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If you don't know about anti-aliasing (AA), AA essentially blurs digital images. With pixel art, this is useful when you want to hide jaggies. To do this, you pick a "blur" color found by mixing the colors where you want to apply AA, then use it to serve as middle ground for your pixel placement.

Example: Circle

Here are 3 circles. The examples on the left and center you can see are circles, but they contain jaggies on the corners. The 3rd circle has the smoothest curve, but requires the addition of a blur color. In this case, the blur color is made by mixing the black of the circle, and white of the background, which results in gray. Since it's impossible to make a perfect circle at this resolution of pixel art, we use blur to give the illusion of more accurate and circular pixel placement.

Example: Straight lines

Straight lines can also have jaggies. You can also apply the same technique here for smoother looking lines. Notice how 2nd and 2nd last line examples in the "AA" example still look a little jagged. You can use extra blur colors to make your pixel art appear even smoother if one blur color isn't enough for you, demonstrated in the "AA+" example. 

So that's my little tutorial on anti-aliasing. I hope you found it useful!

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Looks rocky to me, or like dirt. Might want to make the grass hug the raised land because right now it appears very flat where it meets the rocks

This color palette seems tough to work with because it's so limited when trying to show numerous details. In this case, might need to go simpler, like 1 bit games.

Hey guys I'm back with another goblin pixel art tutorial. This time it's a rocketeer. It's just a small goblin that pilots a rocket strapped to his back so let's get to the process.

Step 1 - Line Sketch

So I knew I wanted a little goblin with a rocket on his back. I was thinking maybe I would also give him a gun, but I couldn't really figure out a great way to pull it off so I kept his design more simplistic. Originally I was going to give him 2 control sticks that he can use to pilot the rocket, but I abandoned that idea later on. You can just see that I was going for that in the sketch here.

Step 2 - Head

I figured I would try drawing his head next. Since this goblin seems like one of those type of engineer goblins, I gave him some goggles. It's pretty common with goblins that like to craft stuff. Plus goggles protect their eyes from debris when crafting or flying around. Since his face is pushing through the wind pretty fast, I made all his facial features tucked downward to show the wind blowing on his face.  You can also see that this guy loves flying around doing crazy stuff in his facial expression.

Step 3 - Body

Next thing, I start sketching out his body. I planned to give him some kind of harness so he can clip onto the rocket. Originally I was planning to maybe give him a shotgun or blunderbuss because I think guns are awesome, except it seemed like it would interfere with his ability to pilot the rocket efficiently. I was thinking maybe the gun could be attached to his harness, but ultimately I just abandoned the idea because I felt like it would be too hard to make the sprite readable. Maybe I can do that with some airship goblins though!

Step 4 - Rocket

Then I start trying out some rocket design. I was brainstorming quite a bit: will it have black and yellow "caution" stripes? Will it have graffiti text? Will it have those 2 control sticks commonly seen with jetpacks? I ended up giving it a shark face and have the goblin's harness bolted into the rocket. Getting the angle of the rocket was pretty tough honestly. It must have took me over an hour to get it this accurate.

Step 5 - Controller

At this point, I give the goblin I controller. What it's function is I left to interpretation. Maybe it's to self destruct the rocket, maybe it's to ignite the rocket, maybe it's to steer the rocket, etc. A bit unreadable at this stage, but I improve it later.

Step 6 - Flames

I start the flames. The start of the flames appear as a strong jet flame, but then it has cloudier shapes further back. I tried to play around with a zooming perspective here and give the rocket trail a slight curve.

Step 7 - Polish

And lastly I polish the sprite. My goal here was to make everything as readable as possible, which was honestly pretty tricky and took me a while. But here's the final result! I hope you like it.

 Thanks for reading this post. You can also read about how I drew my previous goblins back on the my homepage. More goblins coming soon so stay tuned!

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That's totally fine!

Hey guys I'm back. In this tutorial I'll go over my process for drawing a bugbear goblin. This one looks kind of like a troll, but it's technically smaller than an actual troll. I still like the way it turned out. Before I go through the steps, I'll explain what a bugbear is, at least from what I've understand. A bugbear is a type of goblin that is pretty big and strong, but not as big as a troll. It is pretty hairy like a caveman, based on references I was looking at. These guys usually have a large spiked mace or morning star. Generally they're not completely dumb as a troll or ogre, so they might be a bit more experienced with combat. That's pretty much it for the description this time. In short, I think of it as a medium sized troll with a lot of hair. Let's get to the steps!

Step 1 - Line Sketch.

