On my page! 😃 But here's the direct link https://itch.io/t/1864619/the-pixel-tutorial-homepage. Some tutorials might be a bit outdated so I will probably update them in the future. Hope you enjoy the reads!

Today I dedicate a tutorial to slimes! I made a slime tutorial in the past but it probably wasn't that great so have another! This tutorial won't be covering animation though, just specifically on drawing some different variations of slimes. Slimes are often depicted as green gooey round creatures but that's not always the case. They often slide or bounce towards the player in many games and try to attack them. Sometimes they have eyes, sometimes not. Sometimes they have limbs or can even carry weapons! Sometimes they are elemental. The list goes on but you probably get the idea. For now we're starting simple, we're drawing a simple green glob with eyes. First we need to make a good silhouette. 

1) Most artist know how to sketch the general shape of a slime, but I suggest making the bottom of the slime spread out just slightly. 

2) Define your light source(s), the brightest color will make this pretty obvious in most cases. On the left slime light is coming from the left, on the middle slime light is coming from the front, and on the right slime light is coming from above. These are general representations of how the light would appear on the 3 examples of slimes below.

3) Once you've done step "2)" you might have a general idea where the shadows will go (or where the sprite gets "colder") but if not, I will show some rough examples here.

4) Now that we know our light and shadow areas, we just soften the transitions between the two and add more contrast to the silhouette .

5) So if you want an expressionless slime that's it, but if you want you want to add a face go ahead. You might want to blend in the edges of his eyes and mouth to have smoother transitions as well.

That just scratches the surface of how to draw slimes. I want to show more examples going through more or less the same process so you guys have a better understanding. Here below is a Chu Chu slime from Zelda: Majora's Mask.
1) Sketch.
2) Light.
3) Shadow.
4) Improve shading.
5) Polish.

Another example. This time, Final Fantasy flans! With step "4)", I combined shading and polish into one step to keep it simple because I think shading is a big part of the polishing process anyway but only difference between the upper row and lower row is the outline style, upper being black outlines, and lower being selective outlines. 

Once you get good at drawing enough slimes, you can start getting creative and creating your own interesting variations. Here are some extra I did just for fun and I thought they'd serve as some good reference. You have your cube slime, blood slime, ice slime, and magma slime.

So anyway I wish everyone the best of luck with this tutorial I hope you learn a lot from it. See you later!

No problem, good luck!

Today I have another tutorial. This time we're drawing a desert rock, also known as mesas or buttes. The only difference between a mesa and a butte is the size; mesas are taller and skinnier while buttes are shorter and wider. To draw either one, the process is generally the same, but I guess the example I drew looks more like a mesa. These rock structures generally have flat tops with varying heights. We start a very simple sketch, this one is within a 96x96px canvas.

Now with give it some rocky colors along with some simple top-down sunlight. I find it easier to draw these with sunlight coming from the top rather than the side.

Now we break it down by showing smaller rock within the structure. I added a sandy colored background. Although the smaller rocks can form straight up , the overall structure will usually have more of a beveled cone silhouette.

We can add shadow to make the broken-down rocks more apparent. 

To edges of the rocks look too sharp. To show that the edges are smooth, we do this through proper shading. A common way to do this for rocks is to add another shade of color, usually a highlight but not necessarily. In this example, I apply it as if the sun directly hits the edges at a 45-degree angle This makes the edges appear more curved.

The structure looks void of crevices so next thing I would do is sketch some. The way I do this is drawing scratches all over either vertical or horizontal, almost like a grilled steak!😋 

Since earlier I said the sun is hitting at a 45-degree angle, we need to shade accordingly. The side will still be receiving light value equal to the top and the recently sketched crevices facing the sun will also be getting more light.

Now I get stuck wondering what to do next. I don't know what to do, when I don't know what to do I just add a selective outline then it usually becomes easier for me to see what details are missing.

The shadows on the structure away from the sun aren't thick enough. Adding more shadow will give the shapes more form.

