Original subtitles

Hey, what's up guys Nelson here.

And today we're going to make pixel art together.

Now that we know the fundamentals

and the basic tools and techniques to make pixel art.

Let's apply what we learn to make our own.

For my drawing, I think I'm going to draw a

bunch of assorted items

and use a couple photos as reference.

Here's what I'm using.

As you can see, I really like drawing

air conditioning and plants and alleyways.

So that's kind of the vibe I wanna go for this drawing.

I recommend to first start out,

maybe get like a household item

as your subject matter and draw pixel art from that.

This video is going to be super laid-back

so I'll just talk about my process throughout.

Alright guys, let's get started.

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So the first thing, we're going to start off with a sketch

and I'm not really minding about the details right now.

Just getting like the basic shapes.

I'm using a two pixel brush right now.

And the lines look really blocky, but that's okay.

I find that sketching with a one pixel brush takes a lot more time

because you're inclined to be a lot more precise

with the lines that you're making.

So right off the bat, I know I want to have a plant

and aircon and a couple of trash cans.

I saw that the trash cans were on some type of dolly.

So I wanted to add that in as well.

Whenever I'm sketching something out,

I tend to hold the shift key to help me draw.

It helps me draw straight lines quickly,

and I save a lot of time.

If you're drawing multiple of the same object,

it's good to just draw one

and then duplicated using copy paste

and this will definitely save you

more time in the long run as well.

I also wanted to add some sort of dolly mechanism

to carry the trash bins.

I saw a glimpse of it in the photo

and I thought it was a pretty cool thing to add.

I also think about resizing it

so it stays in the center of the frame.

Of course, I have to do a bit of cleanup after that

but it's okay, it's still the sketch phase.

So right now I'm just blocking in the shapes

and finding out where the light and shadow go.

My light source is on the top left area

so the shadow will be on the right face.

So after I drive these three main objects,

I want to think about the rest of the composition

I felt like it was really Autumn-heavy

and there was a lot of empty space on the top.

So I wanted to fill up that space somehow.

I was looking at more images

and I stumbled upon this electric box

and I thought that would be really fitting for an alleyway.

And adding a couple more air conditioners into

the scene doesn't hurt so I put them in too.

Alright so now I think the composition is

a little bit more complete.

And now I'll start to move on to the outline phase.

Technically, this is the part

where I spend a bit more time to flesh out

what pixels are needed and what pixels I can take out

and just refining the piece in general.

Part of what makes a composition interesting for me

is adding like little points of interest

so we know we have the trash cans and

we know we have the dolly,

but what would make it more interesting?

I usually achieved that by adding like

a little bit of logos to it.

And it's just that little pop, that little highlight

that makes it more appealing.

So just remember whenever you're doing outlines like this

and your drawing structure things like these aircons,

hold down shift and draw, you'll save a lot of time

that way drawing straight lines.

Anytime you need to draw multiple objects,

you can just draw one fully

and duplicated by copy-pasting that selection

and that'll save a lot of time in the long run

if you're trying a bunch of the same things.

Alright, so once we have the rough outlines done,

we're going to want to start coloring it in.

The fill bucket tool is really useful because you can

just click once and you have your background filled.

The top area has a lot of controls

for you to play around with but all you need to know

right now is to keep anti-alias unchecked.

And you'll notice that has a trend for all the tools that we use.

We always want anti-alias unchecked

because what it does is that it blurs the pixels

but we want to keep them crisp for pixel art.

You also want the tolerance to be as low as possible.

I keep it at 4 and it usually fills in the pixels perfectly.

So if I want to fill in objects really quickly,

then I use the rectangular selection tool

or the lasso tool and then I use the paint bucket

to fill in those selections.

The great thing about these tools

is that you can pump out your ideas quickly

and get the result you want really fast.

So now I want to start thinking about coloring

in the lines as well and a really easy way to do this

is to use the transparency lock on the layer.

Once you have it on, what it does

is that once you color in

you can only color inside the lines that you made.

You can see me also using the RGB slider

and that's just a different way of picking colors.

And I can try and go in depth later on.

But basically, if you guys have ever done

traditional painting, it's kind of like mixing paints.

So if you're used to that way of choosing colors,

you should probably use the RGB slider.

I think you'd like it.

It doesn't really show properly here

but I use the hue slider.

You can get to the window by pressing control U

and then you can play around and change the color

or the saturation and the brightness and darkness.

I knew that I wanted to create a cooler piece this time.

So I chose like a green-blue.

I also want to choose a cooler color

palette to fill in the objects as well.

So far I'm using around three layers

and it's best to just keep it as simple as possible.

I have a layer for the outlines, I have a layer for the fill,

and I have another one for the road.

So after I have all the objects colored in,

I start to work in the details.

This part probably takes the longest to get right

and it's really where a pixel artist develops their own style.

Some pixel artist like to have no outlines at all

and they have like a very painterly approach.

But I would like to keep all the lines and have

like a harsh dark outline around all the objects.

I guess I lie somewhere in between

where I have some objects outlined and some not

Either way, it's up to you guys.

It's a really good time to step out of your comfort zone

and try new things.

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So right now, you can see that

I'm using a lot of the selection tools like

the magic wand and lasso

and this really speeds up the process as well.

Both these tools have an option called contiguous

and it's basically able to select a cluster of pixels

that are connected together.

