I'm gonna be teaching you everything you need to know to not only get started with pixel art, but to really kickstart your journey as an artist. To get started with pixel art, you'll need a computer, tablet or mobile device. To draw the pixel art, you can use a mouse, drawing tablet or your finger, whichever you prefer.
There's a lot of software options to choose from. Pixel art specific ones and more general art based ones. I use Aseprite, which is pixel art specific and I highly recommend it.
But there are plenty of great free options too. Use whatever is available to you. Most art software use the same tools and workflow, so the skills are transferable anyway. If you want to get up to speed quickly, I have this A-Sprite tutorial series.
To help illustrate some of the things in this video, I've created this little pixel art wizard. The process for creating this character was quite simple. Start with the silhouette, then define some features, cleaning up the line work, and adding color before refining even further.
Shadow, line, color, refine. Has a nice ring to it. Using a silhouette is my preferred approach because it allows me to focus on the simple shapes and readability. And the silhouette can change a lot throughout as well, but the key shapes pretty much stay the same. Notice how these little areas add interest to what is essentially just a triangle.
This isn't the only approach to making pics a lot. You can start off with construction lines. This is especially helpful for mapping out the proportions of the character before adding any detail, and it can save you a lot of headaches later on. If you watch our good friend Brandon, you'll notice he likes to use this technique a lot.
Thanks for the tip. Another process is to just go wild and lay down a really rough idea and clean it up as you go. I actually really like this, especially for backgrounds because you can nail the vibe early on and just relax as you clean it up.
Though it can be a little bit chaotic, especially if you don't know which direction you're going, so you may feel like it's not coming together for a while. But trust the process. You can even design in 2D if you prefer and then shrink it down. This gives a nice starting point but the character detail can change a lot depending on how far you shrink it. These aren't the only ways to make the pixel art.
Everyone's process is unique. I'd recommend watching your favourite artists to see their process and try out a bunch of ways to learn what you find the most fun. No matter which way you like to work, you can always arrive at the same end point. Canvas size is a tricky one because it really depends on what you're trying to make, the level of detail you need and the project you're working on. A good exercise for beginners is to try making the same thing in multiple different sizes.
like I did here. I probably could have went down to the 16 pixel size here because the silhouette translates well and the style is really simple so you don't lose a lot of detail. But this character is part of an established project where size consistency will be key to make sure things don't look mismatched.
If you're a beginner I would recommend working small to try and get used to the importance of a single pixel. A single pixel can change the way something looks entirely. And this can easily be missed if you work in larger sizes I have a challenge called September which is designed to help you get used to the small size limits Check out this video if you want to learn more. After I've done a silhouette in the right size I try and put down some basic line work to map out the key areas.
Here are some line work specific techniques One thing to be aware of is doubles This is where pixels meet and make a right angle Doubles can make the line work thicker and appear darker or sharper in places. For a single pixel outline removing this corner pixel can lead to cleaner and more consistent lines. You can use doubles to add shadow and having only doubles in your outline can be a really bold style choice. Jaggies are when pixels in lines or curves appear, well, jagged. This can create unintentional sharpness which can be fixed by removing any out of place pixels or by giving more smooth progressions to lines or curves.
But jaggies can be useful too. I actually use a jagged line intentionally here to show off the shape of the brow in the wizard's face. Remember, this video is not about good or bad. It's about the awareness and the intentional usage of these techniques to help you achieve the look that you're going for.
Art fundamentals is a huge area. So here are just some of the things I wish I knew when I was starting out. Let's take a look at a standard HSV color picker, where you select your colors in most art software. So you have your hues, which are basically just your colors. A red hue is currently selected.
You have your saturation. which is the intensity of the color. This is increasing from left to right from the neutral grays to the highest saturation. And value is how light or dark something is.
This is the most important thing which I'll get on to shortly but value is generally increasing from bottom to top. I say generally because there's one very important thing to understand. Each hue has its own perceived value.
If we look at the hues in black and white or grayscale we'll notice that the yellow has the lightest value while the blues and the purples have the darkest value. So how does this apply to the color picker? Well, we have four examples here with different hues selected. Red, yellow, green and blue. I've selected a color in the same position of all of them in the top right hand corner.