I wanted to depict him charging at something or someone to showcase his aggressive nature. Here you can see he has some a lot of overgrown facial hair. I was brainstorming what he would wear. They sometimes wear a light amount of metal armor so I sketched what appears to be a pauldron, but the route I ultimately took with this one was to give him a pelt based outfit. Obviously there's the spiked club I plan for him to have. And I want him to be bigger than the previous goblins I illustrated, but not too big. Maybe I'll do an even bigger goblin in the future than a smaller goblin rides on.

Step 2 - Head

I wanted to try a different skin tone: orange this time, and try a different styled eye. Here I start experimenting with the shaggy hair on his head. I give him a nose ring for now but I change it later.

Step 3 - Arm

I figure his arm is an easy place to start next. First I test out more hair on his arm, but then I decide it would be simpler to just do pelts for his design.

Step 4 - Nose Bone Trinket

So originally I gave him a nose ring, but I kind of already did that with the very first goblin I drew, and since I was starting to lean towards this tribal design, I thought why not give him one of those tribal bone piercings through his nose?

Step 5 - Skirt

At this point, I was getting ideas that maybe this guy hunts in the snow and lives with a local tribe of goblins which live in some snowy mountains. In that case, he'd need to keep warm, so I give him a thick hide of clothes around his waist, and give him an emblem that represents his tribes emblem so his peers will recognize him as one of them.

Step 6 - Legs

Originally I was thinking of giving him some fur boots since, everything else he's wearing is made of fur, but I decided that would make his color palette start to become unbalanced, so I decided to just give him a few wraps around his feet instead. Hopefully that will keep his feet a little warm.

Step 7 - Club

The club was pretty simple to draw. I just started by sketching in a large trimmed tree branch.

Step 8 - Spikes

Then I add in the spikes. These spikes are made of bone; maybe ribs, maybe creature teeth.

Step 9 - Polish

Finally I remove the underlying white sketch so I can see what the final result would look like and go ahead and polish the sprite. Here he is alongside the rest of the goblin crew.

So thanks for checking out this post! Still more goblins planned in future blogs. Stay tuned for that, but for now see ya later!

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These is 16px grid, so roughly 48px each so far.

Hey guys, back. So this time I drew an archer goblin. This one has a simple design, but still was a bit tough to draw, however I think it turned out great. So a goblin archer is pretty much a ranged combat goblin that utilizes a bow or crossbow (I think I want to draw a sniper goblin with a crossbow next). The one I drew uses fire arrows. I was thinking maybe he likes to catch battlefields on fire or something. I also gave him an alert horn on his hip so he can alert allies of intruders. This goblin I drew doesn't have much for armor, but he probably doesn't need much since he'd probably only be at risk of ranged attack. This might be a bit of a shorter tutorial but let's get on with the steps I took for this one.

Step 1 - Line Sketch

I wanted him to be lobbing an arrow at a 45 degree angle so you can see that here with my sketch, and of course I want him to be roughly to scale with my previous goblins.

Step 2 - Bow and Face

The challenge with this pose was trying to not obscure his face too much. I like to show character faces with my drawings so I had to find some sort of balance of showing his face, but also posing the bow correctly. So here I kind of did the bow and face in one step. I also give him one of those pointy hoods a lot of goblin archers wear.

Step 3 - Tattered Shirt

I figured I'd give him something simple. I imagine goblins living in caves and whatnot, so they just scavenge around for whatever they can wear for some comfort. Here I sketch in a tattered shirt.

Step 4 - Legs

Then I decided to give him beige shorts and some sandals. They keep his design lightweight so he can still flee if endangered, but also provide some extra warmth and make running around on pebbles a little less torturous.

Step 5 - Quiver

What's an archer without a quiver? I add in a belt and quiver so he doesn't immediately run out of ammo if he gets into a random encounter.

Step 5 - Alert Horn and Polish

Archers sometimes serve as watchmen, so I figured why not give him a signaling horn to alert other goblins if some intruder comes over to the wrong cave? I also figured I was satisfied with the archer concept so I went ahead and polished the sprite.

So thanks for checking out this post! Next up, maybe a goblin assassin, bomber, or bugbear. Stay tuned for that. Anyway thanks for reading, hope y'all have a good day, and see ya next time.

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Hey guys I'm back. This time I drew a goblin warrior and I'm going to talk about my process a bit here. So first thing's first: description. A goblin warrior is a type of combat goblin. These ones I usually think of them as melee-based foot soldiers but a bit more brave and aggressive side. They wear some gear, but too much because that would slow them down and they're not the buffest guys. The gear is also not the greatest quality usually. They can be pretty shabby, crude, or rusty, etc. The goblin I drew features a knife and round shield. What I see a lot with goblin knives is that they're curved, but also jagged kind of like abnormal shark teeth or saw teeth. The Chaos Blades from  the God of War series is a good example of this kind of look. Since I mentioned that these guys are kind of tough and brave, I depict him doing a battle cry pose with his knife raised and him doing a little a scream. So lets get to the steps.

