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Hello! I'm back and in this blog I want to talk about shading, but just the basics. I won't be going over mirrors or specularity in this post. That is a more advanced topic that should be explained separately in my opinion. But let's go over the basics of shading and some examples. 

Light and Wall Example

First, imagine a light and a standard wall perpendicular to the light , such as a light bulb and a drywall in a house.

Well then the light is just going light up the wall right? Pretty much, yeah. There's a little more to it, but I'll explain it later when it would make more sense.

Light and Curve Example

What about the same light, except this time the wall is a half-circle like this? Maybe instead of a drywall in a house, it could be a pillar.

Well now things are just a little different, but the point on the curve where the arrow hits perpendicularly is where the ray of light would hit most effectively, and this applies to the flat wall as well.

Estimating Amount of Light

An easy way to estimate how much light or shadow you should use when shading things is to identify any point on a surface that you want to shade and then imagine a plane flat against that surface. For examples:

The more perpendicular the ray of light hits the plane, the stronger the light will be at that point on the surface. And the opposite is true as well: the closer the ray of light is to being parallel with the tangent, the weaker the light will be. This method also works for 3D objects.

In this example below, the blue plane is unexposed to the light source, so the yellow point doesn't receive any (additional) light.  

Then once you understand this concept, you'll realize that this applies to shading many other things, such as this muscly arm by ShahmiMSD on DeviantArt (notice the shading of the veins too).

That explains the basics of shading. I hope you found this blog helpful!

Specular Surfaces

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Hello everyone! I've been wanting to make a blog about my monster spriting process in Aseprite. I've wrote some similar blogs to this before but I think this one will probably better explain how I sprite any monster in general, so let's just go over it here, starting from the beginning: sketching.

Why Sketch?

Let me ask you something. If you wanted to create an artwork without a sketch. Do you think you could you do it? Well it's actually possible! you could actually just go straight to drawing in all the final details on a canvas. But would that be easy if you don't have anything telling you where and how to draw in those details? For me, that's extremely difficult. That's exactly why we sketch!

What Is A Sketch?

I think of a sketch as visual information on a canvas that shows me, at least accurately enough, where and how I'm going to fill the canvas with details to complete an artwork. It doesn't matter if I'm drawing characters, environments, inventory items, or miscellaneous objects. For me sketches always serve the same purpose.

How Detailed Do Sketches Need To Be?

How detailed a sketch needs to be is entirely up to you, but the key idea is that it should tell you, again, where, and how to draw in details on the canvas. If your sketch is too simple, well you'll still mostly have the same problem: you don't know where and how to draw in the details on the canvas. If your sketch too detailed... that's great! Just be aware that the more detailed you want a sketch to be, the longer it's going to take. Why does that matter? I'm saying this because sometimes you're better of "half-detailing" a sketch, just so that your brain has enough of an idea of how to finish the drawing, and then jumping straight to drawing in the final details in full color. This way you will save time, and spending time wisely is important if you want to go professional or just want to get more art pieces finished.

How Can We Sketch?

I draw in Aseprite specifically, but all we need is a canvas and a layer to sketch on. 

Just as an example, I'm going to use a finished drawing of a demon creature I drew recently called a hell guard (inspired by Doom and Diablo videogame series) and pretend I'm drawing him all over again, but it will explain what I typically do to draw any monster sprite, and this is the same idea if you want to draw a backgrounds as well, but if you ever plan to draw a monster and a background on the same canvas, then you're better off using two sketch layers instead of sketching the background and monster both on the same layer. 

With that said, on the blank sketch layer I've just created for the monster, I would make the sketch! The goal of the sketch is to show basic information of the monster like the monster's pose, how bulky or how skinny he is, his footing, how he holds his weapon, and some breakdowns of the various parts. Sketching can take some time, but it's often more efficient to plan enough of the sprite first  so that our brains can more accurately imagine how to finish the the sprite. Hold off on detailing or polishing until you can see where all the details roughly should go.

This sketch doesn't tell us the exact design this demon is going to have, but we can see where everything needs to go. We can see his weapon, his legs, his torso, his pauldrons, his head, etc.

Designing

This part is trickier because our sketch doesn't provide full design information. It just shows us the relative areas where we should be designing parts of the monster's sprite. This is the part where I do one of two things on a new layer above and in grayscale or monochrome:
A: I try to design the monster without references
B: I look up references, then design the monster

I'll often try 'A' first, run out of ideas, then try 'B', and this typically works for me.  Pinterest is great for viewing monster art and organizing your favorites (No way to do that on Google images unless you save them to your device). For example, on Pinterest I have categories for demons, undeads, golems, and knights, and they are filled with endless kinds of respective creature designs, so I pretty much can't get stuck forever as long as I keep searching for inspiration to fill in the parts of the canvas that are missing.

