Aseprite Tutorial for Pixel Art

In this video I'm going to teach you how to use Aseprite. To follow along with this tutorial you'll obviously need Aseprite, a mouse or drawing tablet, whichever you prefer, and having a keyboard for shortcuts will definitely make your life easier. If you have any questions you can look at the official Aseprite documentation or come and join the discord where there's plenty of people who are happy to help. I should now probably mention that you work at a donut shop for this guy. So once you've opened Aseprite, it'll look a little something like this. This is the home screen where you'll see some of your recent files and where we can set up a new file. Let's just do that. New file. If you're a beginner here, I'd recommend a canvas with a really small size so that you can get used to working with individual pixels. We're going to have 16 by 16 pixel canvas, RGBA color mode, transparent background. You don't have to worry yourself with any of the advanced options or any of the other options if you're a beginner. So here we are inside of our document. This might look pretty daunting for a beginner. So to give a quick overview, we have the palette area here This is where you can choose colors from a predefined palette We have the color section here which allows you to select colors for your brushes or add colors to palettes This here is our layers tab useful for all of our layer options and controls. You can hide it with the tab button for now Down the side here is where we have all of our tools that we'll be using to create some nice pixel art. You can click on all the options to see what they do. And up here is our tool properties. So when you have a tool selected, all of the properties for that tool will be shown here. You can see how it changes with each tool that is selected. These tabs up here are for project navigation. We're in our current project, but we can go to home and select. different files or we can duplicate and close our current project. And right at the top here is our options bar. There are a lot of different option menus which can help you in your project. Right in the middle section here, this is your canvas. This is where you'll be drawing. So let's start with navigating the canvas. I will be mentioning shortcuts as we go through this. As a beginner, this is the best time to start learning and using shortcuts. It'll help you build up really good habits for quick and efficient working later on. You don't have to use all the shortcuts just for the tools and actions that you'll be using most often. If you ever want a reference for the shortcuts, you can go up to help and quick reference, or if you want to view and change them, you can go up to edit and keyboard shortcuts. We can search for the shortcuts you need, like zoom for example. As you can see, there's a lot of shortcuts here, but this is really the only one that I use, so you don't have to use all of them, but feel free to change them to whatever suits you best. You can zoom in on your canvas with the scroll wheel, or you can use the zoom tool up here. which has a shortcut of Z. I like to use the scroll wheel for this. You can pan around the canvas by holding down the mouse wheel which gives you the hand tool. You can hold spacebar and click to do the same thing or you can come up here click on the zoom tool and you'll see the hand tool which is exactly what we've just used. So the main drawing tool that we have is the pencil tool which has a shortcut of B. If you just click on the canvas we'll start drawing things. If you ever want to remove something you can press undo which is in edit undo or by the shortcut control Z. You'll be using control Z a lot. Trust me. So as I mentioned before, if we take a look at the properties panel at the top here, we can see all the different properties for the brush tool. A circular brush, a square brush, and this weird sort of line brush thing. I'm just going to use the circle brush for now. We have the brush size here, which I'm just going to set to one, but you can increase it by dragging on this bar or by holding control and scroll wheel. We have the ink mode up here. I wouldn't worry too much about this as a beginner. I only really use simple ink anyway. We have dynamics, but this is for if you're using a tablet with pen pressure. I'm using a mouse, so this doesn't apply to me. We have pixel perfect up here. So this line on the left was drawn with pixel perfect off and this line on the right was drawn with pixel perfect on. When we're talking about pixel art line work, there's these things known as doubles, which is where there are perfect right angles in the outlines. If I remove the doubles... We end up with a much more clean line like the one on the right. This video is specifically an A-Sprite tutorial. If you're interested, I can make a video on pixel art tips, tricks and techniques in the future. Just let me know in the comments. That's what Pixel Perfect does. I'd recommend keeping it on for now. And these buttons up here are for symmetry. But we'll come back to this later on. So with your brush selected on a size of 1 and Pixel Perfect turned on, pick a dark or black color from your palette for the outline of the donut. So I'm just going to draw it here. Remember if you want to undo it, You can use ctrl z and try again. So there's my outline, but it's got some problems up here I'm going to use the eraser tool which is shortcut a found here on the tool just to erase those areas We can reduce the size just like we did with the pencil tool And there we go a bit more of a clean outline You can check out the rest of the eraser properties up here. They're quite similar to the brush So i'm going to add a middle line for my donut. I want to fill the donut with the bready color So i'll choose the bready color and I could just painstakingly go in and color it in but there's a better tool for this. You can select the paint bucket tool over here or with the shortcut G. So now I just fill in the donut. But wait a minute, it's colored in the whole area. Let's undo that. You want to make sure contiguous is turned on for this. This means that it will fill connected areas only. So with contiguous turned on, you can just click and fill those individual areas. So now it's time for the icing. I'm just going to choose a pinkish color like a Homer Simpson donut. Go back to the brush and then start drawing in some icing. You can fill that area in with the paint bucket tool. Bonk! And there we go. We've got some icing for