Step 1 - Line Sketch

First thing is a try to sketch that battle cry pose, and have him drawn to scale along with the previous goblin. If you haven't read that post yet, I'd suggest checking it out since that goblin's probably easier to draw. At this early stage I wasn't entirely sure what he would look like, but I knew the pose I wanted for him. 

Step 2 - Cuirass

I was looking at various goblins on Google and Pinterest, just looking for clothing/armor ideas. I notice these ones usually wear a lot of brown and grays, stuff like armor plates, leather, fur, or just fabric. I still wasn't sure exactly what I wanted him to wear, but you just gotta start sometimes. I tried some rusty cuirass and it didn't look too bad for a start. He's also supposed to be wearing a pauldron with his shield arm. It's a bit obscured right now but I fix it up later.

Step 3 - Pants

I decided to give him some pants, although not sure what color I wanted it to be, I felt like something was off about it but the blue worked just fine in the end. I also try to show a few creases here and there.

Step 4 - Boots

Next thing was the boots. Brown boots are pretty simple and an easy choice to go with so that what I did here. They could be made of leather or something.

Step 5 - Waist Cloth

I felt like something was missing for his waist. Usually there's something there, I just don't know what to put! But I tried just adding some kind of loin cloth with a skull emblem, and well, it looks good enough.

Step 6 - Knife Arm

Next up, I wanted to figure out what his weapon would look like, so I tried some rusty knife with a jagged blade and I thought adding a decaying hole through it would be a nice touch. It's rough right now, but sometimes it easier to return to part of sprite later.

Step 7 - Shield Arm

Then the shield. So as I mentioned earlier, I wanted to try a cheap wooden round shield. This shield is just made up of some pieces of wood and a rusting rim. It also has some straps so that the goblin can wield it on his forearm. Also roughly sketched in for now. Also I got the sudden idea to add some bands to his knife, it's just what I see a lot and kind of makes it look makeshift I guess.

Step 8 - Head

Finally the goblins head, but I don't polish the sprite just yet. Since he's doing a battle cry, I want his mouth to be open. I also try to give him a helmet, but it's just a sketch for now.

Step 9 - Polish

Now that I had the general idea complete, it was time to polish the sprite. I kept the general idea the same but I added some final touches and small last minute ideas. There's actually quite a few subtle things I did here. First of all, I think his sword arm looked a little off in terms of pose, and was blocking too much of his head so I moved it over. I gave him some scars to indicate that this guys has been through previous battles already. I gave him a harness so that maybe he can carry loot around or a second weapon. I thought it would be a little silly idea to give him a health potion but it also makes perfect sense since he deals with combat a lot. I added some arrows stuck in his shield, also to indicate previous battles. The helmet also now has chainmail on the sides. And the last thing I'm noticing is that I changed his skin tone to yellow and made his nose and ears curve up instead of down, just to add a little more variation from the previous goblin.

So thanks for checking out this post! For my next tutorial, I plan on drawing another goblin. Feel free to suggest some goblin variants and I might give it a go, but for now I think the next one will be an archer. Anyway until then, see you in the next art tutorial!

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Hey guys I'm back, and this time I drew a goblin! I took some progress screenshots along the way and I want to go over how I drew it. Goblins are creatures commonly found in RPG games. They're usually small, green, and have a pointy long nose and ears. The one I drew looks like that, but I plan to draw more variants in the future. I also gave him a simple loin cloth and he's holding a meat drumstick.

Step 1 - Simple Line Sketch

The first thing I do is sketch some lines, but I usually don't make them perfect, they're more of just scribbles I need to guide me before drawing in the final details. With a stereotypical goblin like this, I like to give him a little hunchback. and I was originally planning to give him a club because that's what I see a lot with goblins, but I changed it to a meat drumstick later.

Step 2 - Face

Now that I have a rough idea where his details will go, I go straight to drawing them in, but i do this on a seperate layer. I started with his face. Obviously I chose a green skin tone, but the shadows are slight blue and the highlights are slight yellow. I give him a mischievous grin and the pointy nose and ears, but i also give him a piercing on on his nose and ear.

Step 3 - Right Arm

Next I draw his right arm. Again, on another layer. I find it helpful to break down the goblin sprite into multiple layers that I can work on individually and lock them as go so that I don't accidentally change them. I could start with his torso, but for me it's probably a little more work efficient to start with his right arm first then do his torso after. Not much to say about his arms except I usually assume goblins have skinny arms. I draw in has left arm later.

