Pixel Art Class - Character Sprite Build!

unless you're me right now in this stream no one's like expecting you to like mail at first go the basic things that you want to really call out and you're looking at your character where is the head where are the eyes like where is the character looking it's very important the next is what are the bounds of the character right like if I if I run up against a wall or something what is my character end I can probably imagine that like maybe the edge line where like I run into something is like here and like here but if I have my if I have a character with like a big long tail like this right and like arms that look like this like where is the point where the characters gonna run into a wall is it like here is it here is it here it's kind of confusing this is why I like constraining your character within a small sprite is helpful not just for you know harkening back to that historic sort of pixel art design era it's only part of that history because of the practical side of it and so ignoring the practical side is a big mistake if you haven't made a game before so let's do it like like this let's try to brighten this up a little bit that's a bit better they were there for green for the body just for the sake of this process and I actually encourage you to use colors that aren't part of your actual intended design just for this step of the process because it will help you avoid thinking about color so we're using this like really weird green because we won't be thinking about whether or not green was the right choice because we know it's not the right choice right we're just thinking about the shapes now what's really obvious here is that we don't have a lot of space to work with right we've got so little space to work with in that we can't draw a properly anatomically correct person in this space right like a proper person their heads would be like this and then their body would be like this and then their legs would be like this and it's sort of you know it's okay I mean even this is kind of like stylized you know and you can go for that but we were talking about what was important for our character and it was being able to relate to the character that was like one of the most important things and if you can communicate how they're feeling even at this level give them in this platform of space then you're doing really well I did something just now right before we started we're fighting the cigarette the second time I zoomed out this is really really important it's very easy to zoom in and get stuck at this level I'm zooming out to give myself that perspective again traditional artists would do this with a canvas they would step back from the canvas and have a look you should do this too like I said we were talking about caricature rings so we don't have that much space to play with here so what I'm going to do is try to create something that's feminine in the most recognizable way possible and for me when I'm drawing female characters the obvious thing to do is smaller upper torso like you got that hourglass shape right and then the legs can move from there that's very feminine whereas masculine is more of a big triangle right big shoulders and then small small legs and it's okay to like get it wrong for a while before you get it right you know it's like no one's standing behind you unless you're me right now in this stream no one's like expecting you to like male at first go you know you can like muck around and like get wrong and I encourage that you know and I'm gonna introduce the second shade now just to sort of introduce the arm maybe she's gonna have her maybe she's holding it back back all the time or maybe like in this part of the game like her weapon is the pencil like maybe she has a weapon this has become a Metroidvania now whoops that's all I know how to make so like I mean I don't know I think platformers with weapons are cool you know what there's no harming that there's nothing wrong with that so kind of got lucky here with this orange time it's very pencil pencil like and I think like the other thing we would want to do is have like a uniform now in this sprite I think it might be nice to have an outline at the end of it but we'll see if that kind of goes against the shape that we were looking for am I using your mouse right now no so that's the other thing that's really important I use a tablet I you don't have to use a tablet but I highly recommend it everything that I've talked about today sort of falls outside of the how do you place the pixels it's more about where you place them and what pixels to place I'm not going to place judgment on you if you choose to do it one way or another I think I'm gonna jump back to the Insignia palette just just to help us out here a little bit because this is about character a lot about palette for this part of the episode I'd rather make this a meaningful episode I think what we we should go for here is like maybe like a schoolgirl like a Catholic schoolgirl sort of outfit like a skirt or something like that now this gets kind of gonna destroy the form here so I'll I'll do it as carefully as I can and this is something that I would spend like hours on getting this right because it's so important like it's really it's like especially with something like a skirt that takes all that shape away you got to be really careful and I'm gonna try to bring back some of the shape with shades I kind of like it and we could we could like accentuate some of this stuff as well we could give her like sort of puffy sleeves and this is kind of like what I was talking about when we mentioned at the very beginning of the series we were talking about at the pixel level so the choices that you make over this level here like single pixels will communicate details that you don't that you aren't normally able to communicate so for example let's just say I want the contrast between the shadow of her hand and the ND shirt cuff to be very obvious so I need to use a bright color just on the logic of it a bright color next to a dark color but I still want it to look like a cuff so what I can do is then go to a darker color and now you can see kind of like that cuff coming through as well as like this shape around it maybe and you can play with it it doesn't you don't have to get it right perfectly now I'm trying to I think for this character it's probably gonna be most effective for us to go for this sidon look cars at least for the head because I want to show off that ponytail because it's part of the characters design that we decided on right so we have like a ponytail and pencil and glasses you might not be able to show the glasses well we'll see how we go but let's just work our way there first we'll go with the most obvious details the sketch program is called Leonardo but I want to see if I can get this flyaway hair then I think of maybe the flyaway can be above actually that might be even better oh I think I like that I wanted her to look a little disheveled not disheveled but like like she's got kind of bad hair the one who studies too hard kind of thing you know she like woke up late because she went to bed late because she was - she was up all night studying kind of thing so we've got the low ponytail we've got the flyaway hairs all I'm doing here is just trying to pick out the things that I think are going to make the characters stand out the most on the screen again we we accentuated the head the major features of the character we've tried to really really reinforce the feminine form even though like we could make the waist even smaller to get that hourglass shape in fact I like that even more the goal always is to make the character as recognizable in one frame as possible okay and that's something that if you're animating it's gonna be a challenge for every every single frame of animation is to try to like reinforce them and you can you will as you make your game come up with like a language of how you describe that to the to the player you know like what tools you use maybe like there's a pixel here that when the characters facing this way you used to show her shoulder things like that like for example maybe like if I want to show her collar a couple pixels then reinforce that V in the neckline you know there's little things you can do and that's something that you figure out on a per sprite basis really [Music] so what was left we wanted to get some glasses in here I kind of want her to still be relatable so I still want some eyes I'm not gonna go for the bug eyes but um basically at this scale you've got limited options really you can go for the two lines you can go for some eyebrows in there as well one thing that I like to do for female characters is the lights either side because it looks like like eyeliner or eyelashes you can you can do a lot like depending on like you've got so much there it looks like there's not that many pixels to play with but you actually have a lot if we want to be more chippy you want to make the nose I'm gonna lower here which gives you more space to play with now I'm gonna be trying to use the glasses to actually kind of like reinforce her attitude so if I was to like bring these down it kind of looks a little angry right if I want her to be like a battle if it want the skin to have combat in it maybe you go for the angry but if you want to be more like innocent-looking you might use this angle to be before like sympathetic you know that's like sort of more sad even right it's very important to understand how to draw eyes now I don't have my pressure turned on at the moment this might be a bit weird but like what makes an eye and eye and like what it is that you think about or how you interpret things like for example if you draw an eye and the pupil or the iris doesn't even touch the bottoms or the top then it looks like shock right if the eye if the iris does touch one of the edges suddenly now it just looks like you're looking in a direction okay up or down if the IRS touches both then it's that's sort of more natural right and then you start referring to like okay what's happening with the eyebrows right and there's lots of different things you can do as well as people's you know like a larger pupil but as the smaller people means different things so knowing those things are even a basic level can help you choose between like where to put your one pickles that you've got if you've got four places to put your one pixel you might be able to like pick the right one hey pal thanks for watching and thanks most especially to the patrons and twitch subs who support this channel and my game dev project insignia to find out more I'll click the links in the description below and if you liked 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

Channel: AdamCYounis

Views: 213,044

Keywords: game development, pixel art, game dev, game, video game, indie games, stream

Id: UPAHMyN9YeQ

Length: 12min 30sec (750 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 17 2020