our donut. I kind of want to clean this area up a little bit, but instead of keep going back and forth to select the colors You can use the eyedropper tool which is found here has the shortcut I or shortcut alt I use alt for this hold alt click on the color that I want and then I can just start clicking away Cleaning up that outline yours doesn't have to look exactly like mine choose whatever colors and patterns you want It's your doughnut after all now. We've got the ice in it's time to add in some sprinkles I'm gonna select this bluish color and add in some sprinkles I think that looks pretty good. If you want to see a smaller preview, you can open the preview window by clicking this down here. We can adjust it so that it's a tiny bit bigger and gives us a better preview of what it might look like further away. When you have a single pixel like this one, this is what's known as an orphan pixel and it's really best to avoid these because as you can see from the small preview, they don't read very well and with lots of them it can look noisy. So I'm just gonna connect this to make it a double sprinkle. Again this is for the tips, tricks and techniques video in the future so definitely make sure you let me know if you want to see that one. It's actually probably a good time to save it. We go up here to file, save as and then you can save it into a folder of your choosing. Make sure it's nicely organized. So for the file name I'm just gonna call mine donut tutorial and there's a lot of file formats down here but I'm gonna go with the a sprite files which is basically an a sprite project format. The shortcut for quickly saving this as you can see here is ctrl and s. You'll want to be pressing that a lot so you don't lose any progress. And there it is! We made our first pixel art donut. Okay so we need to make some more donuts. Open up the layers panel with the tab button. Boom! Everything we've been doing so far has been on this individual layer called layer one. Just to quickly run through it, this eyeball tool makes it so you can hide the layer. You can lock the layer so nothing can be edited on that layer. We have this button which is useful for animation, but we're not going to be getting into animation today, so don't worry about that. And we have the name of the layer. I'm going to unlock it, double click on the layer to see the layer properties. The name is layer one. I'm going to change that to donut one. We have loads of different modes down here, but again, as a beginner, don't worry about these just yet. And we have the opacity of the layer, which as you can see, makes it more invisible. We do have some additional layer options up here. This here is for onion skinning. Again, it's for animation. We'll not worry about that today. We have this here which gives us some more layer options. You can change the position of the layers panel here on the right, on the bottom. I'm just going to keep this on the left. And you can add layer thumbnails if you want. So if I do that, increase the thumbnail size, then you can actually see what the layer has on it. A quicker way to change this is the same shortcut as the brush size. Hold control and use scroll wheel. I like to keep it like this. So to add a new layer you can right click and do new layer or use the shortcut as it says here shift n so shift n we have a new layer. Let's call this donut 2 because we're going to make more donuts. We've got no space for a new donut so we need to increase the canvas size. You can do this by going up to sprite and canvas size or with the shortcut c you get this option pop up. So our current canvas size is 16 pixels by 16 pixels. I want to make another 16 pixel donut. So I'll add 16 pixels to the right hand side. As you can see, it did there. This trim content outside the canvas thing, if you have this turned on and something is outside the canvas, when you change the canvas size again, that thing is actually going to be deleted. So trim content outside the canvas, off, 16 pixels to the right, boom. Now we've got more space for our new donut. You might be wondering what's going on in the background, and yours might look different to mine. If you go up to edit and preferences, We can see here under background, check the background. You can change the size of the check background to one pixel. And now your check background is one pixel. This only works if you selected transparent background when we first set up the file, or if you don't have a background. Two pixels, four pixels, eight pixels. I'm going to keep mine on 16 pixels, but you can choose whatever is best for you. Apply, OK. So I'm going to show you some other methods for creating donuts. We have first the ellipses tool. If you click and drag, you can create an ellipse or a perfect donut outline. We have here the line tool and specifically the curve line tool. You click and drag and then move your mouse and then click and then move your mouse again and you can create curves. Strange donut, I'm not the best with the curve tool and another method is using symmetry with the pencil So with the pencil selected remember I mentioned symmetry before with these options to move the symmetry We can use these white buttons on the top and then just draw the shape and I'll do it all over for us This is really good If you want to realign the symmetry you can click the symmetry options button here and reset symmetry to Center You can do vertical only or horizontal only whatever suits your needs So now it's time for your first test. What I want you to do is create three more donuts using the tools that I've just shown you. I want you to make sure they're all on separate layers and also that the canvas size is big enough for all of them. You can pause the video here and try it out for yourself. So well done if you completed that you now know three new tools for creating pixel art. But some of mine seem pretty off-center and wonky. So here's how you can move them. and change them. Donut 4 has miraculously jumped off to the left here so making sure that the layer is unlocked I'll use the move tool which has the shortcut v and then just move it back to the central position. You can just move things about however you want but I'm not too happy with the shape of it. We could go in and erase and try and redraw it all but there are some tools that can help us change it quickly. These are the selection tools. So you'll find the selection tools right at the top here. Let's start with the lasso tool. which has a shortcut of Q. It actually