Step 4 - Torso

Next I draw in his torso and I give him a chubby round belly. You can see that the shoulder sprite doesn't quite connect to the torso yet, but I fix that in the polish stage. 

Step 4 - Loincloth

Before I can accurately draw in his legs, I find it easier to start with his loin cloth, then append the legs after. I make it a little tattered but not too much because the sprite is too small to add a lot of detail, but there is a noticeable little crease in the center. I assume this type of loincloth can be tied at the back and that's how it holds up.

Step 5 - Right Leg

Now I can draw in his right leg. I give him a bit of a squat, I think it just makes him look a little more primitive. I also try to draw in some toe nails. I don't really have room to draw all his toes at this resolution so I give him just 3 instead. I did have to hide his arm temporarily to make sure I positioned his leg accurately, but I think it turned out great.

Step 6 - Left Arm and Drumstick

Now I draw in his other arm holding a piece of meat. The meat is already cooked so it has a bit of a seared brown/golden look to it. I think it's easier to start by drawing the meat where you want it to be first, then draw the arm holding it afterwards. That's just a tip if you ever want to draw a creature holding something but you're struggling with the arm poses.

Step 7 - Left Leg

Not much to say here, just I try to mirror his right leg and draw the left leg.

Step 8 - Polish

After i have all the sprite pieces draw out, I delete the sketch, merge all the sprite bits, then polish the resulting sprite. It ends up looking like this.

Thanks for reading this post! So this is how I draw a simple goblin. I plan to draw more variants though, I just need to browse for ideas first. Let me know what variants you want to see and I can try to draw them in my next tutorials. After that, I'll probably do orcs and ogres! Anyway thanks for reading and see you later!

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Nice! I'm not that good with motifs. 

Well I define creative block as some stress preventing us from creating stuff, and in this sense, I'd say it's a real, but I don't think it should be seen as a bad thing necessarily and instead be seen as neutral: just some stress preventing us from creating stuff. Then it's about figuring why that is, and the reason can genuinely be a good thing! Like "Maybe I really shouldn't be doing creative work at this moment because I have this other important thing to do", but i feel like some people shrug this logic off like "No, my room is a mess, and I have a lot homework due in 2 days, but im just gonna go ahead and draw a castle..." Like no, take care of that other stuff then come back and have fun later. Though I do very much agree that if someone hasn't tried exploring other hobbies, there's a good chance doing that can make their life a lot richer. Sometimes it's just loneliness that kills motivation too. It's hard to know exactly where the stress is coming from at first, but worth looking into instead of sweeping it under the rug.

TLDR: Keep your day job.

Hey guys. Normally I post art tutorials in 2D Art, but want to ramble about something different today. These are my personal thoughts about creative block, and not just for art but for any kind of creative work. I'm not a life coach or therapist but understanding these things might help you with creative block. A bit informal but whatever.

1) Creative Block isn't that bad

Creative block itself isn't bad. Sure if creative work is your money maker, then it can become a problem if you're not doing the work that you were hired to do, but I see way too many artists on Twitter thinking the grind will make them happy and end up in a vicious cycle blaming themselves for not working, then overworking themselves to create stuff. And I get it, this modern society is all about the grind, and showing any sign of vulnerability makes us weak, and I hate it. I think this concept is super problematic. First, it makes everyone work way too much. Second, it makes everyone fear expressing their true feelings. And all this leads to a desperate feeling of needing to feel high status through the grind. Just take it easy, the grind is unhealthy and it's ok to take some time away from creativity.

2) Listen to Creative Block

The next thing is I advise you figure out the stresses your creative block is causing. You might think it will go away on it's own, but I've talked to artists who had this block for years. So don't downplay the stresses because they're important to understand and fix. I also think it's way too common with workaholics. Stress is there for a reason. It pushes us to do something. Sometimes it pushes us to do something bad, but sometimes good. When it pushes you to take care of messy stuff around the house, that's good. Or when it's telling you "Hey, you need to exercise man, or gal..." that's also pretty good. Maybe you need better sleep, or maybe you need to file taxes. So stress can be good, and you shouldn't always downplay it or shrug it off as it will become more of a problem later if you ignore it.

3) Stop competing so hard

So many people force themselves to create stuff to compete on social media, for jobs, and now even compete against automation, and it's not fun one bit. I'm not saying drop everything your doing and just be a couch potato but I'd suggest finding a balance between productivity and a healthy routine. You might think "What a loser, so lazy", but do you realize how many people who are willing to drink way too much caffeine, destroy their sleep (like me), and develop all kind of permanent hunchback health problems in order to compete in the industry. Is that a win? I disagree. I'd say that's exploiting hard workers' emotions.

4) If it's not your job, mostly create for fun.