Now it's looking pretty 3d but the silhouette of the entire structure still doesn't look natural enough. The large rock on the very top is too perfect so I break it down just a bit more. Also the structure just has way too many scratches that it looks too noisy so I remove some.

This is pretty much it for the hard stuff, now we just toy around with the colors and polish the sprite. For deserts, I like the rocks to appear slightly more red compared to things like sand. This helps distinguish the two. This also makes the desert air look a bit dustier.

Yep, that's pretty much it. Here's some other examples of desert rocks if you need a bit more reference. 

So that's all I got for this tutorial. Please practice your rocks! Let me know you thought of this tutorial and I'll see you around.

Today we draw a shortsword! Huzzah! I shall make haste because I want to play Elden Ring later on today with so many swords and knight armor sets you can choose from. Without further ado, we will use a decent sized 32px canvas which is good enough for smaller swords such as this. We're using a light blue background layer - not too important - and a sword layer. Draw a sketch. I use a simple brown hilt material that could represent a few possible things, maybe wood, leather, or wire. Then obviously I have the blade.

We can't leave the sprite looking cardboard flat so we need to position our sun somewhere. I choose top-left. This cause shadow to form at the underside of the sword (the bottom-right).

The shinier face of the blade I guess has some shading, but lacks reflection. The thing about sword blades is that they're reflective, like a mirror with more of a grayish metal tint. This reflection works pretty much like a mirror, but lacks the reflection of color, just light. So the grayish tint of the metal blade combined with the reflection of sunlight could look something like this. Almost like you can directly see the sun through the reflection, or at least some of the radius of light it's emitting.

The hilt needs a makeover. Although standard sword hilts can be brown, that is usually only for the grip. The upper and lower design can sometimes be comprised or steel, iron, or other forms of metal/alloys. We start the silhouette, then try shading.

Now notice how not only the sword is bright, but also the background. This actually makes us have to do more work, sorry. The problem is since the sword and background have similar light values, we have a hard time distinguishing the two apart visually. The solution, contrast! What artists will usually do is one of two things, add a black outline, or selective outline. Both are viable but I like teaching selective outline because I find them more advanced to teach, however I've definitely seen other artists make great use of black outlines so I'm not style hating! You can go one of two ways but I'm continuing on with the option on the right for the sake of this tutorial.

So as you can see, the benefit of applying contrast is that our eyes can easily spot the swords against the background, even when not directly looking at them. The other benefit is that when it is applied in shading, it gives the sprites more form. These swords are acceptable at this point but you can experiment if you want. What I did with these next two sprites is I try to make the selective outlines more apparent first and foremost, then with the version on the right I try to render in a more interesting way. The distinct differences with the sword on the right are the hilt design and the color. The hilt design has fancier curves which subconsciously makes me think the sword is more "royal" belonging to a higher class. The difference in color is that the shadows are tinted blue! What sorcery is this you ask? Let's assume this sword is located at a grassy landscape somewhere ready to be picked up by a player. This sword is in an outdoor environment. The thing about shadows in outdoor environments is they contain a bit of light from the blue sky. I'm no scientist, but an easy way to visualize this is imagine the landscape at night. The landscape is not just darker but also slightly blue because of all of the leftover light being reflected from the sky. Same thing with the day time but it is only more apparent where there is shadow. So final results below take a look!

I've you've made it here, you've reached the end of my tutorial! I wanted to get to other fantasy topics like shields, knights, and golems later on but this is a good start if you want to be able to draw things like knights in the future. I still need to learn all those topics too at the moment 🤐 so don't assume I'm the best pixel artist. I'm just a guy sharing some wisdom as go on this journey and it's been a lot of fun so far. I appreciate all the nice comments and stuff too. If you want to get some sword ideas I tried drawing a bunch of ones below based off Dark Souls. These are old and admittedly outdated but my favorite is the second one. That's all I got to say for this tutorial though, see you in the next one!