Here are some possible designs he could have had. Some we're actual designs I've tried and some I just sketched for the sake of this tutorial.

Coloring and Polish

We don't need to get the grayscale/monochrome designs perfect and that can be time consuming, but what we do need is a polished monster sprite in full color.  With sketches as detailed as these, I would just start trying colors on a new layer above and the coloring process is also when I decide what I want the final monster design to be.

Those are my thoughts about sketching a polishing monster sprites so I hope you found this blog helpful. Thanks for reading!

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I haven't tried it yet, but this game looks good.

Hey so as promised, I'm talking about pinkies today! Pinkies are the demons that run at Doom Slayer and try to bite him, usually in packs. As I originally planned, I wanted to have Doom guy cornered in the upper right corner of the mockup along with the pinkies. The planned pinky locations are labelled with big pink dots.

Here is reference of what the demon looks like and we have a whole sprite sheet for the turnarounds.

So with that, I started my sketches of two pinkies. Here we have the two pinkies. They are facing the proper directions I want them to, but currently there are many things that can be improved:
- They are not in running pose yet
- They lack proper lighting
- The horns lack proper colors
- Their heads are too small
- Their mouths should be bloody
- They lack toes
- The anatomy of their legs should be more demon-like

So I just go down the list trying to fix this issues. The next thing I was testing out was shading. The colors are still off, but now we get the sense that light is coming down from the sky.

Next I adjust the size of their heads.

And then we can't just leave them in a basic standing pose if they're supposed to be charging at the player so we have to fix the poses, as well as the anatomy of their legs. Although the anatomy of their legs still aren't perfect, they're improved and look more demonic. I also gave them drop shadows at this point, though I think we still should blend the edges of the shadows with anti-aliasing.

Here is where I start getting into the polishing-related steps, such as cleaning up shapes and making smaller details more clear. It's a drastic improvement and these sprites would look good enough to put into a top-down Doom game, but we can still take these pinky sprites further than this. I changed up the colors of the horns which makes the demons look better, but I'm still not satisfied with those horn colors and we still need to make the mouths bloody.

So then here I do make the mouths bloody and try to blend the shadows with the ground better, but still could use some tweaks.

Here I was testing out a darker lighting for them... but accidentally made them too saturated purple and it kind of hurts my eyes! At least the drop shadows look nice now and the anatomy of their feet are improved even more.

And here are the final tweaks I made to the pinkies. Also completely unrelated to the pinkies, I re-adjusted the lighting for Doom Guy. He has less "sunlight", which is accurate because there's no sun when you're in Hell! Only evil darkness! But a plus for making him darker is that now we can give him a magma rim-light that really pops now.

So that's it for the pinkies and Doom Slayer. I'll have to figure out which thing I want to draw and talk about next. Thanks for reading!

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     Hey I'm back! I did say I was going to draw some pinkies for this discussion, but I've changed my mind and I'm saving that for later. I want to talk about designing the bridge first. It's difficult to do something like design a Doom style bridge because it's not like we can get a single image of a bridge directly from the Doom series and directly fit it into this mockup. No, we actually have to draw something inspired instead. We have to scrounge around for multiple references to study as well as rely on our understanding of what bridges are and Doom's version of Hell, then finally, design something from our imagination. I am by no means a super great environmental artist yet, but we all have to practice right? All I know is that a bridge is a structure that living beings use to cross gaps and I know that Hell/Gothic culture typically features spikes, chains, gargoyles, other sculptures, pointy, arches, dark stonework/metal, and tortured bodies, etc. On top of that, the classic Doom games such as Doom 1 and 2 don't have the most detailed environments to be totally honest with you! But Doom 64 does environments a bit better and the more modern Doom games such as Doom Eternal or Doom: The Dark Ages does environments in much higher detail which can help serve as reference. Also the Diablo series and Quake series can help. With that said, I advise reference scrounging for any references that include something you can use to improve your bridge design, or at least get your imagination going.
     Here are some references I thought we're useful. First up, We absolutely need the flooring to cross for it to be considered a bridge in the first place and I liked the stonework here as well as the grated hole through the bridge.

Next I knew I wanted something at each of the 4 corners of the bridge, like gargoyle or brazier pedestals or something like that. So I started looking at some Gothic pedestals. I've already seen plenty of Gothic pedestals which sometimes include floral carvings, sometimes other ornamentations included, or gargoyles on top of the pedestals, but here are 2 examples of such pedestals.

