Pixel Art Critique

welcome back just follow and dm me on twitter if you want to be in the next episode okay so just a quick note when you send me artwork please don't scale it up check this out the pixel density here isn't the same so it's harder for me to now draw on this artwork to improve it here we go [Music] so the main thing i think that you can improve on this artwork is the contrast this is a very common mistake and it's because when you draw like this close up like this close up you don't you see the contrast between colors but remember when you zoom out it's harder to see that contrast you can barely see the contrast here in the preview so the main thing i would do is i would select this green and if you're using a sprite link in the description by the way i'm not sponsored by anybody a tiny little kickback so if you use a sprite this is really easy but you can figure this out in photoshop and stuff like that you basically you go to your your like magic wand tool and you can um in most programs you can pick a certain color you see i selected it everywhere and now you can color over it but there's something really cool control d d selects by the way now if i paint bucket this color normally it just paint buckets everything that's touching however if we turn contiguous off here it'll change it everywhere in the artwork and i keep that in mind and that's why i like to reuse a lot of colors and use a small color palette because it's really easy to then go and alter the colors and that's a pro tip right there anyway i think that the contrast needs to be higher and i would make this part of the grass lighter and i'm gonna try two versions i'm gonna try one that's more saturated and less saturated and i'm looking at the preview now so let's try much more saturated all the way in the top right corner there and that looks pretty cool and i do i love saturated colors and saturated color palettes however it might also be better to go lighter and remove some of that saturation and that looks a little bit more natural i think and then if you remember hue shifting it's where when you go lighter or darker you shift hues usually when i go darker i go towards blues so we would move towards the right side and when i go lighter i move towards the reds the yellows so i'm going to go a lot more towards the yellow here and now you see how it it's brighter but it also creates um more contrast because the hue is different and sometimes you don't even need to make a color brighter you just need to change the hue and it will look brighter um so let's try making this a different hue now but more saturated yep there we go i like that and just for fun i'm going to go completely yellow and look even though that is that is completely yellow it's still look that's a little yellow but that's still pretty pretty good it still works and um the opposite of that would be going towards blues and i think that blue and grass is kind of cool but i like to use the blues more for um for when i'm shading not when i'm highlighting so i'm just gonna go ahead and make it you know a little bit lighter like that and check that out wow that looks pretty cool i think the contrast with this um cliff edge is really high too so up here it does make sense for it to be dark but near the water i don't i don't think it does so i'm going to pick a color that's just a little bit darker and there we go for this part um uh actually let me turn contiguous on and that way i can kind of show you how i think it should look so i think that this part right here needs to be a little bit darker and the part under the grass needs to be a lot darker you see something like that i think is pretty cool here how you have the water near the edge something i like to do is i like to um actually if i go ahead and make this i think size four and switch it to a square no no size two and switch it to square now it's the size of your pixels so something that i like to do is if you do a white edge oops i messed that up already so oh my gosh so if you do a white edge right where the water touches it looks like foam and bubbles and whatever and it adds a little bit more to that you see that and you don't even need to have a solid line there it could just go like this be a little bit messy but it makes it look um a little bit more like that water is crashing up against the the stone it's a pretty cool little uh little thing you can do and you can even do it in when you have like a little waves you know add a little bit of a little bit of white there to make it look like it's reflective all right let's move on to the next artwork i like it this one's pretty cool i'm not exactly sure what's going on up here kind of looks like there's a it doesn't look like it's um so the first tip i got for you isn't even a pixel art dip it's name your layers bruh i do see that you're you know trying to use minimal colors however if you use minimal colors um you can't use them so frequently right because even though this does have shading the head would actually be even lighter so for example i actually think that you know you should have even lighter colors up here on the head and use more of the lighter color on the head up here the face also doesn't really make too much um too much sense for me i'm not sure why there's a little corner here so i'm just going to plop that pixel there and there i don't know if i'm messing up your design or whatever but that that to me looks more correct but you see how i made the whole top of the headlighter because there's a ton of light up there and you probably want to do the same thing for the shoulders here i do like that you know you're highlighting but this whole thing would actually be lighter the entire top because