Really? Glad to hear it's well written then!

Thank you! 🙂

Gif! I love your stuff! Nice to meet you man.

Today I have another tutorial. This one should be simple enough to grasp. We're drawing a tortoise but in the process I think you'll learn a lot of little techniques the pros use when drawing pixel art (most importantly shading and selective outlining). To start, we'll be using a 32x32px canvas. This canvas will have 2 layers, one for a light blue background (color code #a2cddb) and one for the tortoise.

1. Sketch

Now we create a simple sketch. It doesn't matter too much how bad the sketch is for now because we will make adjustments as we go. Try to sketch the shell, the long head (curving upward), the feet, and the tail is optional.

2. Color

We can already start coloring if we really want. After coloring, you will need an outline to make it pop out against the background. In this example I will be using brown colors. I also drew lines for the shell pattern.

3. Shade

Yep, you heard me, we're jumping right into shading. I generally use an imaginary sun in the sky somewhere when shading so we will be shading from above. Make no mistake, that does not mean brighten the all the top pixels such as in this incorrect example below.

The sun (light source) is at an angle and you need to imagine the shell in 3d form. It is round in stature such as a sphere and so the light will be brightest where it hits the shell directly and decrease in value as it curves around the shell, same for the head. After shading, render in the shell pattern crevices like so. Keep in mind that the crevices aren't pure black because they receive light, and the amount of light they receive is relative to how direct the light is pointing into them.

We also need to add shadow where light reaches less, most notably underneath the shell where the legs meet, and underneath the tortoises neck. Similar to above, don't make the mistake of darkening all the bottom pixels such as in this incorrect example below. You can see here the each of the bottom pixels of the shell are darkened as well as each of the pixels at the bottom of the feet. This is what not to do.

Yes underneath the shell is generally darker but you want take into account how light actually travels. Sunlight hits the shell but is blocked from reaching underneath the shell, however sunlight is also bouncing off the ground (lets say grass). This bounce causes some of that light to reach underneath the shell, however with each bounce, the light loses some of its value. If that's confusing, imagine a cavern completely closed off from all light. The cavern would be pitch black. However, if there is even but one small hole exposing light, the light would enter directly through the hole and bounce off any surfaces it hits, lighting up the cavern within. Another thing to keep is mind is the light strength. The sun has pretty strong light strength causing its light to reach very far, however something like a torch doesn't have as much light strength so the its light doesn't travel or bounce around as much. Anyway that's enough science. Here's what the tortoise might look like as a result.

Simple edit... the shell top is still fully lit above, although now there is slightly less light where the legs enter shell. Big explanation, small change.

4. Selective Outlining ("Selout")

Alright now that you've hopefully learned a bit about shading, it's time to learn important technique called selective outlining, also known as "selout". In simplest terms, instead of using pure black outlines all around the entirety of your sprites, consider using outlines with the ability to receive some light. Where the outline receives less light, it is darker, and where it receives more light, it is brighter. Here's a visual representation. You can take a sprite like this and turn it into this.

It's still okay to use pure black within the outline, but in most cases, not all around. Only where the outline gets so little light that no color is visible other than black.

5. Polish

We're nearing the end of this tutorial! Just a few more things before we're done. First the shell. The shell isn't thick enough for the neck and tail to fit through so we go from this to this.

Next thing we fix is the eye. The eye looks too inexpressive just being a black dot, so now we draw out an actual eye. First you draw the eye, but then you'll notice it's hard to read against his skin so giving him a little bored eyebrow should add just enough contrast to do the trick.

Then his feet, his feet need some toes! However at this scale, drawing his super tiny toes could be a little tricky. If you try to add toes in front of his feet like in this image below, they appear too big, 

What worked for me was drawing them without making them protrude the silhouette so much. I had to adjust the pose of the legs slightly to do this.