looks like a Q, so it's quite easy to remember. You can click and drag a selection area and then just move it around. I'm going to fix the sprinkles on here, then move it up a bit with the move tool, maybe even make this top bit a bit smaller. And there we go. I've quickly transformed it into a tiny weenie little donut. To quickly go over the other selection tools, so with the rectangular shortcut M, you can just click and drag. Perfect little rectangles or with the elliptical marquee tool here You can click and drag a circle and take parts out if you want and then we have polygonal lasso tool allows you to click And drag then click and drag and click and drag click and drag click and drag and then click again to get some more specific Shaped areas so going back to the lasso tool. There are some helpful properties up here that you'll need to know So you have replaced selection. So if I do this make a selection and if I'm to try and make another selection it will replace the previous selection. But let's say I want to move this, but also I want to move the top left corner. We can use add to selection up here. You can click it here or you can hold shift as you click and now you have two selected areas which you can move. And let's say we don't want this selected anymore, we can use subtract from selection or alt and shift as you click. And there you go, you can quickly start adding taken away areas for your editing needs. And you can also use some transform tools. You can go up here to edit and transform and that gives you these little things which allow you to shrink it, increase the size. You can rotate the sprite as you see the little handle thing changes here. Kind of gets messed up. There are different rotation options up here like rot sprite and fast rotation but because we're working in pixel art you might have to fix up a lot of things because the pixels get all skewy and stuff. So that brings us to my next challenge for you. The taste test. So using the selection and move tools that I've just showed you, I want you to take a bite out of your donuts. Take out a little time now to get used to using these tools and the subtract and add features of them because they are really important. So you can pause the video here if you want to give that a go. Nice! Let's send them to the manager to see what he thinks. Disgusting! Make me back! So it looks like we need to create another batch of donuts, but don't worry. This is actually pretty simple So we'll start off by grouping all of these donuts together Make sure they're unlocked you can click and drag to select multiple layers Or you can hold shift and click multiple layers right click and new group or alt shift and n to create a new group I'm, just going to delete this one here and now all of these donuts are in this group I'm going to double click on it and call it batch one now. We can close the group. We'll right click and duplicate the group Let's call this batch two. You can easily drag these little windows around if you need to. So if we hide batch one, we've still got batch two. Let's increase the canvas size. C, and then we need to add 16 pixels to the bottom. Now we've got space for batch two. Making sure batch one is locked, use our move tool with V, and we can just drag them down. If you hold shift while you're moving, you can get nice straight movement. instead of... Now we've got an entire batch two of donuts. So to quickly edit something, it can help to have it all on one layer. So you could select all of these layers, right click and flatten. Or you could click on this layer and do merge down, merge down. But I'm just going to click on the group, right click and flatten. And then we have all of our donuts. on one layer. So going up here to the palette area, let's choose a new palette. So the default palette is DB32. You might have a different one selected, doesn't really matter. Choose a new palette for your new donut colors. I'm going to go with Game Boy Color Type 1. There we go, a whole new palette is selected. One of the selection tools that I didn't show you before was the Magic Wand tool, which can be found up here or with the shortcut W. You can select entire areas or colors and edit them really quickly with this tool. So as you can see, if I click the pink boom all of those shades of pink are selected and remember this has contiguous turned off so if i have contiguous turned on it only selects these pink ones because these are the connected pixels magic wand tool also has the same properties as the other selection tools so you can add to the selection and subtract from the selection if you want so with the magic wand tool selected and contiguous off i'm going to choose this pink here and i'm going to select this color with paint poker tool selected got to make sure contiguous is off you Now replace all of the pinks with that. Make sure you move the preview window up so you can see all the changes that you're making That brings us on to the next challenge I want you to change the color palette in the palette menu and then I want you to change the color of all of your Donuts in batch 2 and there we go some useful tools so you can quickly change your pixel art. Finally, we must be done now Let's prove this guy wrong by making the ultimate final donut. This section uses some more advanced tools and techniques that I use every day for pixel art. So don't worry if it's a bit too much for you right now, but you've done so well already and with enough practice, you'll easily get there. First thing I'll do is add a new layer, ultimate donut. You see to increase the canvas size and I'm going to add in 32 pixels here on the right. And I'm going to change this background pattern as well. So I'll go up to edit preferences background pattern custom 32 pixels by 32 pixels apply and okay Another useful tool that I use often is the grid tool So you go up here to view and show grid or use ctrl and the app button I guess to hide and show the grid and you can easily edit the grid with view grid and grid settings. I'm going to change the palette up for this one. I think I'll go with bubblegum 16. So I like to work with silhouettes when I'm designing things. So I'll increase the pencil size with control and scroll wheel. I'll use the editing tools and the move tools like I've showed you. Just try and clean up this silhouette. One useful thing you can do to check the spacing is to hold control and you'll see the extents. Let me just hide the grid. It's 8 pixels away from the top and 7 pixels away from