Then I was pretty sure I wanted an arch design over the bridge, but I wasn't sure if I just wanted one in the middle or one at both the front and back of the bridge. Now... I'm pretty sure these are AI images unfortunately. I was just looking up hellish arches and gateways and these popped up, but eh... they're alright I guess.

If you were to try to design your own hellish bridge, you could look up hellish chains, braziers, imprisoned skeletons, or staked corpses too. I was going to include some of these extra details but I couldn't figure out exactly how to fit them on my bridge so I didn't include them.
     Anyway now onto the drawing part. So I started sketching around. Starting with some gargoyle pedestals and some steps.

The floor was looking too plain so I started scribbling some stone tiles in and I tried added some bony looking spikes on the side just to see how it would look.

I started trying out a quick gothic inspired arch.

I tried out some chains from the lava attached onto the sides of the bridge.

And then I realized "Wait, I should double check how big this bridge is compared to Doom Guy" so I brought him over for scale reference. The arch was too short previously so I made it taller. I also tried out some purple torches/braziers, but ended up scrapping them. Also notice on the bottom image with the braziers that I added a demon face on top of the arch! I ended up keeping the face.

Here I went with 2 arches instead of one and added bony spikes around both arches. It looked awesome! I wanted to have little gargoyles on the pedestals chained by the neck, but I ended up scrapping them. Maybe I'll add them back later though. I'm not entirely sure.

And then I figured "Hey! This looks like it could work. Let's do it." So for the most part this was the design I went with and I just spent a good a good 2 or 3 hours just cleaning up the shapes and colors. I also tried to make the arches look more sci-fi and bony and changed the helmet on the demon face to have a rune or sigil. Here's the final look of it (for now at least). I hope you like it! 

I think next time, I'll actually draw in the pinkies that were originally planned so get hyped up for that!

Part 5 - Pinkies

     Ok we're back. So yes we'll be adding Doom Slayer into our scene today. The plan is to have him facing down with his iconic double barrel shotgun. Why did I choose the shotgun? Because he's going to be tightly cornered by pinky demons and the double barrel shotgun is a great choice of survival in this situation! I guess a chainsaw could work too, but it's a little riskier because they have a higher chance to bite you since they're melee based creatures... so we're going with the shotgun!

Ok so the plan is to have him cornered where the green dot is and the pink dots represent the pinkies.

For pose reference we could just use a shotgunner, which are zombie men that shoot the player with their shotgun.

Then for Doom Slayer himself, obviously we have the cover art!

But feel free to always look up more reference as you want. As far as I'm concerned, he's a muscular green guy with a vented space soldier helmet as you can generally see here. His modern designs are usually more armored but I'm trying to keep things classic since I love the classics.

So the easiest thing to start with is a green blob and then just start iteratively drawing smaller and smaller details over him and then tweak the colors afterwards until he looks done. Here's our blob. We know he has a visored helmet with a vent positioned just by his mouth. I'm going to give him a gray helmet because why not? He obviously needs the shotgun so that he doesn't immediately get swallowed alive by pinky demons, and he has some fancy boots. I'm going to have his arm unarmored, classic-style. I'm just sketching in obvious Doom guy stuff for now.

Now let's just polish the shapes a bit more, possibly adding in a few extra details. We can add in a shadow underneath him.

Ok great but we still need to shade him so here's the blob with some shading. His legs and boots will be darker since his arms and shotgun will be blocking the sun (or whatever). Just shade it darker and it will look better, trust me.

Now we're going to shade parts of his sprite that are supposed to be round, like around the helmet, under his arms, around certain parts of his armor, etc. Let's see how it will look after that.

He's getting there! But this is a common beginner pixel artist mistake, at least in my opinion. Black lines can work well for outlines, but sometimes they're pretty unnecessary. For example, whenever there isn't such a big gap behind the black outlines, you probably don't need them at all and can replace those areas with soft shadows instead. Things like little crevices between armor plates, thin cracks on rocks, or the little slit between the two barrels of the shotgun, don't need a full back outline. Just a little shadow is all you need for these sorts of things. Maybe if I show you an edit, you'll understand what I mean more clearly.

Let's tweak his helmet design some more. I'm not liking it. I also want his head to be bigger, more like a "chibi". Also I want his visor to reflect his surroundings more. We can show the lava being mirrored in the left side of his visor, but we should also tweak the color of the visor in general because it doesn't make sense for it to be blue in this reddish-purple hellscape.

