Pixel Art Class - How To Use References Effectively

not my usual style but you know we're looking at this outlines here i thought they looked good give them a try and uh yeah they came up a treat really nice [Music] if you love indie tales be sure to subscribe here and on twitch where i'm live most weekdays you can also show your support through patreon or on itch.io where i upload assets and games shown on the channel hey pals welcome to a new video today we are going to be covering references and using references to create pixel art i wanted to cover how i use references and the way that you should be using them to create original work without looking too derivative so let's get straight into it so the first question is what is a reference or what does it mean to reference a reference is the application of some aspect of existing material into your work now that existing material can be a picture it can be something from the real world or it could be indeed somebody else's work so many of you are now thinking okay but doesn't that make my work less creative doesn't that make me less original something that's taught to new artists is that nothing is truly original everything exists in proximity to other things and in fact when utilizing somebody else's work or something from the real world in your work you create what's called a derivative and the thing that makes something more original versus being theft is transformation so what is transformation transformation is changing an aspect of a composition or structure note that we use the word aspect when describing what a reference is so the thing that you reference that aspect if you change it in some way that is transformative and legally we use that word to differentiate between things that infringe copyright and things that don't so even in the legal sense this is how we think of what is original and what contributes uh to value in the art space versus something that is purely derivative or theft i like to think of transformation as something that is at its heart geometric so in this instance here we have a square and to transform that square means actually taking properties of it and changing them so we can do things like rotate the square we can stretch it or elongate it we can add more faces to the square we can extrude the square into a third dimension to make it a cube these are all transformations and they alter the output or the thing that we create to be more original or different beyond just changing individual properties of a thing that you're deriving from you can also merge multiple different things so you can refer to multiple different references at once when you're creating your work and layer them transform them in unique ways so you can simply add them on top of each other you can you know take half of one thing and half of another and merge them you can layer them you can take certain properties and you know apply them to each other so obviously there are infinite ways you can transform work but this is a nice way of thinking about you know how to at least formally you know describe and define what it means to transform something in the art world transformation can look like this this is kind of like merging two shapes right we have mona lisa we have lisa simpson simply pushing them together creates mona lisa simpson we have the composition of the mona lisa we have the art style and the character from you know the simpsons there's our derivative work an example that's been going around twitter uh more recently is this lovely interpretation of watercolor trees in pixel art by frenric so you can see right we have a tree we have the technique of watercolor and we have the rules of pixel art that bind you know of the pixel artwork and we have this is the result right what we have is an original composition that is technically impressive the the transformation is broad right we're transforming themes and ideas in a new way right so this is like a really really great example of how to use references or at least how to take concepts that exist in the world you know trees watercolor pixel art and to merge them in a way that is transformative and original so when using a reference try to think about how you can make something original by contributing creative transformation the transformations are your way of adding creativity to it and adding originality so given all that when i'm working with references i usually grab a multitude of different images and i create a collage out of them that helps me stay unfocused right and not to tunnel vision on one particular image so that i'm not copying it directly if that's an issue that you have you know this will resolve that and i like to pick when i'm making that collage images that aren't necessarily what i'm trying to make right i'm not exactly trying to find a picture that is what i'm trying to make and to make that directly instead i'm trying to pick things that have the attributes that i'm imagining in my head right so i like the silhouette of this tree i think this is an interesting place to start with technique for applying this to pixel art i like the color of this tree i like the shading on this one and the lighting of this one you know this is you know a painted version so maybe there's some lessons that i can learn on some technique that's here maybe i want my tree to look more painterly even though it's pixel art right so there are ways that you can you know by creating this collage here take bits and pieces right and merge them in an original way to make something that is uh yeah creative and your own right it's not just a copy so now that we've discussed using references uh let's make