the bottom, 6 pixels away from this side and 70 pixels away from that side. If I want to know how far away it is from this part, draw a single line, click and there. You'll see that the length of the line is six. This gives you some properties of the lines and things that you create. It's actually super helpful. So I'm just going to choose a bready color with the yellow, I guess. Fill that in with the paint bucket tool. And you can quickly add in an outline to this if you go up to edit, FX and outline or by using shift or. You can't see it because the outline color is yellow here I'm going to choose the darkest color from my palette you can mess with these settings to get whatever you like best I'm going to make sure everything on the inside is selected and I'm going to make it a circle outline Apply I want to round this off a bit you see down here This is your left click and your right click so my left click is an orange color and my right click is currently set to An alpha of nothing. It's just transparent. This is actually really useful because you don't need to select the eraser So what I can do is click this and add this background color to the palette. So now I've got an eraser on my brush, so I can just right click boom boom boom without needing the eraser. It can be useful to flip your drawings to give yourself like a fresh perspective. You do that by going up to edit and flip horizontal or flip vertical. The shortcuts are shift h and shift v. So shift h it's gone all the way over there but that's okay and shift v you can flip it. Let's add some icing. I'm going to use the pink. I'm going to use the lasso tool here actually and just G for the bucket tool and add in the icing. I want to round these off a bit Let's add in some white sprinkles doesn't matter if it's perfect By the way, if you're drawing with the brush tool and you realize that it's doing This you've got snapping to grid on but you can disable snap to grid here or by pressing shift and s And you can draw properly again. I'm going to fill in this middle section here with the purple. Let's try shading the bread in with a darker color. So I'll select it with a magic wand tool, select the yellow, make it darker, or you can edit the color directly in these little box things. And then I can just see if that works. Is that nice? Now I'm going to add that color to the palette. So I've always got that as a selection. I'm imagining the lights coming in from the right hand side. So that's why I'm shading it this way. I'm going to do the same for the icing, select the darker color. There we go. It's subtle, but it works. I'm going to add that. I'm going to add in a new layer. I'm going to call it Highlight. I'm going to take the white color here. What I'm going to do to select this entire donut, if you hold control and then click on the donut layer, All of that donut layer is selected. You see the little wormies walking around? That's a very nice trick. And on the highlight layer, I'm just going to add in white highlight here. If I go on to the layer properties and change the mode from normal to something like lighting, change the opacity, gives it a bit of glow. Maybe overlay would be nice. I'd recommend messing around with all of these, by the way. They're super good. I'm going to actually use soft light here because I think that looks really nice. Bit of a glazed donut look. Very cool. I'm going to merge this down. Merge down. Boom. I'm actually going to add that highlight to the palette as well. Just in case I want to add, you know, maybe a little bit of highlight there. I can add a bit of dithering in here. Makes it look a bit more textured. So I'm pretty happy with that donut. Looks pretty good. A little bit noisy in areas, but doesn't have to be perfect. So I want to make a little bit of this center bit darker. And how do I know which one's darker? Well, you can sort the palette, which is useful. Brightness, luminance, all that stuff. That's a darker color. Let's try drawing this in. A bit rubbish. We can actually edit that color. If we take the lock off. I will press A, edit the color, and let's just make it a bit brighter. That's a bit better, but I actually don't really like that at all. So I'm just going to change it back and delete it. But that's a useful thing you can do with the palette if you want to edit the colors. And now let's add in a nice little backgroundy border thing to finish it off. So I'm going to create a little frame here. So I use the pencil tool. I'm going to click, hold down shift, and that gives us a little line. Just make a little border. You can do that with a rectangle tool as well, but I thought it was important to be able to show that off. Let's add in a background. Blue is quite nice. Now I'm going to add in a little bit of a dithered background. So if you click on the paint bucket tool, you'll see the gradient tool here. Let's go with the two by two. A little bit of gradient there at the bottom. That's quite cool. I'm going to take this control C, control V to copy paste shift V to flip it vertically and boom, there we go. There are some fancy things you can do if you want to change the colors. So what I'm going to do is extend the canvas again, duplicate it. the ultimate donut. You can go up here in edit, adjustments, hue saturation, brightness contrast, change the hue. You can go crazy really. So to export your work you go to file, export, click these little dots to choose the output. I'm going to call this Donuts for Discord. There are lots of different file types for images, but I'd recommend the PNG file because there's no compression like there is in a JPEG. So we'll export this as a PNG. If you are exporting game assets, you might just want to keep that at 100% because it doesn't really matter for your game engine. But if you're exporting for something like social media or Discord or something, maybe increase that size to like 800% so people can actually see it. I'm going to export all of the visible layers and I'm going to select all the frames. This only matters if you're doing animation, which we'll do in another tutorial. And there we go. Export Sorted You can also export a sprite sheet for your games, but we'll do that in another tutorial when we focus on taking our assets made in A-Sprite and then putting them into a game engine like Unity. And we did it! I wanna see your donuts, so make sure you join the Discord to share or tag me in a post on social media. Definitely try out some of these tutorials in the meantime. Good luck and goodbye.