And then after tweaking the visor, doesn't it make the rest of the helmet's colors look weird? The gray isn't working. Why? Because we have to factor in the ambient lighting of the environment. So that's how I get this next helmet design with a slightly more purple tone. 

And then here's Doom Slayer a little more beefed up with better colors, generally a purple tint.

That's it for Doom Guy! Next up, pinkies! Be patient and I'll be back with another post soon enough.

Part 4 - Bridge

I wrote this tutorial super quick. It can help you draw shiny stuff better. Here

Hey guys, I'm back with some info about specular surfaces. When shading, be observant of what texture you're trying to illustrate. Is it rough like a stone?

Or is it shiny like these smooth, highly polished, metal chrome balls? Notice how these balls are mostly just mirroring their surroundings rather than just being shaded from a nearby light source.

What do we see in this metal ball below? Do we just see standard shading, or is it mirroring something more interesting? Possibly it's mirroring the sun, a long street, and some grass or trees beyond the sides of the street. Now let's show what happens when we take a shiny ball such as this one and gradually degrade the polish of the surface.

Adding some scratches and grime, it's still shiny, but the shine gets a little more distorted and unclear.

And here are balls that are rusting. The bottom one loses almost all its specular quality.

As you can see, the more rough a shiny or mirror-like surface becomes, the less it's going to have that quality and the more standard the shading will be. Once you understand this concept, you can see how this applies to swords for example. 

I hope this blog was helpful!

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Maybe you'll find ideas from "Dave the Diver"

This photo I took shows reflective rounded corners in my room. These rounded corners are mirroring the light bulb on the ceiling. Gems often are depicted with rounded corners as well and so we see the same sort of specular highlights.

I didn't finish all the items, but I was tweaking some of the sprites, mainly anti aliasing and specularity on some of the sprites. The gem is probably the biggest take away to study though. You can get pretty wild with the lighting on gems and it will often look passable, as long as you don't use black lines for the polygon edge lines.

I feel like it gets more and more difficult to market asset packs because market saturation increases over time, especially with artists doing free icons for Minecraft, Terraria, and other sandboxy games like those. People can just save them off Google images with no problem. Though it's not impossible to make an RPG icon pack do well financially I guess. I have no idea because personally I've never tried. And just about every gig in the world is competitive anyway so gotta still try. Sometimes I'd feel like quitting pixel art, but if I quit pixel art, I don't have any other career skills to fall back on lol... brutal but that's why I never give up on art, though I take breaks. You can see my portfolio on Cara by the way.

Good luck. Are any of these going to be animated? Would be a cool addition in my opinion.

I think the blue gem would look better without the black edge lines all over it. Gems should shine bright but the black lines are doing the opposite. Try using brighter edge lines instead and some rim lights maybe. You may want to look up specular highlights as well. The chest, sword, and shield I think would look better with specular highlights on the metallic bits.

How do you decide on a font?

Castlevania vibes

     Hey guys I'm back. This one is probably going to be a short talk about improving our attention to detail with art, but this is not to say more details = better art. Some art looks better without smaller details, especially pixel art at a small scale would be horrendous with too many small details. For example if we look at the grass in classic top-down pixel JRPGs, we don't see every single blade of grass, we kind of mostly just see large green clusters, but we still know it's grass due to context clues such as nearby bushes, trees, or flowers. I honestly think it's way better that way, because the grass would be too distracting otherwise. We do need to have enough detail for viewers to understand what we're drawing, but we don't always need every small detail and there are also diminishing returns and extra time consumption that come with adding smaller details. So that's just to get that out of the way first. 
     With that said, if you ever feel like you're not improving with your attention to detail and you keep drawing your sprites at the same level of quality each time, then I have a tip: Compare your art with a better example then find the MAIN key thing the better example does better, not just any small detail but the main detail or thing that substantially causes a better vibe with the better example, then try to add it to yours. Your drawing still won't be perfect, but this can usually make your drawing look a huge leap better. Again, I don't mean go spotting any little detail that you can add to yours. Spot the main difference then try to incorporate that to your drawing. Then you just keep iterating this process until you're satisfied with the drawing! 
     That's all it is, When artists start out, we are only able to memorize and draw out the key details of whatever we are trying to drawing. If we try to draw a dragon, we all probably know there are wings, a reptilian head, a tail, some feet, etc. then we look at what we draw and might think it looks terrible! But this is absolutely a continuous iterative process that all artists go through and why it can be important to spend a lot of time practicing drawing. We look at better example of a dragon again and might realize "oh right, I got the basic anatomy down, but my proportions are off compared to the way this other artist drew his", we fix the changes again "hmm... my whole dragon pose is off, so unfortunately I need to redraw the pose from scratch all over again" That's totally fine, just do it. We look again, "oh right, I totally forgot the scales and the little spiky horns on the cheeks!" This is basically how improving attention to detail works. It's iterative learning over a long course of time. It's not about getting everything right on the first attempt. Try to draw the key details, then the next set of key details, then the next set, and the next set, and so on. 
     If you draw a lot, there's just almost no way your attention to detail won't improve. The more consistently we draw certain things, the more we're going to memorize those details whenever its time to redraw those details with our next artworks. That all I got to say for this post. I'm keeping it short and no fancy images but good luck!