If it's not your job, you don't always need to work so hard. It's good to try so that maybe you end up with a career out of it, but you don't always need to so you shouldn't always force yourself to. Figure out what you enjoy about creating, what creations you enjoy, why you enjoy those things, and maybe make a list if you can't remember them. Then try to base your creations around these ideas as they will often be more fun than drawing random stuff. Me personally this year, I'm really liking horror stuff, and I'm challenging myself to draw in linear perspective a lot more as it's something I always avoided before but nowadays feels the most rewarding when I complete these types of drawings. So all my drawings this year are based around those ideas. Eventually I might switch it up, but for now that's what I'm doing. But that's another thing though; just because you thing something is challenging to create, if you're out of other fun ideas, just go for it, be patient, and keep working on it until it's complete. When I do that, I just feel kind of proud my art rather than when I'm just doing simple quick art I've already mostly been doing years. 

Conclusion  

So those are all the things I can think of off the top of my head for this post. Thanks for reading and happy creating stuff. 

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Once you have a lot of experience, you don't always need to sketch, but I think it's good practice either way because its hard to visualize proper measurements in our mind. The more details we have, the easier it is to see what's wrong.

Thanks, I feel like I can actually improve this tutorial as well so I'll probably get around to that eventually.

Poquito espanol, pero no mas projeto. :(

Thanks a lot!

Thanks but no, sorry.

Thanks. I need to have another go at this guy, or a cacodemon. 

Thanks. I like writing these tutorials so I'll be back.

This is clean

Alright so in this tutorial, I'll go over the basics of sketching. By this point, this tutorial assumes you've dabbled around with Aseprite a bit, got familiar with some of the drawing tools and maybe read my previous tutorials, but if you are curious about those you can find them on the back on the homepage in the beginner catalog. With that said, all you really need to sketch is the pencil and eraser, but it's also good to know the selection tools such as the lasso tool and rectangular marque tool because these tools allow you to select and rearrange parts of your sketch without needing to redraw them. What I like to do when sketching is use grayscale so I don't need to think about colors just yet and can just focus on the construction of my lines. You can do this by accessing the Grayscale mode, found here under the Sprite tab.

With this mode, you only have the spectrum of colors ranging from black to white to work with. You don't need to do this but I find it useful, especially when shading. Now before sketching, you need to create a sketch layer. Layers allow you to separate the elements of your drawing into multiple parts. This is convenient when you want certain elements to be protected as you work on another. By default, you can press (Shift N) to create a new layer, and you'll see your layers down here in Aseprite:

Here you can set a background layer and sketch layer. You can rename them by double- left clicking them, and if you right click the bottom layer, you can convert it to the background layer if you select the option. Make sure the eyes are open on both layers so your background and sketch are both visible on the canvas. Also notice the lock icons, when they're closed, the layers can't be visually edited so the locks are useful when you want to protect layers as you're drawing. I'd set the layers up like this.

Now I have a distinguishable background layer and sketch layer. I also locked the background layer since I won't be changing it. Next you need to decide what it is that you're trying to draw, and gather references accordingly if you need them. I've decided to draw the "Dark Souls" guy equipped with the "elite knight" armor and wielding a sword and kite shield. The problem is that I would have a really hard time finding a reference image that directly matches what I'm trying to draw, so instead I break down what I'm trying to draw into multiple searchable things: the elite knight armor set, some swords, kite shields, and shield blocking poses. 

With these different reference images, I can study them and combine my observations into a sketch.

Very underwhelming, I know that's what you're thinking. The pose and proportions aren't accurate to what I'm trying to achieve yet, but the sketch is good for 2 things: it was quick, and it's better than nothing. At least now we see what we need to adjust: the pose, the proportions, and we can add further details if we want. You don't need to have a super detailed sketch; the only thing that's important with sketches is that it helps you visualize where everything needs to go, so only sketch as much detail as you think you need to start shading or coloring as it will saving you time. Anyway, if I were to adjust the pose and proportions, I'd have something more like this:

It's still not the pose I want, but similar to the first pass, it was a quick edit, and it's closer to the goal. Now if I upscaled the sketch by 200%, which you can do under the Sprite tab:

, and took the sketch further, it could then fit in more details and the sketch could look something like this:

Conclusion

So that's basically what sketching is. It's a quick and useful drawing process used to establish where details approximately should go before you shade and color your drawings. If you want to watch a video about it, I think Draw Like a Sir explains it well. Although I'd say instead of practicing drawing basic shapes like circles and squares, just try drawing whatever you think is fun to draw and practice that because you're more likely to stay motivated drawing something fun. Just practice breaking down the subject into smaller shapes. In the next tutorial I'll probably go over is shading, but we'll see. Thanks for reading!