This is the home screen where you'll see some of your recent files and where we can set up a new file. Let's just do that. New file.

If you're a beginner here, I'd recommend a canvas with a really small size so that you can get used to working with individual pixels. We're going to have 16 by 16 pixel canvas, RGBA color mode, transparent background. You don't have to worry yourself with any of the advanced options or any of the other options if you're a beginner.

So here we are inside of our document. This might look pretty daunting for a beginner. So to give a quick overview, we have the palette area here This is where you can choose colors from a predefined palette We have the color section here which allows you to select colors for your brushes or add colors to palettes This here is our layers tab useful for all of our layer options and controls.

You can hide it with the tab button for now Down the side here is where we have all of our tools that we'll be using to create some nice pixel art. You can click on all the options to see what they do. And up here is our tool properties.

So when you have a tool selected, all of the properties for that tool will be shown here. You can see how it changes with each tool that is selected. These tabs up here are for project navigation.

We're in our current project, but we can go to home and select. different files or we can duplicate and close our current project. And right at the top here is our options bar. There are a lot of different option menus which can help you in your project.

Right in the middle section here, this is your canvas. This is where you'll be drawing. So let's start with navigating the canvas. I will be mentioning shortcuts as we go through this.

As a beginner, this is the best time to start learning and using shortcuts. It'll help you build up really good habits for quick and efficient working later on. You don't have to use all the shortcuts just for the tools and actions that you'll be using most often.

If you ever want a reference for the shortcuts, you can go up to help and quick reference, or if you want to view and change them, you can go up to edit and keyboard shortcuts. We can search for the shortcuts you need, like zoom for example. As you can see, there's a lot of shortcuts here, but this is really the only one that I use, so you don't have to use all of them, but feel free to change them to whatever suits you best. You can zoom in on your canvas with the scroll wheel, or you can use the zoom tool up here. which has a shortcut of Z.

I like to use the scroll wheel for this. You can pan around the canvas by holding down the mouse wheel which gives you the hand tool. You can hold spacebar and click to do the same thing or you can come up here click on the zoom tool and you'll see the hand tool which is exactly what we've just used.

So the main drawing tool that we have is the pencil tool which has a shortcut of B. If you just click on the canvas we'll start drawing things. If you ever want to remove something you can press undo which is in edit undo or by the shortcut control Z. You'll be using control Z a lot.

Trust me. So as I mentioned before, if we take a look at the properties panel at the top here, we can see all the different properties for the brush tool. A circular brush, a square brush, and this weird sort of line brush thing.

I'm just going to use the circle brush for now. We have the brush size here, which I'm just going to set to one, but you can increase it by dragging on this bar or by holding control and scroll wheel. We have the ink mode up here.

I wouldn't worry too much about this as a beginner. I only really use simple ink anyway. We have dynamics, but this is for if you're using a tablet with pen pressure.

I'm using a mouse, so this doesn't apply to me. We have pixel perfect up here. So this line on the left was drawn with pixel perfect off and this line on the right was drawn with pixel perfect on. When we're talking about pixel art line work, there's these things known as doubles, which is where there are perfect right angles in the outlines.

If I remove the doubles... We end up with a much more clean line like the one on the right. This video is specifically an A-Sprite tutorial.

If you're interested, I can make a video on pixel art tips, tricks and techniques in the future. Just let me know in the comments. That's what Pixel Perfect does.

I'd recommend keeping it on for now. And these buttons up here are for symmetry. But we'll come back to this later on.

So with your brush selected on a size of 1 and Pixel Perfect turned on, pick a dark or black color from your palette for the outline of the donut. So I'm just going to draw it here. Remember if you want to undo it, You can use ctrl z and try again. So there's my outline, but it's got some problems up here I'm going to use the eraser tool which is shortcut a found here on the tool just to erase those areas We can reduce the size just like we did with the pencil tool And there we go a bit more of a clean outline You can check out the rest of the eraser properties up here.

They're quite similar to the brush So i'm going to add a middle line for my donut. I want to fill the donut with the bready color So i'll choose the bready color and I could just painstakingly go in and color it in but there's a better tool for this. You can select the paint bucket tool over here or with the shortcut G.

So now I just fill in the donut. But wait a minute, it's colored in the whole area. Let's undo that. You want to make sure contiguous is turned on for this.

This means that it will fill connected areas only. So with contiguous turned on, you can just click and fill those individual areas. So now it's time for the icing. I'm just going to choose a pinkish color like a Homer Simpson donut. Go back to the brush and then start drawing in some icing.

You can fill that area in with the paint bucket tool. Bonk! And there we go. We've got some icing for our donut.