Lastly the tail, the tail is just a little too thick and receiving too much light for being tucked away behind the shell. Also I made the tail curve upward instead of down, so here's the edit.

Those are all the main changes however being the stubborn perfectionist I am, I looked at the tortoise a bit longer and made a few more changes. You can see through this gif. It is mostly just me adding thicker crevices in the shell then tweaking colors for fun (hue/saturation/contrast), it's something I always love experimenting with at the very end.

But there you have it for the tortoise tutorial! I hope you tried and learned a lot from it. I always try my best to explain what I'm talking about but I never have any idea how I'm doing that so far unless you guys let me know so always feel free to comment or message me on Twitter or Discord. Anyway see you next time! 

Today I'm making a tutorial covering how to draw one of those giant monster dogs from the game "Elden Ring". If you need to get yourself familiar with what they are, here is a great YouTube video showing them in action! I haven't beat the game yet but they are some of my favorite enemies so far and really add to the sense of dread wandering within the rot-infested region known as "Caelid". So first things first, if you want to draw something, reference helps. You can either search "caelid dogs" or capture screenshots of them from videos with (Window + PrtScn). Technically, there are other smaller poisonous dogs in the area but Caelid is iconic for the large ones for sure. With Google, you can filter the images by size by clicking on Images-Tools-Size and the larger the better because they are higher quality images. 

Now, pick and choose good reference and scrap the rest. This one here is good because it just the entire monster of a dog up close. The reference is a little blurry but it shows a lot of what the creature is.

These ones have a better view of the teeth.

These ones have a visible arms and poses we can emulate.

So as you can see, they are basically T-rex dogs. I wonder how they got that way, maybe they were once normal dogs but mutated due to the scarlet rot infestation across the land. Either way, I will never forget the sheer terror of facing these insane creatures. Moving on... we will need a canvas. 128px should be large enough but we probably won't need the whole thing. I'm going to use a red background because the environment they are found in has red skies and it's easier to work with than the default Aseprite "checkerboard" background. This will also help with the color choices for the dog because it will have a slight red tint from environmental lighting. Then we sketch. When sketching, try prioritize the features from most important to least. It doesn't have to be in this order but for example...
Priorities
- Body
- Super Large Head
- Legs
- Arms
- Ears
- Tail
- Texture

If you draw the sketch too big or too small, you can always change it but it's better to get it right early on so you don't have to repolish all the details in the end. I'm going to include a side view sketch so you can see a clear pose and anatomy breakdown. This should make it easier for you to translate it into a final pose.

From here you can start drawing it with your own changes. I chose to draw it from the front with a slight angle because in game they are usually chasing you head on ready to chomp.

I gave him some simple dark gray colors for now but in the polish stage, he will be slightly redder from lighting.

From here we can see that we need to adjust his pose a bit. He's standing too tall, he needs more of a squat, and his arm look too dead hanging straight down like that so here's the fix below. I think the change in pose also emphasizes the size of his head a bit more.

I wanted to give him a more wild-aggressive look so I tried to give him a running pose with a tilted head. 

A really simple way to make them look just... pure insane is to make there eyes wide open and adding high contrast to it. 

Now is probably an okay time to start shading him. We can start adding some more believable lighting at this point and rendering out how skinny and starved these guys are.

I reduced the size of his lower jaw slightly just to give him a cute but disturbing puppy look.

There's a few variants of the dogs that have red glowing eyes for some reason and something about it I just find mysterious and eerie almost like they might have hidden supernatural powers so I went with it. Not to mention, but the red eyes blend well with the environment.

Giving him a dangly tongue definitely gives him a blood-thirsty look.

He seems to be lacking any fur at all so I'll try to render some at least on his face. This can easily be done by drawing just a few spikes jutting out.

I gave a scar across his main visible eye and stabbed him in the side. They aren't actually found wounded like this in game, but there is an area where "Redmane" soldiers from a nearby castle are discovered battling the dogs so I thought it would be a nice touch to the drawing.