something let's make a tree okay so let's get into it i'm going to keep the reference on the right here and i'm going to be working on the left and i'm going to try not to zoom and scroll too much so we'll see how well that that turns out the first thing is a silhouette let's uh just block it in with any color i'm just going to take this dark brown here that's red and just fill out the silhouette and i'm not going to copy directly i'm just going to create something that's you know evokes the same sort of thing so i like this idea of it leaning one way and another and my goal is to really have something that tapers as we move forward so we want the the limbs to get smaller as they fork and split and that's that's basically how trees work in real life note that we are creating a 2d tree in uh you know from a 3d reference you need to take into account branches that are facing the camera it might be a bit difficult to to do at this stage but if you look at this you know it's a 2d image so you can kind of just ignore that for now but when we shade we're definitely going to be trying to think about that a little bit more you know thinking about things like branches crossing over would be a good example of taking into account that 3d aspect and i really like the way that this is sort of more crooked to i like that it's not just one straight stump that goes all the way up and i want to just make sure it looks nice too so just aesthetically you know if we can follow a line you know all the way up that helps a lot now i'm starting out with kind of like the branch system of the tree so that i have the structure looking you know reasonably well balanced at the start this is kind of like drawing a skeleton of the tree really we don't have any leaves yet okay that's pretty good there's a little bit of an issue here where this goes a bit too thin too late you can really see it right if if um if it's too thick further up it's like okay that looks like it's wonky looks lopsided so i'm just thinking about these um clumps that i'm gonna be adding and how i want them to be formed and i suppose green's fine for now for our next layer up so i'm going to add a new layer and i'm just going to start clumping these down and the goal is to really try to create uh a sense of volume without completely erasing all of the the branches right you don't want to not be able to see the branches at all and i think what's really important here is like i'm using a brush size if we darken this off a little that's you know this big relative to the tree but if you look at these clumps right the clumps are quite a lot bigger than this relative to you know the size of the stump so it can be helpful you know if you want to like really replicate what's there to use like a bigger brush for this exercise just to make sure that the the global shapes those big shapes are being represented you can go back and erase as well that works too but it's it's good if you have these big structures um that make these almost like mini silhouettes right of your bunches so that you can at least work with them and cut away from them and that the remnants of how you created it are still visible right you can still kind of see how it was created just helps make that um make it look more natural now you can you can sort of lower the opacity of this to see the branches underneath if you want to like show off some of that structure and you just don't want to guess your way around uh you can just yeah try to come through here and um it'll also give you a good indication of where the leaves should be relative to the branches anyway so you have some sort of understanding of the the circulatory system of the tree what i'm going to start doing is thinking about how i can break up this into what looks like smaller leaves right obviously this isn't like a smooth line here we can see that there's like breaks in it so i'm going to start adding some of those breaks in and then i'm going to basically trick the eye into thinking that these shapes these little you know inconsistent single pixel sized shapes were used to make the entire thing right i'm going to make it look like there was some sort of you know brush that was used to create this and that's how i achieve that kind of more painterly effect so for now that we can just do that by cutting into the shape keeping in mind that that old lesson that i gave about trying to use small shapes to inform the bigger shapes right so if you've seen one iteration of a detail you will assume that that detail applies everywhere i'm going to brighten this up a little bit because i want to see a background so we'll add a blue and i want to brighten up this a little bit just to give us our base color now i'm going to go back to the shade brush and so i'm going to grab the colors that i want to use and i'm going to just press my shade button here and that's going to give me the the ideas that i want in fact i'm only just going to use two shades right now so i'm going to take this and the shade below it and that's going to help me build out these clumps so as i'm looking at this i'm just thinking about how the lighting is actually going to be applied and i'm thinking about which parts are lit up right it's not really like left versus right i mean there's a little bit of darker space on the inside but that's really looking through the tree into the branches that are sort of obscured by the by the rest of the branches when looking at the sun so these are sort of in shadow and that's where they're darker not because they are on the left side or the right side or higher up or lower down so we're not just going to sit here and shade you know along