I kind of want to clean this area up a little bit, but instead of keep going back and forth to select the colors You can use the eyedropper tool which is found here has the shortcut I or shortcut alt I use alt for this hold alt click on the color that I want and then I can just start clicking away Cleaning up that outline yours doesn't have to look exactly like mine choose whatever colors and patterns you want It's your doughnut after all now. We've got the ice in it's time to add in some sprinkles I'm gonna select this bluish color and add in some sprinkles I think that looks pretty good. If you want to see a smaller preview, you can open the preview window by clicking this down here. We can adjust it so that it's a tiny bit bigger and gives us a better preview of what it might look like further away.

When you have a single pixel like this one, this is what's known as an orphan pixel and it's really best to avoid these because as you can see from the small preview, they don't read very well and with lots of them it can look noisy. So I'm just gonna connect this to make it a double sprinkle. Again this is for the tips, tricks and techniques video in the future so definitely make sure you let me know if you want to see that one.

It's actually probably a good time to save it. We go up here to file, save as and then you can save it into a folder of your choosing. Make sure it's nicely organized.

So for the file name I'm just gonna call mine donut tutorial and there's a lot of file formats down here but I'm gonna go with the a sprite files which is basically an a sprite project format. The shortcut for quickly saving this as you can see here is ctrl and s. You'll want to be pressing that a lot so you don't lose any progress.

And there it is! We made our first pixel art donut. Okay so we need to make some more donuts. Open up the layers panel with the tab button. Boom!

Everything we've been doing so far has been on this individual layer called layer one. Just to quickly run through it, this eyeball tool makes it so you can hide the layer. You can lock the layer so nothing can be edited on that layer.

We have this button which is useful for animation, but we're not going to be getting into animation today, so don't worry about that. And we have the name of the layer. I'm going to unlock it, double click on the layer to see the layer properties. The name is layer one. I'm going to change that to donut one.

We have loads of different modes down here, but again, as a beginner, don't worry about these just yet. And we have the opacity of the layer, which as you can see, makes it more invisible. We do have some additional layer options up here.

This here is for onion skinning. Again, it's for animation. We'll not worry about that today. We have this here which gives us some more layer options.

You can change the position of the layers panel here on the right, on the bottom. I'm just going to keep this on the left. And you can add layer thumbnails if you want.

So if I do that, increase the thumbnail size, then you can actually see what the layer has on it. A quicker way to change this is the same shortcut as the brush size. Hold control and use scroll wheel. I like to keep it like this.

So to add a new layer you can right click and do new layer or use the shortcut as it says here shift n so shift n we have a new layer. Let's call this donut 2 because we're going to make more donuts. We've got no space for a new donut so we need to increase the canvas size. You can do this by going up to sprite and canvas size or with the shortcut c you get this option pop up. So our current canvas size is 16 pixels by 16 pixels.

I want to make another 16 pixel donut. So I'll add 16 pixels to the right hand side. As you can see, it did there. This trim content outside the canvas thing, if you have this turned on and something is outside the canvas, when you change the canvas size again, that thing is actually going to be deleted. So trim content outside the canvas, off, 16 pixels to the right, boom.

Now we've got more space for our new donut. You might be wondering what's going on in the background, and yours might look different to mine. If you go up to edit and preferences, We can see here under background, check the background.

You can change the size of the check background to one pixel. And now your check background is one pixel. This only works if you selected transparent background when we first set up the file, or if you don't have a background. Two pixels, four pixels, eight pixels.

I'm going to keep mine on 16 pixels, but you can choose whatever is best for you. Apply, OK. So I'm going to show you some other methods for creating donuts. We have first the ellipses tool.

If you click and drag, you can create an ellipse or a perfect donut outline. We have here the line tool and specifically the curve line tool. You click and drag and then move your mouse and then click and then move your mouse again and you can create curves. Strange donut, I'm not the best with the curve tool and another method is using symmetry with the pencil So with the pencil selected remember I mentioned symmetry before with these options to move the symmetry We can use these white buttons on the top and then just draw the shape and I'll do it all over for us This is really good If you want to realign the symmetry you can click the symmetry options button here and reset symmetry to Center You can do vertical only or horizontal only whatever suits your needs So now it's time for your first test.

What I want you to do is create three more donuts using the tools that I've just shown you. I want you to make sure they're all on separate layers and also that the canvas size is big enough for all of them. You can pause the video here and try it out for yourself. So well done if you completed that you now know three new tools for creating pixel art.

But some of mine seem pretty off-center and wonky. So here's how you can move them. and change them. Donut 4 has miraculously jumped off to the left here so making sure that the layer is unlocked I'll use the move tool which has the shortcut v and then just move it back to the central position.

You can just move things about however you want but I'm not too happy with the shape of it. We could go in and erase and try and redraw it all but there are some tools that can help us change it quickly. These are the selection tools. So you'll find the selection tools right at the top here. Let's start with the lasso tool.

which has a shortcut of Q. It actually looks like a Q, so it's quite easy to remember. You can click and drag a selection area and then just move it around.

