I Tried To Make Omastar Look Like He’s Dancing To Fit His Regular Sprites

Perfume early days are marked by terrible clothing choices and idol-ish music, but this song in particular has so much charm, I love it...

Unfortunately it was hard for me to chose three different poses, so I decided to go with unity and make them do the distinctive pose of that choreo...

More pixels here | Twitter

Thanks for the nice response on my last tut, Under the cut I'll talk more about the specifics of drawing pixel art, I'm not sure how deep is this because I thought of this tutorial as basic knowledge, but please ask me if you want me to explain anything in more detail.

So, since you already know how things work on the program let's talk about drawing and polishing things in the program... Also, I want to add since I forgot with the last tutorial... I'm not the best at pixel art, not even close, I'm still learning, this is not a definite guide and it won't give you superpowers... or maybe it will if your computer is radioactive and you spend a lot of time reading my guide or something... no guarantees of that though, but if that happens don't blame me if your superpower is lame, ok? First of all, let me explain what pixel art is: Pixel art is a subdivision of digital art, where you have control of your image in the smallest level, pixels. That's why pixel art is normally small, so you can focus on all the picture without leaving things to chance. The main thing that I like about pixel art is that the placement of every single pixel matters...

(you can notice clearly how altering the position of 10 pixels make the lines completely different... this is also true for variations in single pixels, but I wanted it to be obvious)

Since it's a subgenre of digital art it has some "rules" that don't necessarily apply to other sorts of digital art. of course you can break the rules, but then you're not really making pixel art... Actually I think it can be condensed to one rule... 1.- Control EVERYTHING: this doesn't mean you can't use the bezier line tool or the paint bucket, but you shouldn't use any kind of filter or blender tool (burn, dodge, blur, etc) as you can't control the outcome... this doesn't mean you can't use a lot of colors, but give every color a meaning in your picture and keep your palette to a minimum... this doesn't mean you can't freehand your lines, but you have to fix them later so nothing is a program choice and everything is placed RIGHT where you wanted it to be. There are a lot more don'ts than dos with pixel art, but you'll find them as you progress... just look at the master's (I admire Syosa deeply, you may find fool, jalonso and mrmo tarius to be freaking awesome because they are... pixeljoint has a bunch of talented individuals posting and offering advice) and join pixel focused sites if you're interested, their forums are really helpful, I post in pixeljoint, they are cool dudes and have helped me a lot. There are two different approaches when it comes to pixel art (or maybe many more, but I have two):

1.- From specifics to general.

This method is basically start with clean lines, and then fill them out and add detail, much like you'd start any picture I guess...

so I start with a sketch...

(all the sketches I'll be showing are at 200% so you can see better since it's so small)

then I clean the lines,  I normally just clean the same sketch and then change the sketch color to black so I can see better, but you can make a new layer and  work there if it's easier for you... as you can see I made all lines 1px wide fixed all the jagged lines , and basically worked every pixel so in 100% the lines have the correct angles... this was specially tricky in the dress and legs, sometimes just moving one pixel changes the entire meaning of a line...

Then I simply fill the lines with whatever colors I'll be working with... they're not definitive colors but placeholders, but I still try to make them as close to what I want as possible because... well.. I like working the less I can, so if I can pull it off with just one attempt it's great for me... right now this pic has 6 colors

then I put some shade where it belongs, now the pic has 9 colors, I added one darker yellow, one darker orange and a brown... as you noticed I completely ignored the dress colors because I'm stupid and took the screenshot before I worked on it... but I only added one shade of grey for the dress and shaded the lighter part with the darker red.

then I make the lines work in function of the forms, not only as lines by shading them too. I add another darker shade for every color that's touching a line and paint the line also minding the lightning of the picture (using a darker color only for the parts where the shade is, sometimes you can even erase a line if the pic looks better like that, beware of using lights randomly though, that can ruin a picture very quickly...)

then I fix the colors to my liking.. this pic needed some more contrast and better use of saturation in the shadows...

and then I just finish adding detail and put a white border around it because idk... I decided that's how all my animal crossing pixels would look like...