(Shading tutorial coming soon)

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Nice. Four directions of walking seems like a lot of work.

In this tutorial, I'll go over how to set up your personal preferences for Aseprite. This allows you to set up a comfortable and productive workflow as you're drawing. The options to do this are found under the Edit menu bar tab, they are the Preferences and Keyboard Shortcuts.

Preferences

Now if you open up the Preferences window, there's a ton of preferences you can edit, but I feel like you can ignore most of them. However there's a few preferences you may want to look into right now such as Editor, Grid, and Background. In "Editor", I like to set my right-click function to pick colors off the canvas. This saves me a lot of time when I'm drawing because I don't have to recreate colors with any sliders. I can just right click on any existing pixel on the canvas and my selected color immediately becomes that color. For background, I just like to keep the checker pattern 16x16px. Same for Grid. Grid is useful for tile sets and icon sets such as inventory icons.

After that, you can apply any changes you've made. Now moving on to keyboard shortcuts!

Keyboard Shortcuts

So keyboard shortcuts are useful for obvious reasons. They cut down time and energy it takes to do tasks on a computer. Art can take a long time, and I think patience goes a long way, but I still think you should take advantage of what you have. If you open your Keyboard Shortcuts tab, you'll see a lot of shortcuts key combinations you can change. I'm not going to tell you what shortcut to set, but just pick whatever keys you think would work for you, and make sure they don't conflict with each other. Though maybe 2 things I'll suggest are the shortcuts to move the camera and change the brush size of your pencil.

Camera Movement

I have camera panning and zooming set to "Ctrl" so when I press the Ctrl key, I can click and drag to pan the view, and use the mouse wheel to zoom in or out. To do this, you'll need to modify both the options in the Tools and Mouse Wheel tabs. In the Tools tab, find the Hand tool and make sure you select the "quick" version. This is the panning tool but not a zooming tool, and the "quick" specifier specifies that this tool is active only if you're holding down the shortcut key. Here you can set it to "Ctrl" and now you should be able to pan the camera by pressing Ctrl and clicking and dragging the mouse.

However we still need to set up the zoom functionality. This is found in the Mouse Wheel tab. Set it to Ctrl as well. So now when you scroll the mouse wheel while pressing Ctrl, you can zoom in or out from your canvas.

Lastly, I set my brush size my scrolling the mouse wheel as well, but this is by default, not while pressing Ctrl. You'll find this in the Mouse Wheel tab as well.

Conclusion

So this concludes the tutorial, and now you should know how to change your Aseprite preferences. Next I will go over 3 methods you can use to find references for the pixel art you want to make. Thanks for reading!

Gathering Art Reference

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Thanks, I hope so! Although this tutorial is kinda old so might have to review it.

Today I want to go over a quick concept I learned about "referencing" things for your art. This applies to any art, whether it's 2D, 3D, pixel art, digital art, traditional, etc. Hopefully you find these useful. Essentially there's 3 ways to gather reference.

Referencing
What is referencing? In the context of art, I think of it as searching for or gathering visual information to apply to one's artwork. This can by done by searching for visual imagery or researching specific topics. 

Why is referencing useful?
Without referencing you'd be drawing from memory, but for any normal artists our memory is limited. With reference, you draw in extra details you wouldn't easily be able to draw otherwise.

3 Methods
When I think of art referencing, I think of 3 primary ways, these aren't official terms but I think of them as "direct referencing", "indirect referencing", and researching.

Method 1 - Direct Referencing
Direct Referencing is probably the most obvious way to reference things for your art. What I mean by this is searching for images that directly relate to the subject you want to draw. For example, if you want to draw a Super Mario, you'd search up images of Super Mario, if you want to draw a castle, you'd search up images of a castle, if you want to draw a Dark Souls boss, you'd search up images of that specific Dark Souls boss. Now although this is useful to an extent, this is only useful for getting the general appearance, proportions, and colors of the thing you're trying to draw. The problem with this is that often times after the initial "sketch, shade, and color" drawing stage, you hit a road block where you feel like something's missing, but you're not sure what it is, and the art looks unpolished. If you solely rely on this approach, you skip fundamental understanding of what you're trying to drawing. It's a good start, but not everything, that's why I want to introduce these next 2 reference methods.