I'm going to fix the sprinkles on here, then move it up a bit with the move tool, maybe even make this top bit a bit smaller. And there we go. I've quickly transformed it into a tiny weenie little donut. To quickly go over the other selection tools, so with the rectangular shortcut M, you can just click and drag. Perfect little rectangles or with the elliptical marquee tool here You can click and drag a circle and take parts out if you want and then we have polygonal lasso tool allows you to click And drag then click and drag and click and drag click and drag click and drag and then click again to get some more specific Shaped areas so going back to the lasso tool.

There are some helpful properties up here that you'll need to know So you have replaced selection. So if I do this make a selection and if I'm to try and make another selection it will replace the previous selection. But let's say I want to move this, but also I want to move the top left corner.

We can use add to selection up here. You can click it here or you can hold shift as you click and now you have two selected areas which you can move. And let's say we don't want this selected anymore, we can use subtract from selection or alt and shift as you click. And there you go, you can quickly start adding taken away areas for your editing needs.

And you can also use some transform tools. You can go up here to edit and transform and that gives you these little things which allow you to shrink it, increase the size. You can rotate the sprite as you see the little handle thing changes here.

Kind of gets messed up. There are different rotation options up here like rot sprite and fast rotation but because we're working in pixel art you might have to fix up a lot of things because the pixels get all skewy and stuff. So that brings us to my next challenge for you. The taste test. So using the selection and move tools that I've just showed you, I want you to take a bite out of your donuts.

Take out a little time now to get used to using these tools and the subtract and add features of them because they are really important. So you can pause the video here if you want to give that a go. Nice!

Let's send them to the manager to see what he thinks. Disgusting! Make me back!

So it looks like we need to create another batch of donuts, but don't worry. This is actually pretty simple So we'll start off by grouping all of these donuts together Make sure they're unlocked you can click and drag to select multiple layers Or you can hold shift and click multiple layers right click and new group or alt shift and n to create a new group I'm, just going to delete this one here and now all of these donuts are in this group I'm going to double click on it and call it batch one now. We can close the group.

We'll right click and duplicate the group Let's call this batch two. You can easily drag these little windows around if you need to. So if we hide batch one, we've still got batch two.

Let's increase the canvas size. C, and then we need to add 16 pixels to the bottom. Now we've got space for batch two. Making sure batch one is locked, use our move tool with V, and we can just drag them down. If you hold shift while you're moving, you can get nice straight movement.

instead of... Now we've got an entire batch two of donuts. So to quickly edit something, it can help to have it all on one layer. So you could select all of these layers, right click and flatten.

Or you could click on this layer and do merge down, merge down. But I'm just going to click on the group, right click and flatten. And then we have all of our donuts. on one layer. So going up here to the palette area, let's choose a new palette.

So the default palette is DB32. You might have a different one selected, doesn't really matter. Choose a new palette for your new donut colors. I'm going to go with Game Boy Color Type 1. There we go, a whole new palette is selected. One of the selection tools that I didn't show you before was the Magic Wand tool, which can be found up here or with the shortcut W.

You can select entire areas or colors and edit them really quickly with this tool. So as you can see, if I click the pink boom all of those shades of pink are selected and remember this has contiguous turned off so if i have contiguous turned on it only selects these pink ones because these are the connected pixels magic wand tool also has the same properties as the other selection tools so you can add to the selection and subtract from the selection if you want so with the magic wand tool selected and contiguous off i'm going to choose this pink here and i'm going to select this color with paint poker tool selected got to make sure contiguous is off you Now replace all of the pinks with that. Make sure you move the preview window up so you can see all the changes that you're making That brings us on to the next challenge I want you to change the color palette in the palette menu and then I want you to change the color of all of your Donuts in batch 2 and there we go some useful tools so you can quickly change your pixel art. Finally, we must be done now Let's prove this guy wrong by making the ultimate final donut.

This section uses some more advanced tools and techniques that I use every day for pixel art. So don't worry if it's a bit too much for you right now, but you've done so well already and with enough practice, you'll easily get there. First thing I'll do is add a new layer, ultimate donut. You see to increase the canvas size and I'm going to add in 32 pixels here on the right. And I'm going to change this background pattern as well.

So I'll go up to edit preferences background pattern custom 32 pixels by 32 pixels apply and okay Another useful tool that I use often is the grid tool So you go up here to view and show grid or use ctrl and the app button I guess to hide and show the grid and you can easily edit the grid with view grid and grid settings. I'm going to change the palette up for this one. I think I'll go with bubblegum 16. So I like to work with silhouettes when I'm designing things. So I'll increase the pencil size with control and scroll wheel.

I'll use the editing tools and the move tools like I've showed you. Just try and clean up this silhouette. One useful thing you can do to check the spacing is to hold control and you'll see the extents.

Let me just hide the grid. It's 8 pixels away from the top and 7 pixels away from the bottom, 6 pixels away from this side and 70 pixels away from that side. If I want to know how far away it is from this part, draw a single line, click and there.

You'll see that the length of the line is six. This gives you some properties of the lines and things that you create. It's actually super helpful.