the bottom and say that's that's where the light touches and that's where the light doesn't touch because it's not one object right it's it's lots and lots of objects you know layered on top of each other so at best we can kind of think of these clumps as you know smaller objects and we can start shading them a little bit but i'm just going to try to scatter out some darker shapes everywhere and then put lighter shapes on top of those darker shapes so i'm just trying to think about you know what's closer to the camera what's closer to the outside of the tree versus the inside and that depth is going to dictate what gets lit up and what doesn't so and as i refine this i'm really just looking at the the shapes of my shapes right the shapes of these shadows and thinking about like okay what do these individual pixels look like right like this section over here is a little wonky so how do i flatten that out i'm kind of thinking of the clumps as being sort of oval shaped and i'm just trying to emphasize those i'm also thinking about the bright shapes casting shadows on the shapes below them so this section here is casting a shadow down onto this what's important is that you have some kind of rule if you have a rule that you're following the rule will appear to flow naturally across the image if you don't have a rule it's going to just look like you had random stuff happening everywhere yeah and trees themselves all follow different different rules right there are different species of trees that have different shaped bushes and branches and the lighting is therefore different across all of them so it's not really a question of like doing it right or wrong i'm sure you can find examples of trees that look you know really wild and have very very different appearances so we just want to also make sure that we're not losing the the unique shape of the tree so you know does this you know look like the tree that we started with is it overall is the silhouette looking good you know we can do what we want with it if we want to give it some more varied shape here and make it a bit more lopsided so it looks like when analyzing this tree you know what really stands out to me are these very bright sections that are backed by very dark sections right these high contrast areas that as we look at the sort of rounding as this sort of like rolls forward our eyes are about here right so this is kind of above us and we can see the branches facing the sun and then as they face us the contrast looks like it's a little higher and so we can try to like emulate that by highlighting the base of the clumps at the bottom of the base of the clumps that are towards the middle and i've sort of even started doing that here you can see so you know maybe some of this and this and also i just want to take this opportunity to just highlight the outside as well for sure so at the very top we're going to see a lot of light and then we're going to come very very very sparing as we approach the parts down here and now is our opportunity to work in some of those shapes that we want to use to emulate you know the brush so let's clean it up a little and i'm just going to throw in some of these shapes towards the bottom to give us the impression of there being you know if this light shade is at the contrast point between this and this then maybe this would be the contrast point between this and you know the darkest color so i'm just throwing in these little soft shapes here to give us the impression of you know just leaves that are peeking out from underneath so we're trying to do here is you know keep the big shapes and add smaller shapes to the edges and that way if we have you know rather than creating smaller shapes that cross over into the big shapes that destroys the big shapes right so if we keep them separate then the structure is there at those different levels right we see the overall silhouette we see the clumps and we see the little details inside i like really mixing up the background color just to see you know what this thing looks like at different uh different levels of contrast okay and i'm actually just going to do a little more highlights here just to go that one step further and be very very sparing with these these are sort of leaves that are catching direct sunlight the next thing i want to do is do some shading on the trunk so i'm going to take this as a reference because i really like the way that the trunk that's exposed to the sun is brighter than the trunk that is uh or the branches that are further in the structure i really like that idea so you know obviously we can take this and start darkening this up and straight away you can see that looks so much more clear now that the branches are creating shadow that's darkening the inside here very similar to this and so i want to give the impression that the sunlight is both coming through this so you get little bits here that are lit up right right along the top of these logs these branches and maybe there's being shadow the shadow being cast you know on this side not exclusively right we still see bits peeking out the other side but if anywhere is going to be dark it's going to be this bit close to the bottom we do have an opportunity to create texture here so we can get really really close to it and just work on creating the sense of bark you can see these these sort of little rips all right coming up through here this is like texture in the trunk itself we can start emulating that here i do want to see a little bit more of that original set of uh shapes coming underneath so i'm going to try to just invade this a little bit and show some more and i want to show you know the