Even though they're in the same position, if we convert this to black and white, we can see that each of the values are very different. This is important to keep in mind when selecting your colors. Value is the most important thing to consider because it's how you give your art a sense of 3D form and depth using light and shadow. It really doesn't matter what colors you choose, if your value selections in value range is incorrect, it just won't look right. In art software you can quickly check the values of your piece by placing a layer filled with black on top and setting that layer mode to color.
It's actually not a totally accurate representation of the values but it's good enough for a quick reference. Too many saturated colors in a piece can make the colors clash, be difficult to look at and burn your eyes. And a lot of desaturated colors can look muted and washed out.
You can use saturated colors sparingly and intentionally to add areas of interest and focal points. But remember... Value is the most important.
I wanted to show you this piece which uses really highly saturated colors But the value structure is still on point so it works There are lots of different types of contrast in visual art. Value, hue, shape, detail, just to name a few. High contrast between things means that there's a large difference and low contrast means that these things are more similar You can use high contrast areas to attract the viewers eye and low contrast for areas of rest and repetition Contrast is relative though.
If everything is low contrast you get unity and pattern like visual behavior. And for high contrast areas to stand out you need those low contrast areas to allow it to do so. If I was to put in a bunch of texture and detail into the wizard's beard for example, the face would stand out a lot less.
Try and think how you can use contrast to emphasize important parts of your work. Understanding how light and shadow works can help you shade things properly and use value to show the 3D form. If I shine a light at this ball, we can see factors that make up a basic light model.
The ball blocks the light to create a cast shadow and darken the side of the ball. The darkest part of the shadow is where the ball makes contact with the surface, which is known as the occlusion shadow. On the lit side, we have our midtones and highlight.
We have our terminator, where the light transitions to shadow. We also have bounce light, which is the light reflecting from the surroundings and back onto the object, increasing the value of the co-shadow. It's not necessary to draw all of these factors in pixel art, as this might be too complicated depending on the size you're working in, but it's up to you and the style you're going for.
One thing to remember, how shadow and light works really depends on the amount of light sources, their strengths and the surrounding environment. If you want a deep dive into these topics, I would highly recommend James Gurney's Color and Light. One thing I see quite often is if you don't consider the form and just shade around the outsides of the object, you get this effect known as pillow shading, which doesn't aid in describing the form of the object, making it look flat.
Materials reflect light in different ways too. Notice how the matte yellow ball doesn't have a strong highlight as the light is diffused across the surface. But the glossy 8 ball and metal object have stronger highlights and reflect surfaces and objects.
If you want to portray a particular material like wood or gold, consider how that material reflects light and use a value structure and range that helps show that. You may hear or see colors being described as warm and cool. If we look at these two colors, the central color appears cool compared to the red. And in this example, the color appears warm compared to the blue.
It's actually the same neutral gray that appears differently because of the surrounding colors. If we look at the red and blue together, in this example, the blue is the cooler color and the red is the warmer color. But if we take that same red and put it against this new red, our original red on the left is now the cooler color.
The thing to take away here is that colors are relative and will appear differently depending on the colors. surrounding it. The color of an object is massively influenced by the light sources and surrounding objects and environment. Notice how the yellow ball's color changes as I change the color of the light source.
And it also takes on the red of my sketchbook because of the reflected bounce light. Hue shifting is a technique I've seen a lot and I think it is a simplification of this. It's also to try and make your colors more interesting. So when you add shadow, for example, instead of just shifting the value of the color to make it darker, you can shift the hue as well towards a different color.
Like I did here when I shifted the shadows towards purple and the lights towards yellow. Notice the difference between a pure value change and the value and hue change. Let me know which style you prefer in the comments.
Another kind of common beginner thing I see is the random use of lots of different colors. This can make an image look unintentionally noisy and you can lose control of your color palette and value structure. It can help to limit your color range to try and get more cohesion in your work. If you struggle with color selections and want to make your life a little bit easier you can use predefined color palettes.
They're also great for getting a specific look like the Game Boy palette. There are lots of pre-made palettes on low spec or you can just pick colors from your favorite movies, art or whatever and make your own. But a palette doesn't do all the hard work for you. You'll still have to consider the hue, saturation, value, contrast and style you're going for when you're creating art.