Finally all there is to do is just polish. Not much else to say at this point, all the key features are in place, now it's just a matter of rendering out the details. However I will say, I needed to emphasize a few things here: the scarlet-red color in general, the number of teeth and teeth color, the demon dog ears, and the skinny-starved look. So these are the final sprites.

That's it for this tutorial. So far Elden Ring is a really amazing game, and I always look forward to playing it. I hope some of you will also give it a shot in the future but I'll see you in the next tutorial! 👋

Today I drew the Yeti from Final Fantasy 14. He is a huge furry beast that lives in the snow like any other yeti. He has sleepy looking eyes and two large tusks protruding  out of his jaw. I don't know much else about him because I never played Final Fantasy 14 but I just came across it on the internet and loved the design so much that I had to replicate it into pixel art! It was a pretty tough sprite to draw but I finally finished it and I'm very satisfied with the final result. I'm going to try to explain what I did to create it.

Step 1 - Sketch

Start with the most obvious features. Giant Head, big tusks, sleepy eyes, and a large furry physique. These are the things that stood out to me most so I made a sketch.

Step 2 - Fur

Probably the next key thing we need to draw is the fur but in order to do that, we need to do a little shading. Once we have a bit of shading, we sketch out little pointy tufts of fur onto the sprite. It's easier said than done but start by blobbing out some shading clusters, then take those clusters and make them appear jagged or wavy like fur.

Step 3 - Belly

If you look closely, you'll notice a small detail: he isn't completely covered in fur. He actually has an exposed belly so I made the change. It's just a sketch for now but I'll polish it later.

Step 4 - Color

Yeti's are often depicted having white fur but that's just the generic color all yetis have in common. Yes they have white fur, but some also have a slight tint to them such as this one so I gave the sprite a slight cold tint.

Step 5 - Polish

Now that we have most of the key details in place, it's just a matter of rendering them and cleaning up the sprite. This step took me a while so it takes some patience but it is the most important step if you ever want to finish any drawings you started!

Conclusion

So this is my final sprite. The key take away I want you to learn from this tutorial is how to draw fur and notice how much of an impact color can have on your sprites. I feel like those 2 things had a huge impact on this sprite even though they may seem subtle at first. The same yeti was actually a major inspiration for my Yeti-shroom sprite I drew a while back!

There's plenty more things to draw and learn but that's all the time I have for today so I'll see you in the next tutorial!

Pixel Tutorial Homepage

Today we're drawing a Marlboro from the Final Fantasy series. It is a large green plant-based creature with numerous tentacle protrusions and a wide gaping mouth. Its name is derived from it's signature attack "Bad Breath". They have plenty of tiny sharp teeth and in some games, have eyes. If you want to read more about them, here is the link to the Final Fantasy Wiki. Let's begin!

Step 1 - Sketch

For the sketch a 96px canvas should do, although we'll probably need to resize it later. Draw a wide oval shape for the head and give it a mouth. Sketch out at least 4 tentacles above it's head and imagine some tentacles beneath the creature.

Step 2 - Color

It is green so we'll fill it up with that color. The eyes tend to be orange or yellow. The teeth can be composed of bristles or tiny shark-like teeth (it depends on which game in the series), I'm going with the tiny shark teeth. The teeth are mostly white but with a slight tint to them.

Step 3 - More Details

We can shade now, but it'll probably be a lot easier to do that once we have more of the details drawn out. There should be way more tentacles, eyes, and teeth than the amount I currently have drawn.

Step 4 - Shade

Now we can at least attempt some shading. I did it pretty loose for now but mainly I want to highlight the head and shade the tentacles in a way that shows them waving around.

Step 5 - Resize

Sometimes as you're sketching out more details, you'll realize you want more room to draw so I expanded the canvas size just a bit and resized the creature.

