Pixel Art
Introduction
When I was a young boy my father did not take me in to the city. Instead I started playing a game called Terraworld Online.
You probably recognise the art style, it's reminiscient of early Zelda among other Nintendo titles. I loved this game and have exceptionally fond memories of playing it, but more than that it started my interest in pixel art. I would screenshot existing assets then recolour them, occasionally I'd add new lines and try to make a more unique image. I was not very good at it, but I did enjoy it. I enjoyed "mapping" too, taking those assets and building up the game world with them.
I stopped playing Terraworld probably around 2007/2008, and the game's servers were switched off entirely in 2014. This honestly breaks my heart, I would love to explore that world again. But we're not here to get all nostalgic, I do that enough on my other pages. No, we're here because I'm going to try to learn how to make pixel art again.
We're basically starting from scratch because I was never that good to begin with, as I said I mostly recoloured existing art. Not this time though. This time I'm going to try to do it properly, and I'd like to post my progress here. I am literally a complete beginner, so it's not going to be good in the beginning, but I think the end result, if I stick with it, is going to be a lovely timeline of my skills improving.
Goals
Short-term and long-term goals to hopefully keep me going. Short-term:
- Replace the site favicon with one I made myself
- Design a repeatable tile to use as a site background
And long-term:
- Design enough tiles and sprites to make a small game
Art
Starting off with legalese isn't ideal but I do think is necessary. Even though in the beginning I see absolutely no reason for anyone to actually want the artwork, but still... This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
Novice Art
I'm going to describe my current stage as "novice", this will mostly be 16x16 or 32x32 images.
This was the first thing I made that was at least semi-decent. I also played around with animation, but I'm mostly going to steer clear of that for now. I quite like how subtle it is though, just a little flicker of the flame. You can barely tell it's moving unless you look at it closely.
The second thing I made, this time limiting myself to the four original Gameboy colours. I was trying to get used to a limited colour palette, there'll be more of that coming too. I think the stems should have been thicker, and the flowers themselves probably bigger. I think I'll try expanding on this one. I really struggled with the 'rim' of the pot too, it looked too much like a bucket so I did google some pixel art to see how they did it. I'm actually pretty happy with the pot.
I returned to the flower pot and made them thicker. Now they kind of look like alien eyes peeking out of the pot, so I really don't know.
Pumpkin I made for Halloween. Quite happy with this one actually, I would've liked more shading/illumination around the lit pieces but I was struggling to get it right and kept it basic.
Practicing shading on the bottom of the tree/the trunk/grass. It took some time to figure out the trunk, at first it was just the bottom shaded, then just the top, then the top and bottom but not the middle, and finally I realised the whole thing should be shaded. I kinda like it.
The first 64x64 canvas, although the image is 32x55. For reasons I do not know I tried to draw a pepsi can. Also practiced dithering a weird shape. I did it without shading first, and thought it looked a little flat but the only other other colour lighter than the shade I used for the can was white, and it didn't look right. Still, I tried it, and once it's at the correct size it does actually look more like shading - It's a weird trick of the eye or something but when drawing it the white looked far too bright.
Then I tried colouring it, and I'm not sure. I don't dislike it, but I think I need to practice shading more.