in this video, i'm going to be showing
you my process for creating a pixel art character portrait.
This video is based on a community challenge where i ask people to make a character portrait.
Stick around to see them at the end i wanted to do a character portrait of
Lumbah the little wood chopping dwarf character from these videos so here's how it went
the original Lumbah design fits into a 16 by 16 pixel canvas so the challenge here was to
scale up the head while maintaining the simple design and also getting the correct proportions.
i like to start out with silhouettes making sure to focus on the simple shapes
as you can see from the original design the corners are rounded by a single pixel
but when you increase the canvas size that would just look way too sharp.
so on the largest silhouette i make sure i remove more pixels from the corners to make them look
more rounded, notice how the hair isn't just a square block anymore but actually more circular
it's these translations from the single pixel details into the larger relative
details that's key to keeping the essence of the original design
once i'm happy with the silhouette i start to rough out the features of the character
in the correct proportions not only trying to stay
true to the original character design but also what makes anatomical sense
i have this video which walks you through some very standard
human head proportions please remember these aren't set rules just a basic guide
understanding and applying some of the general things i go over
in that video will definitely help you create more believable
characters anatomically but it should also help you understand
where and when you can skew these proportions to create more interesting and unique characters
so for this challenge there was a limit to use the
nes palette i used similar colors from the original pico 8 palette that lumbar
is actually designed with to define the key areas like the hair nose and beard
i was going to use no outline at first but i kind of just prefer the way it looks
you might have noticed that the original design doesn't have any eyebrows this was
intentional because the space on the head was so small in the original design but i
think this would have looked really weird on the larger portrait so i've added them in
in my tutorials i usually show a step based process this is just the most logical way i
can think of to teach something but this is what my actual creative process looks like
i thought it was important to show this because if you're a beginner it might be demoralizing if
it doesn't go as smoothly as you planned but i wanted to show that it's normal to
experiment and maybe not get things right the first time at least for me anyway
i think experimentation can also be part of the fun.
you're exploring lots of different ideas and you get to discover what the final piece looks like as
you're making it. So as you can see i started to experiment with adding more shading colors
but i think i got a little bit carried away here with adding too many colors at once
when you have a lot of options like you do with the nes palette it can be really easy
to get carried away and the image started to look noisy and flat when really i wanted
to get across a stronger sense of 3d form and when i recognized this in the process
i pulled the shading back to just one color and this is when everything
really started to come together in the way that i wanted it to
putting intentional limits on yourself can really help you focus on what is important
in the process so for me it meant less colors so i could focus on the 3d form
i changed the color of the shading to black this gave it a really moody look
which i felt really matched the grumpy eyes that i went for in the design
i mean the dragon did set fire to his house after all
when i'm thinking of where to put the shadows i try to think of the 3d shapes that make up
Lumbah's head which is basically just a bunch of spheres once i've got this in
mind i establish a light source which in this case is in the top right hand side facing down
it can help to imagine or even draw in some cross contour lines sort of like the wireframe you see
in 3d programs it then becomes really easy to place the shadows to help build the form
if you struggle with shading i'd highly recommend observing it in real life
just take a light and shine it an object to see how the shadows form
videos and pictures don't really do it justice so try this out yourself it can be really useful
so with the shadows in i found that by hiding some of the features
in the shadow really helped make this piece look more dramatic
kind of like an rpg character portrait.
either way i'm really pleased with how it came out
but look at all these awesome portraits i like the way the purple is used for
anti-aliasing around the mouth line to really soften that out
cheesy butter killed it here i love the limited color usage
the features really faded into the shadows on
this pirate looking character which i thought was awesome
we got a nice moody side profile shot here with a nice use of limited colors again
we've got some traditional art and aleiocus even did a full animation for this how awesome is that
make sure you join the discord to check them all out and to take part in future challenges
i've been live streaming on twitch recently check out
the links in the description thanks for watching goodbye