Step 6 - Polish

Now that we have a decent amount of canvas space to work with and most of the priority features are in place, we can finalize the sprite. This step takes a while but you can do it 💪! Make whatever edits you want at this point. I wanted to emphasize the numerous amount of wavy tentacles and eyes but also keep them somewhat symmetrical. I made the tentacles on its chin more visible. I added in his gums which you see with some of the original designs of creature. The teeth and now smaller and more numerous as well. The tentacles below are finally rendered out so it can squirm around.

Conclusion

So this is the final sprite I created! Let me know what you think of it and please share your takes on it in the comments. The polishing stage took me a while but I'm pretty glad I did it and I'm satisfied with the result. It's much better than my older drawing of it this time around. Well anyway, that's all for this tutorial so I'll see you in the next one.

Today we're drawing a hedgehog pie from the Final Fantasy series. Like a hedge hog, it is has spikes on it's back. It is red in appearance and has green eyes. It is a pretty round stubby creature with a mischievous grin. It has arms and legs that somewhat resemble those from a raptor dinosaur. If you think they sound interesting, you can read more about them on the Final Fantasy Wiki. Anyway time to get started.

Step 1 - Sketch

From experience, I'm sure this sprite can fit into a 32x32px canvas. Going off the description I wrote above, I'm going to draw a round figure with a grin and spikes on it's back. The arms and legs can be sketched in very quick too, no need to get them perfect at this stage.

Step 2 - Color

Now we pick some quick placeholder colors. From reference, we know the creature is red and has green eyes so we'll add those colors to the drawing.

Step 3 - Shade

Start by shading the belly. It's the most simple to shade because it's very similar to shading a sphere. From there, we now have a good sense of light direction that we can apply to the rest of the sprite. I shaded the belly from the front, that's why the spikes in the back don't receive much light.

Step 4 - Nubs and Limbs

The limbs we currently have are off position, we'll have to adjust those. What I did here was render out the body and the head so that I know where the "nubs" will go (left image). Once I had that I could branch out the arms and legs from the nubs (right image). 

Step 5 - Polish

Now that our sprite pose is looking pretty accurate to the original creature design, we can finalize the sprite. This step is all about cleanup, rendering, adjusting colors, and adding in the small details. Make sure the bordering pixels of the sprite have good contrast against the background so that we can see the sprite silhouette nice and clear.

Conclusion

This is the final sprite I created! Let me know what you think and share your version in the comments if you want. If you have any more questions about how I created this sprite, feel free to ask me. Anyway, good luck and see you in my next pixel tutorial!

Today we're drawing Flans from the Final Fantasy series. They are essentially the slimes of Final Fantasy and are flubbery like the actual flans that people eat. Here is a better description of them from the Final Fantasy Wiki. If you need visual reference of what they are, here are a few examples of what they can look like.

Ok so now you know a bit about them and what they look like so we can get started.

Step 1 - Sketch 

They have round heads and the base of them is spread out a bit to look smudged as you can see in the images above. They also generally have slobbery mouths  We need to incorporate that into our sketches.

Step 2 - Rough Shade

In this step, we don't need to get the shading perfect but we at least need to define our light sources. This should give the flan features some form, especially for  the smudgy smears at the bottom. 

Step 3 - Reflection

This step is a bit similar to the previous step, but just taking it to the next level. These creatures are wet and slimy so they need to appear like it. You'll need to pick very bright colors here and show the light source within the reflection. This step can be tricky trying to understand how reflections work so don't beat yourself up. Even for me, drawing reflections takes a bit of trial and error still but eventually I come up with something good enough.

Step 4 - Polish

Once you're done shining your sprites, it's time to make sure your sprites have a nice silhouette and don't have any sketch pixels left over. Also double check your reference to see if any important features are missing. For example, I forgot to give the blue one arms! In this stage, you can tweak colors as well. Sometimes the sprite doesn't have enough hue shifting or saturation but those things add so much in the polish stage so make sure you at least try toying with the colors, you might be surprised. The polishing stage can be the most time consuming because it's all about cleaning up and getting in all the final small details, but for me it usually the most fun! So here are the sprites I'm satisfied with. I'd love to draw the Royal Ripeness boss version someday and teach it to you all. But for now that covers this tutorial.