your light's not coming your lighting's not coming you know just from here you're always going to have lighting coming from the side and the top so you kind of have to you have to make sure that all the things that are pointing straight up they should probably have a lot more highlights on them and then for the cape well since you have that light coming from above i'd make the whole cape darker adjustments brightness and contrast all right let's tone down the brightness there and check that oh man that just instantly looks so much better it also um i don't think you need all that contrast in the cape honestly um i don't think you need that many colors in the cape i would almost make the cape one color but i would go with a darker cape just because even if you wanted the cape to be grey don't take this you know don't be offended by this but i think it's poor design if the cape is exactly the same color as the armor it probably wouldn't be now maybe you're trying to do a limited color palette but if you are trying to do a limited color palette then have the body and the cape not use all the same colors or not the same amount so we could still make this cape darker but then i mean choose one of these darker colors if you're trying to use a limited color palette don't choose the same color as the main armor because if you're using a limited color palette then the colors don't just represent the shading they literally represent objects so you would want intentionally the cape to be a um a color that is not exactly the same as the armor wow i think i feel like i ranted way too much to get that point across i'm gonna put a couple of uh highlights here on the shoulders it looks like the head actually is uh some of the stuff is on the shoulder so i'm just gonna merge that down so that way it's not overlapping oddly and then this blade right here it is it does look like the same color as the eyes and there are some lines in here but um i don't exactly know what you're going for with this uh blade whether these lines are supposed to make it look kind of like it's got energy in it or something like that so i'm not gonna mess with that too much i think the boots are pretty awesome this shading for the crease it's it's awesome but i would add a little bit more um a little bit more uh uh shading to the boots not really a big deal and this right here to me looks a little bit odd i'm not sure why there's so much shading on one side but not the other if you're going to use this as a really dark outline for example here by the foot i would actually continue this up the boot and for this one i would probably transition into it a little bit like this and i know you're trying to avoid using outlines but it's kind of odd to have this much dark shading near the bottom and not make it an outline so trying to sort of do what you're doing kind of like that maybe there we go something like that i would probably remove the highlight from the corner because if it's the if the foot is facing me then the highlight actually wouldn't be on the corner it would be on the top you see you see what i did there and um i i don't know i might be messing with it too much but the shape of it i think would probably be a little bit i think i might be messing it up you know what disregard this completely disregard that tip um the rest of this body is pretty cool i would i would add a little bit more shading maybe up here by the helmet and the back of this helmet i think looks too light so a lot of the body parts here have this dark outline shading but it looks like it's missing from the head so i would go ahead and add a little bit of that onto the head here i think it's just gonna make it look um a little bit better if if the outline isn't so light it looks like you you did go for an outline here but it's it's way way way too light we can transition to it being that light but i think you do need the darker sections of it the shape of it is actually a little bit hard for me to make out i'm going to alter the shape a little because i think it's supposed to be a little bit more like like that if i i don't know it's a little hard for me to see but um overall looks pretty cool this section right here i'm not sure why it's so um so dark honestly you could you could probably do something like uh like that if you were trying to sort of transition this i just think this color is too dark if we're using colors that you already have existing colors i would actually use this gray not that black i don't think you needed to go so dark with it um you know something like that might be fine and right here the contrast between these two is too high so it would actually make more sense for that to be gray and for us to just have that that tiny corner there be the outline because i know you're trying to make it look like the chin's sticking out but there's already a large enough contrast between these two that we don't need to go and add another outline or make this even darker it already looks like that part sticks out and this shoulder i would probably make it a little bit larger just because it's um it's it's closer than this other shoulder and um by making it larger you won't have that weird section between the shoulder plate and the helmet where it looked like you had some kind of odd shading um what i'm basically talking about is right here that crease you see that um oh my gosh i accidentally turned on my geforce settings i gotta change the shortcut for that but this crease right here um you could do it you could use a shading that might be too harsh i'm trying to kind of use the same colors that you have but um basically yeah you could create a little bit more here to kind of give it some kind of um some kind of more to give