So I'm just going to choose a bready color with the yellow, I guess. Fill that in with the paint bucket tool. And you can quickly add in an outline to this if you go up to edit, FX and outline or by using shift or.

You can't see it because the outline color is yellow here I'm going to choose the darkest color from my palette you can mess with these settings to get whatever you like best I'm going to make sure everything on the inside is selected and I'm going to make it a circle outline Apply I want to round this off a bit you see down here This is your left click and your right click so my left click is an orange color and my right click is currently set to An alpha of nothing. It's just transparent. This is actually really useful because you don't need to select the eraser So what I can do is click this and add this background color to the palette. So now I've got an eraser on my brush, so I can just right click boom boom boom without needing the eraser.

It can be useful to flip your drawings to give yourself like a fresh perspective. You do that by going up to edit and flip horizontal or flip vertical. The shortcuts are shift h and shift v. So shift h it's gone all the way over there but that's okay and shift v you can flip it.

Let's add some icing. I'm going to use the pink. I'm going to use the lasso tool here actually and just G for the bucket tool and add in the icing.

I want to round these off a bit Let's add in some white sprinkles doesn't matter if it's perfect By the way, if you're drawing with the brush tool and you realize that it's doing This you've got snapping to grid on but you can disable snap to grid here or by pressing shift and s And you can draw properly again. I'm going to fill in this middle section here with the purple. Let's try shading the bread in with a darker color. So I'll select it with a magic wand tool, select the yellow, make it darker, or you can edit the color directly in these little box things.

And then I can just see if that works. Is that nice? Now I'm going to add that color to the palette. So I've always got that as a selection.

I'm imagining the lights coming in from the right hand side. So that's why I'm shading it this way. I'm going to do the same for the icing, select the darker color. There we go.

It's subtle, but it works. I'm going to add that. I'm going to add in a new layer.

I'm going to call it Highlight. I'm going to take the white color here. What I'm going to do to select this entire donut, if you hold control and then click on the donut layer, All of that donut layer is selected.

You see the little wormies walking around? That's a very nice trick. And on the highlight layer, I'm just going to add in white highlight here.

If I go on to the layer properties and change the mode from normal to something like lighting, change the opacity, gives it a bit of glow. Maybe overlay would be nice. I'd recommend messing around with all of these, by the way.

They're super good. I'm going to actually use soft light here because I think that looks really nice. Bit of a glazed donut look.

Very cool. I'm going to merge this down. Merge down.

Boom. I'm actually going to add that highlight to the palette as well. Just in case I want to add, you know, maybe a little bit of highlight there.

I can add a bit of dithering in here. Makes it look a bit more textured. So I'm pretty happy with that donut.

Looks pretty good. A little bit noisy in areas, but doesn't have to be perfect. So I want to make a little bit of this center bit darker.

And how do I know which one's darker? Well, you can sort the palette, which is useful. Brightness, luminance, all that stuff. That's a darker color.

Let's try drawing this in. A bit rubbish. We can actually edit that color.

If we take the lock off. I will press A, edit the color, and let's just make it a bit brighter. That's a bit better, but I actually don't really like that at all. So I'm just going to change it back and delete it.

But that's a useful thing you can do with the palette if you want to edit the colors. And now let's add in a nice little backgroundy border thing to finish it off. So I'm going to create a little frame here.

So I use the pencil tool. I'm going to click, hold down shift, and that gives us a little line. Just make a little border. You can do that with a rectangle tool as well, but I thought it was important to be able to show that off. Let's add in a background.

Blue is quite nice. Now I'm going to add in a little bit of a dithered background. So if you click on the paint bucket tool, you'll see the gradient tool here. Let's go with the two by two.

A little bit of gradient there at the bottom. That's quite cool. I'm going to take this control C, control V to copy paste shift V to flip it vertically and boom, there we go.

There are some fancy things you can do if you want to change the colors. So what I'm going to do is extend the canvas again, duplicate it. the ultimate donut. You can go up here in edit, adjustments, hue saturation, brightness contrast, change the hue. You can go crazy really.

So to export your work you go to file, export, click these little dots to choose the output. I'm going to call this Donuts for Discord. There are lots of different file types for images, but I'd recommend the PNG file because there's no compression like there is in a JPEG.

So we'll export this as a PNG. If you are exporting game assets, you might just want to keep that at 100% because it doesn't really matter for your game engine. But if you're exporting for something like social media or Discord or something, maybe increase that size to like 800% so people can actually see it.

I'm going to export all of the visible layers and I'm going to select all the frames. This only matters if you're doing animation, which we'll do in another tutorial. And there we go. Export Sorted You can also export a sprite sheet for your games, but we'll do that in another tutorial when we focus on taking our assets made in A-Sprite and then putting them into a game engine like Unity.

And we did it! I wanna see your donuts, so make sure you join the Discord to share or tag me in a post on social media. Definitely try out some of these tutorials in the meantime.

Good luck and goodbye.

Transcript for:Aseprite Tutorial for Pixel Art

Transcript for:
Aseprite Tutorial for Pixel Art