Method 2 - Indirect Referencing
By indirect referencing, I still mean searching for images, but these ones don't directly relate to the subject you're trying to draw. Instead you search up images that a not directly related, but similar enough to what you're trying to do. Let's say I'm trying to draw Doom Guy:

Now obviously those are very awesome depictions of him that I didn't draw, and you should use these images as reference if you were trying to draw him, but you can also apply indirect referencing to you fan art as well. Doom guy is basically a space marine who fights demons trying to destroy all humanity. This means, you can also search up space marines, or even any other similar military personnel. Maybe you can even search up some ordinary astronauts, although that's straying a bit far. You can also mentally break down his design into smaller components to search up. You can see here that he usually wears some sort of sci-fi space helmet with some oxygen filters and a glass visor so you can search that up, but you can also maybe search up some motorcycle helmets. You can search up what futuristic armor or bullet proof vests look like, you can look up shin guards, guns, space guns, camo pants, creases in pants, etc. I hope you see where I'm getting at: you can search up similar things. This approach I find very useful when I'm trying to learn how to draw a very specific aspect or element of a certain person, place, or thing's design but can't seem to get a good close-up reference image of it directly, so I work around by searching up the specific thing I need instead. I have a WIP fan art of Doom guy here:

Although overall I tried to be faithful and used reference images that closely depicted his classic design, I used some indirect referencing. I looked up some shotguns, some bicep veins, and some poses for him. Now, this drawing isn't perfect. As you can probably tell, It's a WIP without color yet, and his design could probably still be improved with further referencing, but I'm just trying to make a point of how indirect referencing can be just as useful as direct referencing.

Method 3 - Research
The last approach I want to bring up is research. So this is kind of self-explanatory, but research means basically what it's supposed to mean. Find information about the subject or topic you're trying to illustrate. In this case, Doom guy. Search up articles or videos that discuss military dudes, what they wear, how guns work, what the parts of their clothing/armor are called, why they wear them, what the different components of guns called, etc. Having this fundamental understanding will help a whole lot more than you might initially think. You might be thinking "how can I learn to draw without visuals to refer to?" Well without research, you're just "eyeballing" things and trying to mimic what they look like, but the problem is, you're more likely to make fundamental mistakes if you don't understand the rules behind how certain work or why they're needed. So do your research!

Conclusion
This is my end of my discussion about the 3 methods I use find reference as I create artwork. Next I will go over sketching. I hope you all learned something useful today and thanks for reading!

Sketching

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That's a good way to get symmetry! I probably should have done that before shading.

Hey guys, I'm back. I'll call this blog a tutorial because it's simple and short. I used Aseprite for this. What we're doing in this one is drawing a "Doom" helmet, which roughly looks like this

from "Doom" video game franchise. Start a sketch that's big enough to fit the details you want. Here you can see the visor along with some oxygen filters here. I would make the sketch on a separate layer against the background.

After that, duplicate your sketch onto a new layer, and on this new layer, experiment with shading in grayscale. Grayscale mode is useful because it allows us to focus on values when we're not ready to add color. An easy light source to work with is in front, but maybe a little off to the side to make it more interesting.  The helmet should be pretty reflective of light since it's made of metal and the visor is made of glass. The back of the helmet should appear darker if there's no light source behind the helmet. Even though helmets aren't spheres, they are a bit similar as far shading goes, so you can use sphere shading for good reference. You might end up with something like this:

Once that's done, coloring should be pretty straight forward. Duplicate the shaded helmet onto a new layer and start adding color to it. I'm using a combination of green and gray colors, but also yellow in the shadows. If you're struggling with color picking, use the accurate color sliders, such as HSV (Hue, Saturation, and Value). These color sliders let you modify color elements one at a time. Now I have a helmet that looks like this:

Now the last thing I want to show you is a simple trick to make the helmet look have more hellish lighting since the game takes place in hell mostly. Make a new layer. Fill the entire layer with orange. Set the layer's opacity to roughly half of the maximum and set the mode to "overlay".  This will make the layer see-through, and overlay will blend the upcoming tint nicely into the helmet without changing the shading.

Use the Magic Wand tool to change the background color back to gray. First select it, set the tolerance to 0, and set it to "contiguous".

0 tolerance will set the tool to only select exact matching color, and contiguous will make the tool only select adjacent matching pixels. Now you can probably flatten your helmet drawing to simplify the drawing, but don't merge it with the tint layer or background layer. On the helmet layer, select the empty space. This should select all the empty space, but nothing else.

Now select the tint layer and press the delete key, and you should end up with something like this.

And that will conclude this tutorial. I hope you enjoyed it and thanks for reading!

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I miss making these. Thanks!

Hey I'm back, with a new Pixel Tutoria-... Normally I'd call these "Pixel Tutorials", but that sounds more like I know everything, which I don't, so instead I'm going to call these type of blogs "Pixel Processes" or something like that from now on. Anyway, this blog demonstrates how I would draw a moon in a cloudy blue night sky. If you were to search up reference for a night sky, you might find something like these: 

Here are my initial observations:
- Blue sky
- Clouds
- Bright moon
- Some obscuring clouds

Based on these observations, we can start a sketch. First we need to set up a canvas, and 128x96 pixels will work for this demonstration, since I've actually already drawn this. Then the first thing i do is set a dark background (but not black because I do something important later) and put a moon roughly this size. 

