Pixel Art Painting | Vending Machine Timelapse

[Music] hello there my name is brandon and i make pictures out of tiny squares and today i'm going to be making pixel art of this hot chocolate vending machine concept that i had to come up with i began this with a couple rough sketches just to plan out the look and a lot of the features here are inspired by those found on some real life references that it pulled up but then i've kind of like blended all these ideas together and given it a slight cyberpunk aesthetic as well i also really like the idea of attempting something in this two point perspective so that's going to be the basis for how my pixel piece is going to go to get started i've created a canvas of 320 by 480 pixels this was just kind of my blind estimate for what i might need for this one i wanted to make this like a bit higher res and more detailed than my typical work most importantly though i want to make sure that i'm able to maintain legibility on the hot chocolate lettering on that console screen so i actually just drew those letters out first by themself and then kind of use them to guide my sizing and the way that i've done that is i've got a photo of my rough sketch here on another layer and i resized it into place kind of according to that pixel lettering and then now i'm using this as a rough template that can sort of guide me to an appropriate canvas size so based on that visual i realized that my canvas should be sized up a little bit uh in this case it ended up at 384 by 576. from here though actually expand the bounds of my canvas temporarily because i want to sort of reverse engineer the two point perspective lines that are on my rough sketch the sketch was you know it's rough it was really just eyeballed so it didn't actually have like proper angles of perspective to it but by extruding those lines to a common point i can kind of see what i was trying to go for and then for the pixel illustration these lines can be corrected by having them originating from proper vanishing points using this perspective grid i trace over the rough sketch following angles that originate from the vanishing point and it'll sort of look like the lines are just showing up because what i'm actually doing is clicking on the start and the end point while holding shift and it'll just connect those clicks with a line so i'm just kind of bouncing around doing that placing the main lines of the machine to get the framework in place and then i'm also cleaning up all that excess that results you know from having extruded it all the way from that vanishing point [Music] and once it starts shaping up a little bit i'm able to get started on the finer details here so i'm pretty sure this is actually the largest sizing that i've worked with in pixel art to be honest um which i know something being like 400 or 500 pixels still sounds like a tiny image right but when you're concerning yourself with single pixel details it kind of ends up being quite a bit of density at your disposal [Music] i suppose if there was one thing intimidating going into this one it was just about if i'd be able to keep up with that potential to create finer details in this seemingly larger space but what surprised me was that it actually really felt quite similar to making kind of a lot of the quote unquote lower res stuff that i normally do the only difference here is that whereas i may be used to making like character sprites and details on buildings and that sort of thing um on this piece that same sizing may end up being stuff like just a bit of paneling on the machine or like a button or something like that which is actually really cool because it still uses kind of a similar application of pixel art logic but then it's nice to be able to think about those finer details for once [Music] a couple times throughout this drawing i found that it was necessary to resize the machine itself so i'd kind of cut and drag pieces together which when you have this perspective in play you have to be careful because those kinds of movements will change the relationship to the vanishing point as far as giving an appropriate angle so there was always kind of a balance with that sort of thing like also when i was adding new pieces i'd make sure to trace it back to the vanishing point to make sure that it follows the perspective but at certain points also i you know just tried to freehand things because it felt like there was enough context elsewhere to make it work or if something you know happened to work better as far as the pixel art itself uh i would kind of go with that you know since it's always kind of a battle of what looks nice versus being too choppy when it's following those perspective lines basically what's occurring uh or what i'm getting at is that like a lot of times i'll go into a piece with sort of a healthy amount of knowledge and confidence with how it needs to be approached but with this one there was sort of this tangibly higher degree of making it up as i go along but the best thing about that was just kind of putting myself out of my element enough to sort of try a different approach and configuration like this [Music] and with the two-point perspective we often run into that issue where the lines don't come out at the most ideal angles for you uh often you'll have like mismatched segment lengths of pixels along that line and you can see that i've dealt with this by often just erasing pixels along the line to break it up or to sort of try to balance out those individual segments i've started to enjoy the sort of scrappier look of this approach so i really leaned into it on this piece especially rather than trying to keep the line work looking pristine and in control i found that the jagginess here wasn't really as much of an issue once you're viewing the image fully zoomed out since you're just kind of taking the thing as a whole and not really looking at these individual pixels necessarily [Music] that being said some of my favorite stuff on this one was actually when i got to do the finer details when they were called for um like right here i'm detailing some intricate machinery that is sort of like these exposed inner workings of the machine it's great having the sizing to work with for this kind of thing because you really get a lot of space to like establish these textures and this idea kind of extended into other areas too like i started using dithering here on this sort of like hopper filled with hot chocolate powder and then this dithering texture also appears as like other sort of shaded areas around the machine another finishing detail was some weathering so i would go through and kind of make these small chips and dents on the edges of the machine and then also apply a bit of grime here and there too the last pieces that i'm adding here are some additional environmental objects which will sort of provide more context than if this were just an isolated machine so right here i'm popping a street sign behind it and again this was another piece where it was a lot of fun to work with a higher resolution on this one um you know on a typical piece of mind a pole for a street sign or something like this might only be like one or two pixels thick between the outline so comparatively there's a lot more opportunity here for this sort of intricate detailing uh and to be able to kind of look at the thing and sort of have this idea of how it might appear as a real object at the base of the machine i'm making a small bit of foliage and i'm starting from a blobby silhouette using a large pencil size and then i'm going to erase from that silhouette to create the texture i guess i should mention to you it's december at the time that i'm making this and posting this so there is kind of like a vague holiday or winter inspiration here um that's where the hot chocolate thing comes from too so that's also something that i wanted to try to tie in with a lot of these finishing touches and so when it came to the coloring uh i was sort of thinking about like your typical red and green holiday kind of thing but maybe sort of bending that more to my application like using uh cold colors in like a low saturation blue or teal to represent metallic components in cold weather and then contrasting that with something warmer and like chocolatey you know for obvious reasons and i'm selecting all these colors in a really low saturation because i was hoping to give it almost like a sort of painterly feel like as if it's a postcard or like a christmas card or something like that i ended up taking these base colors and overlaying them 50 with each other to generate all these in between tones and then i'm painting these in to create some blending between all these colors i've also explored a look where it's kind of bleeding outside the line sometimes like as if it's just been painted like over the line work um which obviously is what i'm doing myself also but in this case you know i have to manufacture that effect through this deliberate placement of squares to finish this off i dropped in a large circle to frame everything and then this also allowed me to draw in some small dots using the background color to provide the appearance of snow and that one's really sort of the last thing here so let's go ahead and take a look at the final piece here we go [Music] all right well i think it's looking appropriately postcard ready um but you know beyond that it was a lot of fun to kind of have this focus on a detailed look at a singular object like this uh in this like i guess higher res style i guess i'll call it for now um so i think i'll have to explore these sort of parameters again at some point because that was a lot of fun to do but uh let's roll along and close this out with some crt time so thank you for watching and take care and keep it square [Music] so [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Brandon James Greer

Views: 62,681

Keywords: pixel art, two point perspective, concept art, cyberpunk, vending machine, hot chocolate, painting, speedpaint, timelapse, tutorial

Id: VuVbeWBHuGM

Length: 10min 11sec (611 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 12 2021