You may want to browse this channel DYA Games. Although I don't draw exactly like the artist, I've learned a lot about his pixel art aesthetics and borrow a lot his stylistic choices. Also his channel just serves as nice pixel art reference for small scale.

Bah you're right, I ran out of time, though these tips will probably still help in the long term! You'll learn to draw various monster features quickly and possibly start leaning into a certain style.

When it comes to designing, I generally have an core idea then I want to search up reference images to support that. Then I will mentally break down these references images into smaller, possibly usable features that I can add to my monsters.

For example, I was trying to draw a "Hell Guard" which is basically a demon that is strong and heavily armored and is assigned to just guard stuff in Hell. So then I just start looking up demons, minotaurs, demon/hell armor, demon weapons, even just igneous rocks, then I just pick the features I like and try to add them in.

Same applies to this maple story looking Yeti-shroom. I take a core idea "ice mushroom" then think hmm... mushrooms... ice... Oh! Yeti's live in icy areas! Maybe I can mix the features of a yeti onto a maple story looking mushroom?

Then here's a magical clown mushroom

and a killer coconut kinda inspired by the treant from Dragon Quest.

So again, I just take a core prompt idea, find supportive reference images that contain features or elements I think I want to use for my monsters, then finally I just start picking and choosing individual features here and there to add. I hope this helps.

     Hello everyone. It's been a long time since I've made an informative posts about pixel art here, but I want to talk about how I typically design monsters in pixel art fast and effectively!

Step 1 - Getting an idea

     There's always a monster to draw, everywhere. You just have to find them. The simplest way is to do some Google searches and just see what comes up. You can search up games, movies, art books, artworks, wikis, Dungeons and Dragons, etc. Personally I use Pinterest. There you can search up a variety of monsters and save them into categories. These screenshots are from my Pinterest account.

     Also be sure to have a clear description or definition in mind as you're designing monsters. For example, you may be trying to draw a dragon but you draw a wyvern because you didn't know they have a key difference in leg count! 

Step 2 - Sketching

     Once you have your idea, you're ready to sketch but you need a canvas, preferably not too big! Don't go making sprites as big as you want just because you can. If you do, you may spend a whole week on a single monster sprite, even worse if you have to animate it. The smaller your sprite is the faster you'll be able to sketch it. These Final Fantasy monster sprites I drew below are 32x32 pixels each and I drew each of them in 30 minutes or less. If they were even just another 32x32 pixels wider, they probably would have taken a considerably longer amount of time, possibly 45 minutes to an hour each. Though I understand that sometimes your sprites need to be bigger to fit in certain details that aren't possible at a smaller resolution. In these cases, go ahead and make your sprite as big as it needs to be but also keep in mind that you can sketch small then upscale later. 
     Another thing you can do to cut time is shade in grayscale or monochrome first then color later. This can help out a ton, especially when you are unsure how you want your monster to look at first and want to just experiment. It can be tedious to constantly pick colors for details that you're just going to end up scrapping later on so keep that in mind.

Step 3 - Coloring

     Okay so you've seen the finished sprites already, but let me take it a step back to show you how to get from A to B, hypothetically. If you have a grayscale monster, what you can do is apply a color "overlay". Essentially you can take a monochrome sprite and apply the base colors to that sprite while not having to worry about reshading!  You can adjust the opacity of the overlay depending on how strong you want the colors.  The colors won't look completely final because they'd lacked hue-shifting, but it's a quick way to start colors.
    Let me show you how this is done in Aseprite. First you need your monochrome sprite on one layer, then add a new layer above it for the overlay. Now set the new layer's mode to overlay. Test out difference opacities for the strength of the color.

     With the new layer you've just created, you can pick the base colors of your monster(s) i.e. red, yellow, purple, green, blue, etc. and just splash it around with a large brush. 

     Then you can merge the new layer onto the monochrome layer to get just one layer for simplicity, then erase the extra pixels. I'm just going to use the first row of monsters for this demonstration. 