The next thing that will really add to the composition is some obscuring clouds, which are pretty easy to sketch right now.

From here, we can add some blue light to the nearby clouds. Realistically, the moon doesn't emanate light, it just reflects sunlight, but in fantasy it can. To render light onto the clouds, you need to understand that exposed parts of clouds to the moon will receive moonlight, and the hidden side will hardly receive any. Notice here, you can interpret some clouds being lit by the moon, but also, there is no added light behind the two obscuring clouds.

Next, I add in more obscuring clouds, be these ones are less dense, so the appear lighter.

Here's where the color black comes in. I use it to show the full silhouettes of clouds in the foreground.

Keep in mind what I said earlier about the exposed parts of the cloud receiving light. This applies to the foreground clouds as well.

Here, I pretty much went gung-ho with clouds, but I ended up scrapping some of them in the final result because there was too many.

I wanted to show that closer clouds to the moon, receive more moonlight than those far away, so I added a brighter shade to the nearby clouds. I also make the foreground clouds, default color (black) appear a bit brighter because you wouldn't really see black clouds in the sky, clouds usually receive at least some light. The other important thing here is that I blend the obscuring clouds with the moon. This way they appear more translucent. Thicker parts appear less translucent, and thinner parts appear more translucent.

At this point, I decided there was way too many clouds, so I removed some. I also tried to get the colors to resemble the reference images at the beginning of this blog.

In conclusion, I hope this blog helps! I wouldn't consider it exactly a tutorial because I don't fully understand how skies like this work, but I think a know enough to showcase. Here is a Bloodborne fan artwork for example:

And this piece which is still a WIP but it has a nice sky.

Anyway that's it for this blog. Thanks for reading! 

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This looks very faithful. I look forward to playing this! 👍

There's no use for the money haha sorry, ran out of time.

Same issue here

I've had the same issue. Sorry to hear that but thanks for playing anyway!

Totally understandable, thanks for feedback.

I've set up a Doom-inspired game jam. It is currently open and will last for almost 4 months. The idea of the jam is to submit games based of the "Doom" video game series primarily, but can also take inspiration from other shooter or combat focused games such as Blood (1997), Heretic (1994), Unreal (1998), or Quake (1996), etc. This is the overall purpose of the jam. Here is the link and I hope you join!

😆

Thanks! I hope I get back to making tutorials eventually but I'm trying to focus on school and a new career because art world has been rough in recent years.

"I'm gonna take my horse to the old town road, I'm gonna.. riiiide til' I cain't no moe 🎶..."

Incredible storytelling. The world reminds me of Pandora from Borderlands. Also like how you went from struggling with UI to coming up with the wanted poster format. Last but not least, thanks for adding the robo-cacti. 🙂

Hey guys, I'm back. If you're new, I suggest you check out the first tutorial of my Zelda mockup series. This time we're going to draw some dirt. It's good to search up some reference from 2D Zeldas, especially Zelda: The Minish Cap in my opinion.

If you look at the dirt alone, it's actually pretty simple to draw. It might look difficult at first because the game's art looks so good as a whole, but the dirt itself isn't all that difficult. Just to experiment for now, we can try drawing a single tile of dirt (more or less) just to understand the texture of it without worrying about the technical details so much yet. We can start with our grassy scene from the previous tutorials as a template. then draw a single brown square in the center. It's a good idea to try to pick a bright color for this because we will have dirt walls in the future.

Now we need this tile to transition seamlessly into the grass so we will add some blades of grass. I see a lot of 2D Zelda games make them bright so we'll try that. 

We will need our shadows in the dirt caused by the grass. For the shadow colors though, I'd actually shift them towards red but make them dark enough so it's hard to tell. So the shadows aren't actually brown here, but secretly red. Just so you know a little bit about hue shifting.

So that decent for a single tile of dirt, but for a game developer, it's pretty useless when it comes to tile mapping. A game developer can't use this to create dynamic patches or roads of dirt with only this one tile. It would be a lot more useful to have a dirt tile, then having bordering tiles separate

because now we can resize it.

There's still a problem though. If we do the inverse having grass in the center and dirt bordering it, we'd be lacking corner tiles,

so just make sure you fill those in.

This is all we really need

and there's so much we can do with it. 

It could help to have a variation of the dirt tile with some roughness though, but try to avoid making them look obviously like squares.

Are here is the dirt with other assets in the scene!

So thanks for reading. I'm looking forward to writing the next tutorial.

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