look at it becomes like kind of hard to read it's kind of like less confident so yeah and there's something about this character I kind of she still looks really uh really likable and I'm I'm very tempted to add just like a downward turn for the eyes to make her a little more evil but I feel like we could be more subtle than that maybe one is enough that gives it kind of like a bit more of a sneer quite like that so I'm going to start with that as a base let's do some variations here as well and let's think about how we could change this up you know maybe maybe we could bring the eyes down and what does that do right how does that affect the way that we think about the character maybe we make the eyes a pixel taller how does that affect the way that we think about them right kind of more cute okay what about higher up what if what does that do maybe that gives us enough space to then just keep a mouth in all the time and what does it do to add the mouth we'll close the eyes entirely or make them just dots like that so there's a lot you can do right with light with Shadow with the size of the eyes with the way that he present them if you were to give the eyes whites it becomes a completely different look again and you could you could change this all together by you know changing the position so we could move this over by one add even more of a white to the eye and you get something different again I feel like with the white to the eyes like this we get something that's a little bit more almost insecty and so it kind of goes well with the dress So I think this all comes back to understanding your brief what kind of game are you making what is the tone and what is the genre who is the audience for this thing and how are they going to perceive how do you want them to perceive this character are they the protagonist are they a villain do you want to humanize them do you want to make them feel younger more innocent or perhaps more grizzled more jaded or less sympathetic these are things that you can do with the design of the details of the face as well as obviously the rest of the character that goes for the eyes the omission of details like a nose or a mouth or even the inclusion of shading to create more and different structure in the face okay so I hope that was useful and if you have any other suggestions feel free to leave them in the comments or on my Discord and I can either answer your questions there or consider making a different video on a topic of your choosing thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next one hey pal thanks for watching and thanks most especially to the patrons and twitch Subs who support this Channel and my gamedev project Insignia to find out more click the links in the description below and if you like this video tell YouTube by clicking the like button and then YouTube will tell me and then I'll make more videos that's nice thanks again and until next time

Channel: AdamCYounis

Views: 64,145

Keywords: game development, pixel art, game dev, game, video game, indie games, stream, pixel art head, eyes, face, hair

Id: j2sjA9wLHpE

Length: 22min 2sec (1322 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 31 2023