     Now we have the base colors. From here, we can improve the colors, i.e. hue-shifting where shadows are more purple and highlights are more yellow. Start with the eye dropper. The eyedropper lets you quickly and accurately set your brush color to the color of any pixel on your canvas. Why are we doing this? The process involves picking existing colors then tweaking into the new colors we need. You can select the eyedropper manually from the toolbar

or set it as a your right-click shortcut in your "Editor" preferences. Go to Edit -> Preferences -> Editor, and set right click to "Pick foreground color".

     Be sure to apply the changes. Now you can right click on any pixel in your canvas to set the brush color to that pixel's color. For example I can pick the bright purple on the purple monster to steal that brush color. 

          With that new brush color, we can tweak it with the individual property sliders to get a new, more accurate color we want. Since I'm trying to simulate hue-shifting, I'd slide the current purple color closer towards yellow, but not yellow just closer (sliding the hue to the right a bit, getting a pinkish color).

Now we'll need the magic wand. 

     This tool allows us to select multiple pixels of matching or similar color. The tool functionality depends on it's settings so I highlighted them in red. "Tolerance" determines how exact the wanted selection of pixels must match by color in order to be selected with whichever one we click. For example, if tolerance is set to 0 and there are 2 pixels, to select both, their colors would need to be identical or else we'd only be able to select the one we click. "Contiguous" means adjacent or touching. If it's turned on, then all the pixels we want to select must be in the same cluster of pixels as the one we click.

For this purple monster, I'd have contiguous off and tolerance set to 0, except this monster colors got a bit distorted and compressed at some point and I'm not sure exactly when, but my point is they aren't identical so I set the tolerance to 10 instead, but now we can click an individual color on the sprite we want to change and bucket fill it with the new brush color. 

     Below is a quick rough edit just using general color tweaking tools and techniques

But it's mostly just to show you how the eyedropper and magic wand can be used to tweak colors quickly, in the end if I were to actually polish it all over again, it would end up looking like the one version below. All this combined is how sketch, design, and color monster sprites, except in reality monster sprites typically have more than one base color so when doing the overlay steps you'd have to use as many base colors as your monster needs for the different details such as the skin, the eyes, the hair, etc.

Anyway I hope my tips help and make designing monsters more enjoyable! See you in another tutorial someday!

Hey guys, I'm back with an exciting update! Today we have a pain elemental! This guy!

Originally we had a cacodemon up here above the lavafall.

Unfortunately I have scrapped him for now, but I replaced him with a pain elemental which I think turned out very nice, and I plan to have some "lost souls" which are the fiery flying skulls that attack the player and can also be summoned by pain elementals! So what was the process this time? Well, I just sketched him out like so first.

SUPER basic. Then I took it a step further. Notice the fiery gaze here in his eye and horns coming forth instead of upward.

He has the ability to summon flaming skull enemies from his mouth, and so his mouth has a fiery glow to it as well. The furthest out is darker red, but as the glow transitions deeper into his mouth, it becomes becomes brighter and transitions to orange, yellow, then white. So the color ramp goes red->orange->yellow->white.

Alright then we can do a rough pass on the shading. I basically just shade him from above, but notice the rim light beneath him coming from the lava.

If light comes from above, then there would be some shadow coming onto the lava, but since lava is pretty bright itself, we don't want to make it too dark. 

The shadow also helps his sprite pop out a little more, but we still need to give him a noticeable outline, so let's do that now.

Ok and then I polish his sprite, BUT I included lava oozing from his mouth AFTER this first pass. It's too much thinking to do it all at once, so I do this simpler pass first. Notice that I use more colors here. More colors help improve the shading here. I made the outlines and shadows darker (including the lava shadow too) because I need his sprite to pop out enough against the lava background so you can see "Oh! This is a pain elemental here floating above the lava!". It's also good to practice some hue-shifting with the color sliders. He's generally brown, but you can lean towards hellish red, orange, or yellow colors too.  The rim light from the lava onto his chin is brighter now to further help with the contrast against the lava shadow below. Lastly, a subtle detail, his eye now casts a radiant glow onto his skin just a little in front of the eye, but it's very short range. Polishing always takes a while, so be patient with it as it involves trial and error usually.

From here, we can add the oozing magma coming out of his mouth more easily, probably on a new layer so we don't mess up the sprite we already have. You may want to search up Venom from Spiderman because he's a character that has a lot of drooly spit like this. I also included some ripples in the lava below.

And this is what we have so far for the scene.

Ok thanks for tuning into this one. Stay tuned for the next part!

