by Daruda
 

Color theory
I've made a little tutorial about the Hue shift that is the easiest thing about the theory. It's elementary, but this picture in my head worked for me when I didn't understand much about colors.



Edited by jalonso - 24 July 2014 at 7:52am

If someone wants to make any of the following tutorials, these are some things that need explaining to new submitters more often lately:

Why low color counts are generally preferred.

Why colored-in line-art isn't necessarily pixel art.

Consistent lighting.

What is pixel-precision?

Why not to post pre-zoomed versions of your work.

Why to use transparent backgrounds rather than blank white backgrounds.


Edited by JustinGameDesign - 26 July 2014 at 9:18am

There is no valid reason why PJ gallery previews need to be under 10k anymore.
Because early pixelart had so many restrictions and file size was chief among them its just something we like to keep.
If your preview is over 10k it will not show on the Front Page Section with New Art, Weekly Showcase (WS) and Hall of Fame (HoF).
It will however be seen everywhere else.
You don't have to make your preview under 10k but you should.
For easy copy/paste use:



Edited by jalonso - 27 July 2014 at 5:55am

ISOmetric Pixel Art Cheat Sheet v.0.8

 

edit: Dennis, added to PJ's imgur.com


Edited by jalonso - 16 October 2014 at 6:21am

Isometric lines that cause you grief:
Its a little bit of extra work but this is a way to solve some isometric lines which gives you a lot of problems to get just right.
This method works on any iso line.
The key is to make the width reduction (usually 80% is good) tho sometimes this needs adjustments too so it reads right even when its not 100% accurate. Anything from 75% - 90%.

By PixelSnader:

The correct way to build ground shadows is relatively easy though.
Just draw lines, and see where they hit the ground. Here's an example:

1 - original WIP image
2 - raycasting a bunch of key points
3 - correct shadow
4 - you can try to tweak a bit to get cleaner lines and more detail. for example, the overhang of the roof.

Edit: I used a simple 1:1 step because it's easy, but you can see that it makes the shadow a bit wid/big. If you want to save tile space or something, you might want to try a 1:2 step to get a much smaller shadow.

You will sometimes see the term 'sub pixelling' used.
Galiant recently submitted a simple pixel that visually illustrates the technique so I'm adding here for all.
Click image to zoom.


This pixel by Cyangmou shows a more advanced use of sub pixelling



Edited by jalonso - 14 August 2015 at 8:39am

I know of a less complicated, more beginner-friendly way of making iso circles.



First, draw a normal iso-diamond/square, next, with the Elliptical Marquee tool, outine the square you made and draw on the edges. Finally, erase the initial square and you're done.

Originally posted by  r1k:

So the first thing I want to cover in this CC is Line-work, Line-work is the basic building block for nearly all pixel art.
_{(all sprite work, some people use a technique called Blocking http://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299 I highly recommend reading all of this thoroughly it covers nearly everything.)}

So what exactly differentiates good line-work from bad line-work?

Well I won't talk too much about this but I will show you a few examples.

Ex1: Jaggies


jaggy lines area major problem with newer artists sprites. You should always make sure your lines are clean and smooth.
As you can see the line on the right is much smoother and represents almost the same shape. There are rare occasions where jaggies are acceptable (Rocks sometimes)

Ex2: AA'ing


It stands for Anti-Alias and it is used to smooth out edges. I may be the worlds worst AAer so my example is actually pretty darn bad, there is some mathematical equation to it that I don't understand maybe someone here could enlighten me actually, I would recommend looking at the link posted above and reading the section on AAing.

Lastly: Banding


Banding is what happens when you have strips of pixels the mirror each other as you can see on the left the pixels are hugging each other, and you can see how much better it looks without this banding/hugging.

Given this how can we improve the line-work that you made?

Lets get rid of those colours and get this line-work down.

There now given what we just learned lets fix it!_{(AA and banding won't do anything for us right now because you can't AA a transparent sprite.)}


Okay so I made some adjustments and I will explain all of them.

• Now I understand that the sprite was supposed to be flying, But I don't think this is a good idea as it makes more sense to make him in a standing position.


• The ball was way too small so I enlarged it and placed it in his other hand.


• His head was may too large for his body so I made it smaller and changed the shape so he doesn't have a balloon head


• I gave him a JRPG like hair style (you should practice hair styles its good to learn if you want to be a spriter)


• got rid of his lego claw hand(dont attempt to draw hands at this small of sprites :) )

The main problem with your sprite was the head it was completely 2-D. Even though its only line-work at this point you can still see the difference in perspective between my rendition and yours. Now this is not to discourage you at all in fact I didn't change all too much I just had to move a few things around. I worked completely off your sprite.

So that brings us into my next topic...

[glow=red,2,300][size=36pt]Perspective and Depth![/glow]

Now you can clearly see that the title there popped out of the page. I believe the best place to start if you have trouble with depth and perspective is drawing 3-D letters cubes and shapes.



Start with drawing straight up cubes then move on to different shapes of cubes and styles. I like to draw my cubes swurvy like this, its requires a bit more thinking then Straight up and down cubes like below (psssst Its also funner)



This cube is in an isometric form drawing in this style is also another way to improve at getting your depth and perspective down. (it can also get confusing and troubling at times) here's a good isometric tutorial for you:
http://gas13.ru/v3/tutorials/isometric_pixelart_tutorial_mathematics_of_isometrics.php

Okay and last but certainly not least is the colouring!

First things first lets take a look at your palette


The palette is pretty darn good and colours and palette making is a weak point of mine so the only thing I have to say about it is that the greyscale ramp and green ramp that branch off of the donut is completely unnecessary and I wouldn't recommend doing that in the future (unless greyscale is needed) another thing to avoid is using 100% black or 100% white. Though some outlines on sprites 100% black is acceptable.

So now that that is all out of the way we can finally get down to colouring this bad boy!


So first of all try to not use more then 2 colours per body part especially for a sprite this small it really only needs 7 or 6 colours. You have 1 base colour and 1 darker colour for every body part and you should reuse colours, for example the dark colour in his jersey is the same as the light colour in his jeans. This is hard to explain but certain colours interact differently when presented with different partner colours. So when the colour is looked at with the lighter green it appears to be a darker green tone, and then when mixed with the dark blue it appears as a light blue. Again you'll see some examples of this in the pixel art tutorial that I linked in the very beginning, make sure you read that. ill link it down here for convenience http://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299

You might have also noticed that his ball is missing. This is because a pro spriter would never attach his ball sprite to his character sprite, That way the sprite can be moved around independent from the Character.


I posted this on Pixelation tonight and thought I should post it here too for others to see. (also that is some horrendous AAing in the example XD).

Hey Guys, as a N00B myself...^^' i think it's pretty nice to have all those tutorials in one place, but something that may help would be an order of those tutorials, i mean, something as tuts about colours should be something you do earlier then isometric spriting, or is it?

I mean some of those stick onto the very basics. Like as an example people usually learn how to shade quickly but the way of doing it right sticks onto this basic so it seems logical to actually put it as one of the first things. Also a lot of those things are new to me and holy, my head smokes just from reading those... learning how to sprite is indeed not easy 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJ2HOj22gDo&ab_channel=MarcoBucci