GraphicsGale - Blog Posts

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

Since some people asked me to explain how do I do pixel art/show them the program I use, I decided to do both things...some basic info about the program, shortcuts and the explanation for the tools can be found under the cut.

Welcome to this tutorial for GraphicsGale (shortened Gale from now on) I'm sorry if some things don't make sense, english is not my first language, you're free to correct me if you want, I'll try my best to answer questions if you have them. Enjoy.

So, first things first, What is Gale? it's a graphics program by Human Balance co. focused on pixel art, it can be found on it's official site and there you can download it there too. I highly recomend buying it if you liked it, it's not expensive at all and it's awesome.

For this first part I'll just talk about very basic stuff like tools and such, so let's take a look at the program itself.

It doesn't look intimidating does it? I even broke up the menus in pretty colors, yay!

1.- (red) it's a normal menu, like any other program has. I'll be talking about specifics later on, while I explain how to do stuff.

2.- (orange) basic actions icons, it's basically a condensed menu; I'll list the icons, hover up on the words if you want more specific info. New file, Open file, Browse, Save | Undo, Redo |Cut, Copy, Paste | Paste as a new image | Zoom | Grid, Custom Grid, Grid snap | Onion Skin

3.- (yellow) Tools, again, I'll list the icons, hover for a more specific explanation on each icon. Magnifier, Image Mover, Rectangular Selection, Oval Selection, Lasso, Magic Wand, Color Selection, Pencil, Connect line, Spline Curve, Rectangle, Filled rectangle, Oval, Filled Oval, Flood fill, Color Replacer, Draw text | Antialias, Transparent, Paint mode

4.- (green) Layers menu; New Layer, Duplicate Current Layer, Delete Layer, Combine Layers | Previous Layer, Next Layer | Properties of the Current Layer (I don't think I need to explain any of these)

5.- (cyan?) Animation stuff; Add frame, duplicate frame, delete frame | previous frame, next frame | properties of current frame | cut frame, copy frame, paste frame | Play, Pause

6.- (blue) your current document window, here I have a gif with 4 frames opened. as you can see the document only shows me one frame at a time, but if you have the preview window open you can see the animation and you can find the frames in the Frame

7.- (purple) Extras! this is another important part of the program, this program has a lot of specific things that are meant for making your life easier at pixelling, you can call the extras in the menu view, and they are Frame, Layer, Palette, Preview and Loupe, I always have the first 4 opened at any given time as they are pretty useful, I don't really see the point in the loupe, but maybe you will...

Now, some important tips that you may be interested in.

You can dock windows so they're not floating around like I did with the frames window, simply go to the options (the arrow), select "dockable" and drag the window to whatever corner you want, you'll notice the outline changes when it's docked.

You can keep windows collapsed so they don't use space, like I did with the layers and palette, simply select auto hide in the options menu

You can save a lot of time with shortcuts and button mappings, this program comes with some stupid button mapping (for example, ctrl + or ctrl - aren't the default mapping for zooming in and out), so if you're used to another program, you can make them match. Simply go to File > Preferences and change them to your hearts content (or if you dont want to change anything, learn what the shortcuts are)

I hope you guys find this useful, I'll cover basic pixel drawing on the next tutorial...