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Hey I'm back. Alright! Pinkies! So in the previous part, we got Doom guy into the scene with his shieldsaw. I figured this time we'll get the pinkies done to get some action going for the scene. I've refined their shapes a little more here. I didn't using reference yet, just memory and imagination, but here's some reference if you want it.

These guys have a hunched pose and they're pretty muscular (important when it comes to shading). If we were to shade them with light coming from above, we could have something like this (without shadows yet). Although looking back at the pinky facing north, I realized I should have shaded more further down his back too since it's slanted about 45 degrees and light would still be reaching it. Since I didn't here, it looks like he's standing perfectly straight like a human. A little mistake, but easy to fix. 

Before we do anything else, we need BIG HEAD MODE. Since we're doing this Zelda game vibe, these pinkies need to look a bit more chibi, which means their heads need to be bigger. So here's a revision. Be sure to eyeball Doom guy's head size to compare with.

Looks about right. Now, before we add shadows to these sprites, I want to adjust the poses so they look like they're running. Make sure the arms and leg motions "criss-cross"! That's not really what they do exactly, but they alternate. What I mean is, "right arm forward, right leg back", "left arm back, left leg forward", and vice-versa, I hope you get the idea. Pro tip: imagine or observe how you walk in real life! Anyway the result should look something like this. For the 2 pinkies facing forward, you can actually save time by just drawing one of them and then mirroring him horizontally, as you can see below.

Ok NOW we can shade in the shadows where sun light is less exposed, or whatever light source is in hell. Let's just pretend there's a big light source in the sky. We can shade under the arms, armpits, and add simple circular shadows underneath the pinkies altogether.

Now we just polish. Try your best! It took me about almost an hour to get these sprites polished because I struggled a bit with the shading and the leg/feet shapes, but you can try to observe my sprites, learn from them, and try to memorize these little details such as the shading of the muscles. It will help when it comes to drawing a Baron if we stick to that plan. I may want to place him somewhere else though. You should get something like this. Pinkies also eat HUMAN FLESH! So it makes sense that they'd have blood and guts on their mouths.

Ok that's it for now. I hope you enjoyed this read! Maybe next time we'll draw the Tomato! (Cacodemon) I'm not sure though. I don't always have a plan, but we'll figure it out!

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I'm back! In the previous post we made a pretty bad Doom sketch, and just to recap, here's what it looked like.

We are going to try and polish this drawing step by step. But what are those steps? Well... I don't really know to be totally honest with you, but we can start with some of the tiled rock and lava assets as this will establish the ambient lighting of the scene and will make the coloring process easier when it's time to shade and color the other assets such as the characters or demons. It's a good idea to have at least have one image layer for the environmental assets such as the floor/wall and dungeon tiles, and another layer for the characters, monsters, and gibs (classic gamer word for gory corpse bits). For now let's hide all the extra stuff except for environmental assets. Let's keep things simple. We don't need the extra stuff right now.

Now I didn't say this earlier because it really wasn't that important during the sketching phase, but when we're trying to draw in tiled assets  for something like an actual game, it's important to measure grid space to know where and how big everything should be on screen. For this mockup, let's try 16x16px based tiles. I think we can work with this resolution because Zelda: The Minish Cap looked great for it's tile resolution being that small.

Zelda: The Minish Cap

So I turn the grid on and set it to 16x16px as I'm drawing, starting with the rocks and lava then I just copy and paste them around a bit to see how they look in the scene. I know I want the floor rocks to look kind of crumby and the lava to look less plain somehow, although I didn't look at much reference yet and just went off of imagination and memory.

It looks better but could still use work. Looking at this where the rock and lava meet, the lines are too clean-cut. We have to make the transitions appear more natural. I ended up making some transition tiles with more jagged edges and  tried cleaning up the lava to see how it would look without as much noise.

But this is where I noticed that I mostly wasn't liking the colors for the rocks. Searching up reference of hellish landscapes and volcanic environments, I noticed that the rocks tend to be a lot darker than this plain basic lighting we currently have.

So I gave the rocks a darker purple color (with a little hue shifting  as always). Also notice at the transitions how the rim lights are red on the rocks. The purple rocks are receiving a rim light from the lava. Why is it red? I assume if you blend dark purple and bright yellow, you'd get a reddish rim light, although I'm not completely sure, though it looks nice at least so I'm going with that for now. I also added some little rock islands.

We still need the walls. I want the rocks to look jagged so I start with just 2 colors to establish the shapes, then I polish them after. Here I also tweak the lavafall using just 3 colors, it's mostly just a lot of downward lines to simulate falling lava. It's not very droopy though so it's more like hot magma rather than cooling lava, so you don't see horizontal droops here.