Dithering is a technique where you create patterns to blend or give the illusion that there are more colors than there actually are. If we have a limited palette of only black and white, we can create this checkerboard pattern to create a midtone. If we look from far away or blur it, notice how it appears grey.
With varying pattern complexities, we can create a whole value scale from black to white. You can be really creative with dithering and the patterns that you use can have different effects. This one looks more noisy and gritty for example. You can even use dithering to create new colors by mixing colors in patterns, which is especially useful if you're working from a limited palette. Dithering can look noisy and add unintentional texture especially in smaller sprites so be careful with your usage.
I really like this little portrait I think it uses dithering really well even in the smaller spaces. Anti-aliasing or AA is a technique used to soften pixel art. To achieve this we choose a color with a value which is between the two immediate colors.
Here we see a circle with no anti-aliasing so it looks sharp. The second has some anti-aliasing which successfully softens the shape but the third one has too much which softens the circle but also alters the shape by adding these corners. You've got to be selective and make sure it doesn't change the shape.
In this example we have internal and external anti-aliasing but note that if the background changes the effect of the external anti-aliasing stops working because of the value change. As I've mentioned a lot, the value is the most important so you can be creative with the hue if you like. It can even be used to alter the appearance of your line work making it appear thinner in some parts.
Looking at the wizard here's an example with too much anti-aliasing. It's really not required at all but if I was going to use any as a style choice I might use it to soften the beard. This is quite an advanced technique I think and you have to be careful with your application but as some inspiration this is one of my favorite examples of using anti-aliasing really well.
Using shading or anti-aliasing techniques for the entire length of an outline can lead to an effect known as banding. This can make your image look immediately flat or noisy instead of helping to build the form. You can kind of see this with pillow shading which I described earlier.
There are a bunch of different outline styles. Here's a few that I can think of off the top of my head. A single black outline looks graphic or cartoony, and it's great for animation. A double outline looks really thick as we saw earlier when we looked at doubles.
You can use a normal outline with a different color. This can reduce the contrast and sharpness of the outline. There's a colored outline which represents the area that it's outlining.
We have a light source outline which represents the area it's outlining and the direction of a light source. We have selective outline or sellout where anti-aliasing is used in the line work to help describe the form. We have broken outlines which is a form of selective outlining where parts of the outline are left out completely. Again to help describe the form. You can even use no outlines if you want.
For the wizard, I've used a single pixel black outline, because it fits into the style that I'm going for. I've also broken the outline a little in the hat to make that shape read more clearly. Doing pixel art with clusters in mind is the technique of pairing up pixels or multiple pixels to form chunks to describe areas, generally avoiding single pixels. A single pixel or orphan pixel can introduce noise or look out of place amongst clusters.
But they can be used to add details, highlights, especially in small pixel art, and even introduce a noisy or gritty effect if that's what you're going for. The wizard's eyes are single pixels, which is necessary because of the size of the sprite, and also just because I like the way it looks. I thought this piece was really interesting because it basically only uses single pixels. While it may look noisy and gritty, it works really well for the style of the piece.
One thing to note when taking reference from retro game pixel art is the fact that some of these games were being displayed on CRT monitors which put simply Blurs pixels. If we look at the raw pixels of Ristar, an old Sega game, we see the pixels very clearly, might even be able to spot some banding and jaggies, but none of that matters if we actually look at how it was displayed on the CRT screens. In a 2017 interview, the creators of Sonic and Tails mentioned that once they were aware of this, they started designing everything to make use of the blurriness, even using it to create intermediate colors. While I can't say for sure that all retro pixel art games were designed intentionally for the CRT blurriness, it's something to keep in mind when looking for reference or inspiration, because today we mainly see the raw clean pixels without any filtering.
Using your knowledge of art fundamentals and pixel art techniques, as well as your own personal tastes, there are an endless amount of styles you can come up with. You might like the way one thing looks while someone else doesn't. There is no right or wrong style. But remember, making informed and consistent style choices can be helpful to ensure everything you're making looks intentional and fits into the world you're building.
There is a lot of information in this video that I've been practicing for years and I am still learning So please don't be discouraged if it seems like a lot The most important part is that you're having fun and enjoying the journey because art is a lifelong process Make sure you subscribe for more art videos And if you're interested in supporting the channel further check out the patreon and join the community on the discord I'd really appreciate it. Thanks for watching