A good example of this would be

if I sell like the black ring on the air conditioner

and after I select it, I can change it to any color I want.

I'm also using the eyedropper tool a lot.

Holding the ALT key lets me choose colors

really quickly and keeps my color palette consistent.

It's not like I'm restricting myself to a limited color palette.

But I like it when everything is color-coordinated

and everything bounces off of each other

and it creates like a really harmonized scene.

So right now, there's like a lot of greys and browns

and greens and reds

and I want to use the red as sort of an accent

and try to emphasize a couple points of interest in the piece

like a flower pot and the dolly.

I'm going to go ahead and render out the rest

of the objects in the scene.

I had some small logos and stickers on the trash bin

and the air conditioning units, just a couple of pixels

that stick out like white and red.

Nothing too crazy.

The colors help as small accents

and contrast the greys and blues in the scene.

Now I'm thinking about starting to introduce another accent color.

So I really think yellow would work with this piece

because there's a lot of dull colors.

So you want like a really bright accent

color to pop out.

Though, we also want this piece to make sense, right?

I thought would be a good touch to add

like an electricity sign and have it

as like an electric generator in the background.

I wanted to add like a little caution light and have

like some vents coming out

and have like at a control panel for the generator as well.

I also wanted to add like some text in

some of the logo inscriptions on the trash can and the dolly

and this kind of creates another point of interest.

I wrote the words LFT on the dolly,

and I kind of wanted to imply the word lift.

Overall, just small little details like that

really make it more interesting.

So I also noticed that it looked a bit flat

because everything was the same shade of grey.

So in order to fix that, we want to do

a lighter shade of grey to push it back into space.

It really helps out with the depth of the drawing.

I start adding a couple small little details

and this really helps break up the monotony of everything

being so straight and rigid.

So I had like little stickers and have

like some paper stuck to the beams

and like a little polaroid photograph.

I always like to tell a story with what I'm drawing like

maybe somebody lives here.

Maybe the person that takes care of the generator put that paper on.

So I'm pretty much almost done.

But now I want to add something to the road

cause it looks really empty being one color.

I figured would be nice to have

like a white and red straight line

just like the ones I see in Asia

and it really helps brighten up the entire piece.

Adding a bit more wear-and-tear to the objects

makes the whole scene feel more lived in.

So we're just going to erase a couple pixels

and shave off the road markers to look more worn down.

I want to draw places that have aged quite a bit.

I also duplicate the road marker layer,

transform it downwards and make it a darker gray

so the markers look a bit more three-dimensional.

Afterwards I add a bike looking sign on the marker

to make it appear more like a bike lane.

But since the road is really flat

it's squished onto the road at an angle.

So ending off this scene,

I want to add a levels layer and a gradient map

just to play around

with the lighting in the shadow.

Levels is really good for you to find all the colors together.

And I wanted the scene to be a bit more blue.

So I slid the sliders until it made that effect.

I'll be going more in depth

about how this function works.

But basically, the RGB sliders control the light and the dark

you can also go into its individual channels

like the red green and blue

and you can adjust the entire hue of the piece as well.

So now I'm just doing a bit of final rendering

and see if I can add any details to every object

and then we can move on to exporting.

So now that we're finished with this piece

we want to export it.

So I'll be showing you guys

two ways of exporting your pixel art.

So the first way is to go to file, export,

and save for web legacy.

It'll take you to a new window

where you can change the preset from PNG to gif

So we want to make it png-24.

So right now our image is only 200 by 200 pixels

and if you export it like that,

the image will be really small.

So what we want to do is change

the image size from 200 to 3000 by 3000

and you can either do that by entering in the number

or changing the percentage.

And remember to always leave the

quality to nearest neighbor.

Afterwards let's press save,

and then choose a file location for you to save it in.

And now your scene will be a really high resolution

and you'll be able to post it on your social media, no problem.

Although if you want to think about

printing your pixel art,

then I'll show you a different way to export it.

So I want you guys to go to the

location of your Photoshop working file.

We're going to want to make a duplicate copy

and I'm going to name mine: export.

The reason why we're doing this is because

the export process is really destructive to the pixel art style.

And once we export it,

then we can't go back and edit it again.

So it's better to keep a working copy

and an export copy.

So now let's open up our export copy.

So on the top of the window,

we want to go to image, image size.

From here, we want to change the resolution from 72 to 300

and that'll be the standard printing quality

and you can already see that the pixel

width and height already increased

so we want to increase that to 3000 by 3000

and that's around 10 x 10 in

so we want to keep resample checked

and change it to nearest neighbor.

Nearest neighbor will help keep the pixels

nice and crispy at a higher resolution.

Afterwards, click ok

and now you have your high resolution pixel art

You want to go to file, save as,

and save it as a PNG or jpeg.

I usually like to save things as a PNG

because it has a bit higher image quality.

That's about it.

Thank you guys so much for watching.

That was my pixel art process from start to finish

the scene took about 2 hours to complete

but I sped up some parts to keep it from dragging on.

Let me know if you guys have any questions

or if I missed out on anything.

I'm really excited to see what you guys have come up with as well.

If you guys need any feedback on your drawings,

please message me about it.

So in the next chapter,

I'll be talking about creating pixel art items

in different sizes and angles.

See you in the next one.

Bye guys, take care.