Thursday, August 2, 2018

Pixel Art

I recently completed a course on pixel art from Udemy, and though it was short I really enjoyed it. The instructor, Benjamin Anderson, went through some art basics and related them to pixel art. Things like shape, line, value, and colour. He introduces the free web based software Piskel which is easy and fun to use. Here are some of the exercises I did for this early section.









These are my reference pictures.
The course then includes some animation. We start in Piskel, but end in Aseprite which has a lot of extra features that help with animating your pixel art. It's free if you know how to compile it, or you can buy it off their website for about $20 Canadian. I'm not familiar with all the program's features, but the course does teach the basics of setting up a new animation and how to work with the key frames and colours to create your project. For the final assignment we had to google some animation key frames and base our animation off of that. Here's what I did!
A diving and rolling gymnast!

This was my reference image.
I really enjoyed the course, the instructor was great and knew what he was talking about. There were a lot of little tips and tricks you might not be able to learn on your own. It was great to just get exposed to a couple of nice pixel editing software and I had a lot of fun.

Here's another animation I did in Piskel of some old turtle-man running! He's silly!
Next I'm planning to do another course from the same instructor and finally start learning GameMaker!