branch up against light so that we can see that in contrast that's looking really good now wow and we can add another shade brighter on this just on the edge here and here and very select places and that'll give us that sense of okay some of that light is coming straight down and hitting this part of the of the tree i think i might work it back a little bit some of these darker shapes are a little high contrast yeah i just want to create an overall more solid flat area of this middle green in the top middle section just to create more form for it so you can really see clearly we've got kind of like this section this section this section and this section has like four distinct kind of regions and we can give this sort of one set of shading right where it's darker underneath and then this is sort of coming out the side and that's kind of replicating the fact that we've got these one two three four major branch structures right so it was there in the original and i'm just trying to bring it back it's always good to step back and come back to the original and say okay what am i what have i lost along the way i just want to tidy up some of these orphan pixels anyway you see one pixel just on its own doing nothing you kind of want to be a little careful you know if it's not contributing anything to the shape it can be a bit distracting to see those so again just making sure it looks good on light backgrounds and dark backgrounds at the moment i'm feeling quite happy with it actually again some of these orphan pixels are there just breaking up the picture a little bit too much so there we have it we have the silhouette of this one right or something similar again not direct not exact it's not supposed to be we have a lot more of the lighting technique from this tree and this tree i didn't want to stick too close to this art style because i uh we can i mean we could give it an outline if we really wanted to i usually wouldn't go for that but uh if we go for something like i think this brown really works or a darker green it could be really cool that's quite nice i like it actually and then we could do the same thing for the this here now since we are doing this with the outline what i think i'll do is just brighten it up on the areas where it's uh you know quite bright and then darken it in the areas where it should be darker and it's going to look just a little more professional not my usual style but you know we're looking at this outlines here i thought they looked good give them a try and uh yeah they came up a treat really nice works well with this style almost evokes that watercolor look that we were seeing earlier do you know the only thing that i think got ruined in that mix was the fact that we got now all these little orphan pixels peeking through so what i might do is just erase a little bit further around here i'm just trying to i'm just looking at the amount of white space here and saying okay can i introduce some more white space towards the bottom to give us back some of the shape okay i think we're pretty much there wow that turned out really nice okay since we've come this far how about we draw some some grass so uh should be pretty straightforward here basically just doing what i always do with my grass i'm just going to take this area here and create a little bit more light remember the trees creating some shadow i'm sort of just pretending that i know what the tree looks like from this angle with the shadow you know just creating some broken shapes here to make it look like the tree is casting shadow on the ground i'm just going to create some nice grass shapes first very simple i'm keeping this piece quite low res for you guys just so that you can have something to um yeah follow along with for yeah more beginner pixel artists because i know a lot of my content's pretty advanced and i thought maybe it would be nice to not go quite so hardcore for once maybe we'll go even lower res next time and maybe we'll outline the grass as well maybe and what i like which i see a lot these days is when i'm looking at top down pixel art you'll find there's this really common thing this very common idea where you'll see like patches of like grass being raised and lowered and they sort of have their own shading i think i'll do something similar to that here where i'll take i'll take like a section and i'll outline it and everything as if it's its own zed layer see if that works i think it did i think i'll keep it minimal the shadow it's taking away too much i think from the piece um quite nice i wonder if i just pop up some shapes here if this will look like grass that's it will great like grass that's just sort of a bit not as bright we're sort of creating the grass with the outline i like it a lot let's give the uh the grass a little bit more of a shine a bit of a shimmer so there you go a tree in pixel art using some references that i collected online i hope you took the opportunity to follow along with me and create your own tree or your own art using some references that you were interested in and i hope you gained a little bit of confidence using references if you have any questions about references or drawing trees or if you'd like to see me draw some more stuff in this style and create some sort of asset pack you're more than welcome to do so in the comments below thank you for watching see ya 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: 70,845

Keywords: game development, pixel art, game dev, game, video game, indie games, stream, tutorial, references, tree, pixel art tree, drawing, art

Id: xbi6e8vQ_kY

Length: 23min 35sec (1415 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 27 2021