(this is goldie at 100%)

and the other way to work a piece is....

2.- From general to specifics.

With this method I'll start with a very lose sketch, in this step I mainly worry about the gesture and pose, using references is important so it doesn't suck much..

then, I paint with general colors, like, I know the sweater will be greyish and the skin is yellowish, and the hair will be brown and I'll probably recycle that colour in her leggings too... I don't really marry with a palette right now, I just chose general colors and I'll be adding, removing and modifying them as I go...

I also made the pic a little smaller...

And then... I just start detailing... I always start with the face because it's the most important part, I used two shadow tones that will help the yellow look like skin tones...

Never be afraid to move stuff around... after all what you did was just a lose sketch, I worked more on her eyes and changed the shape of the face to match better my reference

The colors evolved a lot since I started and I started refining the shapes and making every pixel count...

I gradually start adding more colors to the palette, first I check the color is not too similar to any of the ones I already have, and then I check if the ones I already have and see if I can make the colors work on other places, normally when you work with greyish colors you can make them work differently when you place them near to other colors... just experiment (or learn color theory, but experimenting is more fun)

this is the palette I had when I first started polishing it...

(all the black slots are fillers, as gale works with limited palettes since the start, you have to manually add colors everytime you want a new shade and if you modify the color, all the areas that are painted with that color will change accordingly... it's super neat to make the colors work together later...)

this is the palette I ended up with, 12 colors + transparency, you may notice I changed the skintones so I could recycle them in the sweater, and the greyish green became less green because that way I used it in more places...

and this is what I ended up with... I flipped it at the end because I liked it better like this...

Hope you find this useful, let me know if something is wrong...

The next tutorial will be about pixel animation I guess, unless you guys have a better idea/don't want to see me post any more tutorials

bird legs are awkward to draw for me, I feel like I made them too thick, oh well...

ACGB

So this is another thing I was working with... I started this to understand how to work on my original mockup, I never worked with tiles and preset palettes and sizes before, so it was quite a challenge. I made a full set of tiles, that are way too boring to show here... but I made all the fruits, all the flowers and their wilted variation, weeds, rafflesias, some normal trees, pines, palms, grass, rock, etc... it was a lot of work... maybe someday I'll work on more full screen compositions, to show all the tiles... but for now, I can show vesta and kabuki, because they're not that boring... idk if I'll keep on doing this though...

I really hope hitmonlee is still readable as himself even though I drew his not facing the viewer, I just wanted to have an original-ish pose ;v;

I feel tauros is way too big but it looks fine in the context of the rest of the pokemon so idk...

A commission I did a couple of weeks ago, I'm pretty happy with how it came out.

Also a 2x version

I just wanted to XD at Anon's ask box question! Sometimes pictures aren't enough for someone to be a moe-blob, but it's how they act! I'm sure there are plenty in the GnT fandom that agree about Tanaka being moe, and I'm one of them *_* By the way your art is really cute, so don't be silly in saying you're not good at it!

Oh, god, I know you asked this a long time ago, but I wanted to make a cute pic to go along with my answer and then forgot and... the point is... I'm an ass, please forgive me.

Now for the real answer, thanks a lot :D I'm happy to know I'm not alone thinking Tanaka is incredibly moe, I also thought that anon was silly for thinking only animu schoolgirls can be moe and yes, it's more than looks to make me feel the moe-ness, not that I don't think Tanaka looks adorable, because I think so, but he would be just an average cute looking asian dude if he wasn't as sweet as he is. Thanks for making me feel less alone liking GnT, have a Lum-Tanaka as a token of my feelings

I had a written review of Kimi ni todoke, but it turned out too personal to upload it here...

But this is a true story, I think I'll have to stop watching sad things or I'll die from dehydration

The third compilation... It's been already 150 individual sprites and I can feel I've improved a lot just in this compilation...I also feel super pumped out because wild world had 150 villagers, so if I focused on just that game I would have ended already (or be super close, considering NPCs)... Again, thanks a lot for your interest in this project of mine and all the support I've gotten in form of notes and messages, thank you ♥

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