Next up, we'll talk about adding in Doom guy, then we'll do more of the environment work at some point although I'm not sure exactly when because I'll probably want to talk about adding pinky demons first. But that's it for this post so thanks for reading!

Part 3 - Doom Slayer

     Hey everyone! I've been planning to make an art discussion series about a Doom mockup. It's been tricky for me to decide if I actually want to do this or not because it's a fun idea, but it's not so straightforward like a tutorial would be. So with that said this is probably just going to be a series of discussions about how I'd draw a Doom mockup.  
     Now if you don't know what Doom is, they're a series of games (gory games) about a Mars space marine battling and killing demons trying to invade humanity. These games are very gory because they often take place in hellish or futuristic environments with a lot of brutally tortured corpses littered throughout the maps as well as brutal combat happening between you and the enemies. So if you don't like gore, you may have to avoid these discussions. The games are first person shooters but I plan to do a top down pixel art version instead and maybe have a level layout similar to a classic Zelda game or dungeon crawler. I've gathered some screenshots of Doom so here they are. You've been warned!

...and then we have Zelda over here. A peaceful game.

      So what I want to do is basically just slap the two ideas together (Doom and Zelda) and end up with a cool mockup that I can show around to people who like gore! Not really. I just want to have more mockups in my portfolio. My portfolio is found on Cara, but unfortunately Cara doesn't allow NSFW content, so at the very least I will save it on my Google Drive account.

Getting Started

     The first thing I do when I plan a fan mockup of a game is try to characterize what makes that game. For example, common things that characterize Doom games are hellish or sci-fi environments littered with dead bodies and demons that inhabit the levels, but classic Zelda games commonly have an overworld that has puzzly navigation elements such as upper and lower floors that the player can't always easily navigate to and from unless he finds stairs or ramps to climb, or rivers that can prevent the player from crossing unless they have learned to swim. After that, I have to decide which characteristics I want from both games to display in my scene because I can't fit all of them into the mockup. For example, I probably can't fit every single Doom enemy type into the mockup because we just don't have enough space here for that. But once I've decided on the characteristics I want from both games, I try to make a sketch that fuses the two ideas together.

      Although this sketch is lacking quality, the importing thing is that it shows a plan that we can work with to start detailing in the future. It's very hard to jump straight into detailing each of the assets unless we have at least a sketch first. I've sketched in some monsters and bits of gore here and there but it doesn't matter exactly which Doom monsters we want in the scene or exactly where each asset needs to go. I just know I want a hellish landscape with igneous rocks and lava, doom slayer, demons, gore, and a dungeon or something like that. Those are the key ideas that I will most likely keep from sketch and to the final drawing. I may add a locked gate before the dungeon because in Doom games you'd often have to collect keys to progress through the levels but I'm not entirely sure yet. But this is all I can say for this post. I'll be planning the next post so I'll see you in that one next sometime!

Part 2 - Rocks and Lava

Hello. It's been a VERY long time since of made one of these tutorials. Today I drew some monster guts from Zelda: Tears of The Kingdom and I'm just going to briefly describe how I drew them.

So basically they look like this.

The first and most straightforward thing to do is try sketching them at a very basic level. I'm using a grid of 24x24 pixels here.

This gives us the general idea that these are monster guts. Then I figure we can just add a little more detail to some of these guts, such as the veins and spots.

We could shade it right now, but a quick little shaded outline can do a lot for these sprites already without needing to figure out the shading just yet.

Now we can see that they sort of pop against the background and their shapes stand out. We want these guts to be kind of greasy, which requires some shine. You need to have some knowledge about reflections of light here. It's kind of like shading, but you need to keep in mind that it's more like showing the light source itself within the reflection of these guts. The light source would be pretty bright, such as the sun, which is what I usually try to illustrate when I'm doing these kind of sprite reflections. So you might get something like this, which isn't really super accurate yet, but I fix it later. (I leave the pink gibdo guts kind of dry looking so there's no reflection on that once actually)

Alright, now for some shadow. I use a quick overlay technique to get the shadows done quick. I make a new layer in Aseprite, set it to "overlay", pick a shadowy black color (such as just literally black).

and then you can draw over the guts in the new layer to get something like this.

And finally, just gotta polish the sprites. This just requires a lot of attention to detail, colors, shapes, and you just take the sprites as far as you want to go with them. Here's the final results. Have a look!

I hope you enjoyed this short tutorial. Hopefully I will be back for more shortly! (kinda busy but we'll see)

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Adorable game of the year

Best duck walk. I also wanted to say a big ol "THANKS" because you got me an art job from reddit.

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.