Pixel Art Diaries -1

A BRIEF INTRO

I recently started learning how to make my own Pixel Art.

When I was younger I used to draw for hours almost everyday. In fact, one of my dreams was to write and illustrate my own comic book.

This changed when I got to college and took my first acting class. I started to draw less and less because I was so committed to working on my acting craft.

When Midjourney, an AI art generator, came out, I got pretty excited. It was a quick way to create imaginative scenes that I could use for blog posts or our World Anvil page. I was so fascinated by certain artistic concepts that the AI struggled with, like keeping a unified perspective. It was like watching a child try to do very sophisticated work, and I honestly found that kind of youthful ignorance endearing.

While I never left my graphic arts behind, I think Midjourney is partially responsible for getting me excited about making my own art again. As cool as it can be to have some AI make a character portrait in a matter of seconds, I still like being hands on with my art.

PIXELS

Recently I stumbled upon a youtube channel by Brandon James Greer. I love this channel and I think it’s because Brandon has the best qualities of a great teacher. He’s excited and passionate about the subject matter, but is also able to succinctly convey artistic techniques in a clear and accessible way. Watching these videos really inspired me but also gave me confidence to try my own work.

I was…am?… a big fan of video games. I grew up in the 80’s and 90’s so pixels and sprites made up so much of my gaming experience. When I got older I’d always look back at the art from old games with such reverence, because they managed to convey so many ideas with only a handful of little squares.

I’ve always wanted to be able to make something looked like Sonic The Hedgehog, or the dude from Slaughterhouse, but just couldn’t wrap my noggin around how to place the pixels.

Greer’s youtube videos kind of made everything click for me and so I started experimenting with the form.

Here’s how it’s going. The first work I did was create a MegaMan character outline in GIMP, the photo editing software I’ve been using for ove… 20 years now? Crazy.

To do this I just looked at a picture of Mega Man and drew him pixel by pixel. It’s not hard because he’s not made from many pixels at all. You can count all of ‘em if you’re so inclined.

From there I tried to think of some characters that I could create using the Mega Man template.

The first ones to come to mind were the playable characters from Streets of Rage 2, which has some of my favorite art, and inspires some of the ideas I have for Waves Beyond Limit.

I tried to limit myself to only a handful of colors, and tried not to make them too busy. I played with hair and eyes to see what I could get away with. For a first attempt, with training wheels on, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

Still, I wanted to keep playing with this particular style to get more comfortable. It’s a limited canvas and I think working within those confines really gives you an idea of what you can achieve with only a few squares.

In order to continue working I need a suitable subject, and for whatever reason, I found myself drawn to the movie Return of the Living Dead. It’s one of my favorites, but it also has memorable locations and each character has a very distinct style.

THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD PIXEL PROJECT

Step one in this project was to make as many characters from the movie as I could using the Mega Man template. So let's look at how that went:

So we’ve got just about everyone really important including two zombies. I played with height on some of the characters like Spider and Suicide. Again I tried to limit how many colors I used for each color, not wanting to get too busy.

I also experimented with body composition to see how much I could change about the character’s shape within a limited window. For the female characters I tried to see if I could create a different torso form to differentiate them from the boys. Basically I wanted to see if I could give them impression that they have boobs.

So with Tina(third from the right) you can see that I narrowed her arms by one pixel, and then pulled her waist in a little create a kind of hour glass form. Mega Man is only 24 pixels high and the torso takes up only a small amount of that, so there’s only so many options for where the outline of a body can go.

Honestly that kind of limitation is really helpful as an artists because it either works or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t you can just move the pixel around until it does.

If you compare Tina and Casey(third from the left) you can see the difference an extra black pixel makes under the arm pits to change a characters form.

Tarman was the last guy I made, and he’s also where I really started to stretch around in the template. Obviously I moved the arm positions, which was really so I could create the space necessary for those strands. I also played more with color here in order to give the impression of a light source. Most of the other characters are pretty flat, as I was only using a handful of colors.

CHANGING THE SPRITES

At this point I wanted to explore some other sizes for my sprites. I found a template though some googling, which I tried to copy by just eyeballing it. That template is on the left.

Using that I tried to make Casey based on pose I found of her in an image search. I got to play a little more with shades of color to give them impression of depth and shape. Honestly I get the most excited looking at the difference between the two boomboxes.

For my next character evolution I decided to not use a body template and draw the whole character from scratch.

Okay. This is where I started to experiment with proportion sizes. With the Mega Man sprite, the head takes up half the total body.

With the picture of Frank, I ended up deciding on a proportion size that felt somewhere between realistic and cartoonish, which I think really fits the vibe of the movie. This Frank is the picture character drawing I’m most proud of. One, it’s all mine - start to finish, and two, it feels like I developed a style I enjoyed creating.

You can also see how I played with proportions with Tina. The sprites are the same size, but the first one has a more realistic head to body ratio. The Tina to the far right is more in line with Frank’s proportions.

MAKING A SCENE

Okay, so I was feeling pretty good about my progress drawing people. What I hadn’t done up until now was draw a setting for my characters to live in. I was actually dreading this part, because it felt like the area I’d get the most frustrated in. So I decided to really confine myself by limiting my options.

To do this I chose the OG Gameboy’s canvas size of 160x144 pixels. I also picked out a four shade color palette from Lospec, which I’ll link to here.

For my location, I picked the gates to Resurrection Cemetery seen on the right.

Using a little artistic license I managed to turn it into an image I’m really proud of.

I really learned a lot working on this. When you are only using four shades of a color, you quickly find yourself butting up against limitations, particularly when you’re trying to lair different items over top of one another. So you can see where I experimented with some different dithering and shading techniques in order to create some depth to the wall.

I think I’m most proud of the little lighting fixtures and how the light turned out, just by shifting the shades up a step. There were little techniques and ideas that I discovered that I’ll be able to use on everything moving forward. If you’re just starting out with pixel art, I highly recommend trying to work on something with these types of restrictions. It really activates the creative parts of your brain.

NEXT?

I’m going to continue learning and using Return of the Living Dead as my muse. There’s a lot of other scenes I have in mind that I’m hoping to render in a variety of different styles. I’m really enjoying myself with these.