it a little bit more form but i think that's an unnecessary detail actually so i'm just going to keep it a little bit simpler and leave it at something like that we could make it super dark let's see what that looks like but then now because of the minimal colors you guys because of the minimal colors it just won't look right if i if i added more colors i could probably make it look right but i'm trying to reuse the same colors that you have all right let's move on to the next artwork before i start over critiquing every little thing in this so this last one's a sneaker and i love the shape of this this was really well done it looks like a real sneaker however it looks like you got a shoelace problem so the shoelace and the sneaker are very similar in color and i'm not going to try to change the color of the shoelaces too much because i get where you're going with here you know you want to have black um so let's find a way all right let me show you a way that we could try to get those shoelaces to be a little bit more noticeable i think the easiest thing you could do i'm gonna do some new layer i think the easiest thing that you could do is just create highlights now what i mean by that is a good way to this isn't realistic but a good way to sometimes point out or highlight uh two sections when they're the same color is to use the color white or like or gray for example and this way um what i'm doing is i'm just adding a little bit of a um outline but it's a light outline it's the opposite of what you would think a you know uh like when you think of outlines you always think of them as being like a black outline right but you can make white outlines here for this i'll actually use white to kind of just emphasize what i'm talking about and i'll do it on both sides so we could you can outline things in white just to show that there are two objects there and i mean for this sneaker um i think it looks kind of bad i had to use a white outline which is why i'm using the gray one um but uh for some some sort some cases for this i think i i all you need to do is just put a little bit of gray here and there to highlight um parts of the shoelace maybe a little bit over here maybe here it doesn't even need to be everywhere just a couple sections for this part right here i don't think that you need a black outline and i think it might look better honestly without it what i would do is use a really dark red okay so i changed that black outline to a dark red and personally i think that looks a little bit better because it looks more like it's the outline and then for this part right here i would probably go really really dark gray [Music] i also wouldn't use black it looks like there's black is used in too many locations so by not using black in spots like this um it helps kind of uh separate the sections all right and then because there's so much detail in this i think that what you could do is you could um do a little bit of anti-aliasing like smooth smooth this out a little bit let me uh let me show you what i mean i'm gonna pick a a gray a pretty light gray i don't want to go um too dark and right here in the corners i'm just gonna add that gray and what that'll do is it'll smooth it'll smooth that out it'll it'll look a little bit look a little bit smoother it looks like it has more detail i hope you can see that all right i think you get the point i do i don't really get why there's these dots here i don't know what the sneaker that you're replicating looks like but this looks odd to me there's like is this blue there's like blue lines in this i um i don't really get it and it looks messy even if the sneaker actually has something like that i would probably just remove it for the sake of this pixel art because um it looks kind of weird i don't get what those blue dots uh there were and even within here you could add a little bit of shading within these curves you see how that part is lighter and then this part can get darker it makes it look like there's more curvature to the sneaker watch this you see that makes it look more like it like it like it bends there and then in the front here you could add more of a highlight i don't know something like that but basically now it looks like there's a little bit of uh reflection there i would increase maybe this a little bit more too the these colors are very very similar so i would maybe lighten this up a tiny bit um just so that it's more visible probably do the same for that section up there i forgot to click this little if you click this little box your artwork moves around oddly kind of and then if you click it again it keeps your artwork uh your preview um still and i'm sorry i didn't notice that sooner but whatever anyway one of the developers working on dwarve it's a tower defense dungeon crawler rpg it's a genre mashup and it's going to be pretty cool please wish this did on steam i made some free pixel art assets that you can use in your games or whatever there's a link in the description if you want to support the channel get help with your pixel art check out my patreon i'll see you guys next time devla [Music] please subscribe

Channel: Pixel Pete (Peter Milko)

Views: 10,266

Keywords: petermilko, peter milko, pixelpete, pixel pete, pixel art, pixelart, pixel art tutorial, how to draw pixel, pixel art tutorials, how to draw pixel art, how to draw pixelart, draw pixel art, draw pixelart, pixel art video game, pixel art 101, pixelart 101, pixelart tutorial, stardewvalley, stardew valley, Haunted Chocolatier, haunted chocolatier characters, critique, pixel art starwars, starwars pixelart, star wars, storm trooper

Id: _KeZ2c0ea6Q

Length: 17min 40sec (1060 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 06 2022