Remaking the FIRST pixel art I ever made (...5 years later!) #pixels

hello there my name is Brandon and I make pictures out of tiny squares and if actually been doing pixel art for about five years now because I remember the exact moment that I started because I worked this tweet about it which reads trying out some pixel art it's somehow both easier and harder than I thought and that's something I kind of still agree with hashtag pixel art hashtag pixels anyway today because I feel like maybe I've learned a few things in five years I thought I'd revisit this first piece that I made and just see what I could do better so let's get going all right so my main plan with this one wasn't just to make a new sprite entirely from scratch but to actually copy over my original sprite and just see what I could come up with by continuing to make edits and refine it almost as if I'm just picking it back up again and continuing to work you know after like a short break of five years I guess the sprite heighted the original is 28 pixels tall and that was something that I wanted to maintain for the remake just to see what could be done with essentially the same resolution I also really like the idea of the bright colors here which definitely have that very strong like RGB or nes kind of flavor to them so I do want to keep it in the same spirit as far as the vibrancy but definitely tweaking those a little bit to find something that's like less I Bernie and maybe you notice as well but I used the NES Mega Man sprite as a bit of a guide when I created the original which was just one of the more prominent points of reference that I had back at that time for what pixel art even looked like but you can see the similarity in the eyes and also the stance which I just sort of extrapolated to create the Hulk in fact a lot of my work from that first year so pixel art really relied heavily on these sorts of like pseudo Mega Man esque kind of sprites I think it's kind of exciting when you figure out some sort of template that works and then you're just like hey I wonder what all my favorite characters would look like in this style so I think I learned quite a bit about stylization though just by attempting different characters and costumes and different sorts of features in this kind of style over and over again one area that was always lacking with these though was the shading and that's mostly just for me not having been confident with it at all like on the original Hulk sprite you can see that there's a really light outer trim of light or dark that you this sort of bevel effect rather than trying to attempt to indicate any kind of Anatomy it's almost like he's just like a flat sticker that has a bit of an edge on it or something like that with the remastered version here I use a dark green for the shading on his skin and then use the main lighter green to just pop a bit of definition out of that shadow to create the muscles it's a simple shading scheme but because it's a strong contrast it's effective and keeps the sprite simple and clean within the small space here just as an aside I really would recommend revisiting some of your old work and attempting a newer version just as a sort of skill check exercise I've gotten in the habit of making a new Jedi Luke Skywalker's pride every year it's just something I noticed that I always had a version of I was came back to every year so it kind of became a tradition and the point isn't necessarily to massively outdo yourself from the previous version but it more just gives you a snapshot of where your skill and style sensibilities are at that point in time I haven't done this year's version yet I still really like the 2019 set but I suspect that'll probably a new video at some point for the end of the year getting back to the Hulk though for the face I wanted to maintain the idea of that original styling with the black and white eyes in the mouth so it was just a matter of finding the right combination to suit that style but also pay more attention to the expression this time around I mean in the original he does have his mouth open and a few angled eyebrows which are certainly ingredients for being an angry yelling expression but he didn't really look fully committed to it you know with the new one I added in a bit more detail with the teeth and his tongue and then gave him these really exaggerated thick eyebrows which I thought was a cool look and it felt like a touch that was sort of reminiscent at the 1970s live action hulk from here i move on to some refinements and i wanted to experiment more with the outline on this one rather than having the line work the entirely black throughout the sprite you can use like a darker shade color to also color the line work and sometimes that can help for adding dimension or emphasis along parts of the sprite it can also help provide a softer and more colorful look and just kind of help blend together different parts of the body so for the colored outlines i introduced a new shade color which is like a dark blue kind of one more step away from the shade color of a skin but not quite as dark as the black obviously and as I was refining this as well I kept making slight tweaks to the overall coloring I always loved the green in the purple combo but there's a few different ways that you can do it even like the green could lean towards being like a yellowy green or a blue green and likewise the purple could be like a blue purple or a pinky kind of purple or any combination of those in-between so here's a look at the finalized new version of pixel Hulk now the original certainly has its own charm and definitely like a sentimental quality for me being the first pixel art ever made but I'm really happy with how the styling on the new one came out however we're not gonna stop the video quite yet cuz that'd be too easy what I'd like to do now is plan out a small animation of him transforming from Bruce Banner into the Hulk just to really put this over the top if we want to plan out an animated transformation we should figure out the two extreme states of the sprite so we've got the Hulk's bright already so I started by making the Bruce Banner sprite and this is a bit tricky because the full-on hulk sprite was already a relatively small 28 pixels so to take it even smaller for the human form didn't leave a lot of room to work with I began by laying in a basic silhouette at a sizing that I thought could be small enough to enable a dramatic transformation but large enough that it could still maintain the art style with the outlines I erased the inner portion of the silhouette to leave me with that outline look and then started bringing some color into it because this sprite is quite small I thought the line work looked a bit strong particularly around the face so I'm refining it here and I'm trying to find ways to soften up the line work approach I didn't want the heavy line work to like overshadow or consume the attention of the sprite and eventually I found that just removing the outline from the front edge of the face worked quite well to achieve this and seem to still fit in with the style of the larger sprite as well okay before getting into creating the actual transformation frames I planned out a few sort of free animation frames where he's sort of like