for the past three years I've run a pixel art challenge called September it's 30 days with
30 different prompts the first year was black and white only with animals as the theme and
second year introduced a third color with fantasy Adventure as the theme and in this third year I
had absolutely no idea what to do some people suggested different themes and one that stuck
out to me was food I imagine some sort of fast food type theme you know Browns and saturated Reds
and blues so I did some Explorations on that and I found that making a palette is super difficult
you have to think about the values and if there's going to be enough contrast between them you have
to think about the colors and if you're going to be able to create certain ramps eventually I got
something that I was quite happy with but because of the amount of colors it really didn't feel too
limited and the whole point in September really is to challenge the artist with specific limits so
at the last minute I changed it from this colorful bright thing full of options to this listen I know
it's ugly I think it's kind of unique you know you never really see artwork with this palette
probably for good reason but you gotta trust me the artwork does turn out looking cool and for
the theme idea I had in mind I think these colors could work really well and the theme is form 29
Farm based prompts on the final prompt day you have to put everything together to create your
own form and let me tell you we got some awesome entries so while I'm going to share my process
in this video keep an eye out for the community work let us know which one is your favorite in the
comments so for me the first work really sets the tone for the rest of the piece giving me an idea
of the style to follow the first prompts are the farmer and the pet and I decided to go for this
zombie theme from my experiments I really liked how the colors looked on the mid-brown background
with green and yellow as the main colors and the dark brown is an outline I never used to think I
really had a style but all of my work seems to gravitate towards simple shapes outlines in an
exaggerated or Goofy cartoon feel I think it's just my preferred way of working and there's
something about a cartoon simplified look that I that I really like I think it's the amount of
character that you can get into it and you might think that cartoon Simplicity is easy but it's
actually kind of deceiving figuring out which areas to exaggerate and show off subtle changes
in posing shape pixel placement can make a huge difference as you might be able to see from how
the zombie started out to where it ended up but we've got a huge variety of different approaches
we even got some isometric entries which look amazing and some side profile platformer shots too
A whole bunch of beautiful top-down Farms as well super awesome to see these because you can compare
just how different everyone's approach has been despite the limits being the same for everyone
the first problems I run into with this challenge was size difference how can I represent something
that is supposed to be larger in the same pixel size like the tractor and vehicle prompts well
I did actually struggle with this for a while trying to fit these ones into the
same style was quite annoying so I just decided to cheat I mean the props list does say that on
the 30th day you can Auto remove as much as you like so what I did was use two tiles for both
the vehicle and the tractor this helped me get the scaling a bit better but it also helped me
add some more detail with smashed windows and dirt on the wheels some people manage this way
better than I did and I think talaba's entry in particular tackled this problem in a really smart
way where the vehicles were in the background giving it a nice feeling of depth very smart
the work this year has completely blown me away I didn't think we could get any
better than the previous years but it just keeps getting better and better
another challenge I came across when doing my piece was tileable chunks I don't usually work
in tiles it's not my preferred style at all but I wanted to give it another shot for this top down
farm so I tried to create some tileable chunks for the dirt grass long grass and water and it was
pretty difficult to be honest but I actually found that it helped a lot to start with a corner tile
and then I would flip that to the other side which gave me a nice guide to make the tile in between
with that I could just copy paste that to all the other sides and create the center tile in each of
these tiles I was trying to get across some sort of texture for each of the areas the grass is
sort of uncut with indications of grass Tufts in all directions the dirt is dried up cracked
Earth you know this is zombie abandoned style after all with the long grass overflowing and
the water well wet is water wet I don't know just as you've seen me do with the tiles another fun
thing to look at between each entry is how each artist presents the texture this middle piece by
ghouliebones has a super clean textural approach whereas the this work on the left has a lot more
of an organic approach both are really awesome with great results which approach do you prefer
at that point I felt like I had an established style and I could much more easily create the
rest of the assets some of these took less than 15 minutes which is absolutely crazy
since it originally took a couple of hours to establish that initial style you know these days
I'm trying to avoid perfectionism in everything I do because I just feel like it holds me back
a lot I'd much rather finish a piece of work and learn from it than never finish something because
I'm struggling to get it right one of the best things with a challenge like this is being able
to get so much inspiration from amazing artists who are taking part at the same time but it can
also be a detriment if you find yourself comparing too much or being swayed into a style that you're
not familiar with exploring different styles is fun and I find myself always wanting to try what
styles other people are doing but when I do it just doesn't feel right the process isn't as fun
I always end up back to that cartoon style out of everything I think I love making characters the
most the farmer the dog the sunflower and the cow are my favorite by far injecting personality into
things and imagining them as little characters rather than just objects brings me a lot of Joy I
think my food ones are a little boring I probably could have tried to make them more rotten or
something but at least that is somewhat consistent well apart from the fish which I thought it would
just be fun to have a zombie hand reaching out of the water fun fact this year I had to set up
a Google form just to help me collect all of the artwork so if you didn't submit to the Google form
your work will not be shown in this video and I might have missed some anyway just because there
was so many so I'm sorry if I missed yours but I hope you enjoy the work that's on here anyway
thank you foreign so the final prompt is the 72 pixel by 72 pixel Farmhouse this is quite a
large size so there'll be no scale issues here the challenge for me was really trying to keep
that same simple style in that larger size I originally had an idea to do a bond inspired by
The Walking Dead series uh potential spoilers but I wasn't too happy with my initial sketch
so I tried some normal farmhouses in a front-on view with a larger size like this tend to sketch
it out roughly first so that I can get an idea of how it might look before committing to the
actual precise pixels which I'm really glad I did because I didn't like any of these houses
that I was coming up with so I went back to the barn idea but this time in more of
a front-on view and I managed to get something I was quite happy with once I got the basic shapes
down I had loads of fun thinking of how to use colors to create additional details like the
texture in the tiles the grass up the sides some wear and tear on the barn itself some
bins and rubbish along the side and of course the zombie hands scratching outside the barn
doors with just a couple of pixels to indicate their eyes inside try not to go too crazy with
the detail I didn't want it to take away from the Simplicity I'd already established with
the other artworks from that finally done it was time to put it all together but before we
look at mine check out all of these awesome Community Works make sure you watch till the
end to see all of the community work and let us know in the comments which one is your favourite
it didn't take me too long to put it all together I settled on a fairly basic
composition just showcasing what it might look like I had this idea to have an abandoned road
with the broken down vehicles and warning signs on the dried up Earth even added a little car
variation just by removing the back end tile I even created this alternate color palette
version for Halloween check these out this is Aleiocus' final piece which they also turned
3D how awesome is that we got a bunch of color variations and animated entries as well I no
doubt missed a lot of these but the creativity and skills Sean always blows me away it's such
a pleasure to host this fun Challenge and I appreciate every single person who decided
to take part so thank you and if you want to try this challenge out for yourself you
can do it anytime and will we do this again next year well just gonna have to find out