just about to change I think it'll help to indicate that something is going to happen rather than having him jumping into just a transformation out of nowhere so these variants are him just kind of slightly moving and kneeling a little bit to indicate that and now that we have the start and end frames of the animation it's time to fill out everything in between I've never really done an animation quite like this before and so I wish I had some better pro tips but the way that I approached this was I figured I'd just create the exact middle frame based on something that's about 50% between the first and the last sprite and then kind of fill in the other gaps using a similar approach so I brought over the Bruce and Hulk sprites and drop their opacity down to 50% and then just drew in some rough guides for where the placement of like the head and the hands and other features should be for this in-between sprite with the guides in place I took the full Hulk sprite and just kind of trimmed it down and move things around a little bit to fit that placement and then tried to scale down those features a little bit by just selecting and moving the pixels in from here I painted his starting skin color over top and drop the opacity to 50% just so the color would be exactly halfway between those two extremes and then I kind of fine-tuned it into place by bumping up the saturation a little bit just to fit the style I connected the body up as a silhouette and then slowly added the remaining colors to create the detail and the shading and I also remember that his shirt had to tear apart at some point so I tried to get an approximate like ripped apart look for that shirt of the middle sprite here and so now we can set up a quick test animation just to check how these frames fit together so far in Photoshop the animation tool is accessed by clicking window timeline and then create frame animation along the bottom you can duplicate the current frame and then choose a different layer to display on that new frame so it's just sort of like creating a flipbook of your individual frames so I set up the five frames I've got so far and you can see that even with just a few frames like this we're already getting a pretty good sense of the animation the change in size and overall shape feels about right and really it should just take a few more in-between frames to kind of glue everything together and make it a little smoother to create more of those in-between frames I just repeat the process again of lining up the frames immediately before and after and then planning out something that's partway between those two this approach is quite labor intensive since you need to redraw every single frame but it does help if you're able to copy and paste certain parts of the existing frames to at least give yourself something to work from for this frame in particular I remembered that he'd have to lose his shoes at some point and so I actually went to study some reference footage of different help transformations from each of the live-action movies and I really liked this one shot that showed his shoes just kind of tearing apart so I tried to make something similar to that and again here the shirt tearing will be partway between the start and the middle frame so it's about 25% torn at this point I guess at this point the way I approach the animation is just to get something that feels approximately correct the whole purpose here is just that it's the first pass at the animation with only a handful of frames and so we're just looking for broad but consistent changes to the size and the color and the position so even if we can get something that's like 75% of the way there we'll be doing quite well the hardest part I find is just creating all those individual sprites so it's just about getting something on the board that we can look at and assess and then fine-tune it later if there's mistakes so checking in with a quick test animation we're not looking too bad actually the transition here certainly looks smoother than before although there's of course a little bit of minor correcting to do see is hands kind of bounce in a weird way that seems like back and forth rather than being consistent again at this point we just want to have something to work with and then it's just about spotting these inconsistencies and correcting them with that fine-tuning work I like to choose certain parts of the body to focus on and then just kind of go one frame at a time and track the position and the changes to that single component and maybe I don't know this part might not translate too well to the time-lapse because there's a lot of like back-and-forth with playing through the animation but for example I'll choose like a small reference point like the ear or the top of the head or the hands or something like that and just make sure that the path that it follows is pretty smooth and consistent another thing I did at this point was create a single exaggerated frame just to give a big like pop right before the final form which helps give the animation a little bit more character since it's only a single frame you can be kind of wild with it as long as it's still relatively close to the frames around it and it's just to provide a quick glimpse of that exaggerated position in this case I brought the arms out a bit more and then exaggerated his expression it's just kind of like he goes past the finish line of his transformation and then reels it back a little bit to settle into the final form and lastly the final animation task was just a creative quick idle animation so that once he transforms it's not just a static sprite standing there but rather that he's sort of breathing heavily and kind of looks ready for action a bit I used that quick trick of like shifting and repositioning the body and the head at different intervals on different frames and then I also moved and kind of closing the mouth a little so it would create what looks like a bit of breathing action it's a simple three frame loop but it accomplishes more than if we just went through this transformation and then landed on a static sprite so with all that in place let's go ahead and take a look at the final animation that took me about five years and one week to create [Music] alright and to create the loop here I obviously just kind of reverse the animation which obviously doesn't really make sense because it means that his clothes are just Rima T realizing on his body but maybe in another five years I'll build on this and create an animation where he walks over to the closet and grabs a new set of clothes or something anyway I hope you enjoyed watching me revamp my old work like this and if you've been making pixel art for any length of time and really encourage you to go back to some of your first pieces and just see what kind of a new approach you can bring to them this one was a fairly dramatic difference but even if there's a very slight improvement it just reminds you like oh yeah I guess I have picked up a few techniques in that time so thank you for watching and take care and keep it square [Music]

Channel: Brandon James Greer

Views: 179,053

Keywords: pixel art, animation, sprite art

Id: kOotrzumpco

Length: 12min 53sec (773 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 12 2020