Today I'm covering a tutorial on how to draw one of these fireball creatures from the Final Fantasy series, they're called bombs (can I say that on here?). They are recurring enemies throughout the franchise. They attack the heroes and will eventually self-destruct. They change in appearance from game to game but they will have the same general features. You can read more about them on the Final Fantasy Wiki but here's 2 sprites I created. The left version is the new one I created for the tutorial and the right is the older one I did but both look good to me so I thought I'd share them both.

Pretty awesome right?  Well if you want to learn how to draw one yourself, I'll try to recreate it from scratch now that I have an general understanding of how to draw one.

Step 1 - Canvas Size

I used 32px. When I pick creature canvas sizes, I like to keep them in multiples of 16px. Sometimes I'll try sketching them in 16px first just to see if they'll look good, but for this sprite I needed more room to work in the smaller details as you can see here. On the left is 16px, a bit too difficult to pull off, so it's probably better to go for 32px.

Step 2 - Sketch

So if you look at reference. You'll see a bunch of fireball creatures with faces, and tiny arms. That's pretty much all they are. You can start by sketching in a circle shape with spikey flames behind it, then sketching the mouth and eyes. Arms will be added later. If you're using Aseprite, it really helps to the preview window open while drawing so you can always easily see how your sprite looks.

Step 3 - Color

Fire colors usually range from red to yellow. The way I drew it is so the darker areas of the creature appear redder, and the brighter areas lean towards yellow. I know I sketched the sprite in black but generally speaking since fire glows we won't be using too much black. Too much of it makes the sprite look too dim, however black does give nice contrast and helps the readability so don't completely avoid using it! You might end up having something like this.

Step 4 - Detail

So this is good but the sprite is lacking character. The eyes shouldn't be void of color and the tiny arms add a lot of character so we need to add those in. The eyebrows are pretty big and pointy too, don't forget. Make sure the teeth sharp and noticeable.  These are the final touches I added to the sprites.

So there you have it! Another tutorial crossed off my list. I hope you learn a lot from them and I'm always glad to see your progress as well so feel free to share yours if you want. I'll see you in the next tutorial.

If you want to make a Metroidvania game that takes place on earth, there's a good chance you'll need dirt and grass sprites. This tutorial will scratch the surface just a bit. I'm by no means an expert on environment art because I spend most of my time drawing characters but I think this will help a bit. For the dirt, I like to give it a very pebbly look. I start off with a typical 16px brown square then break it up into little stone shapes. You can really do the shading process in any order you want but this is the order I did.

So you'll get something like that, then you need to test it to make sure it tiles seamlessly. If it works, great. If it doesn't work, you'll just need to tweak the ends a bit. And if the color isn't working out for you, you can always change it like I did.

So that works enough for me, time to add grass. Grass is pretty green and pointy so we can start by sketching.

Pretty simple, but we always need to test out our progress so here's how a bigger picture of how it might look.

Looks okay but a bit plain. The light is everywhere and it burns my eyes. Also the transition between the dirt and grass looks too fake. We need to blend it somehow. What I did was add more shading and made it hang over the dirt a bit like a blanket.

This is better but still burns my eyes because those pebbles are too dang distracting. We need to tone it down a shade and also in "Metroidvania culture", only the border tiles receive the most light from the sun while the tiles tucked behind receive less light.

So there ya have it. I'll stop here and maybe continue this later but you can start many different outdoor environments with this knowledge. This tutorial was just to get some of some of you into tiling. I might want to draw a cemetery a cover another tutorial on it similar tiles so this is a good start. Well see you then.

Here you can find links to all my tutorials! Feel free to check them out! I will continuously add more to the links as I pose more tutorials.

Drawing Slime Creatures

Desert Rock

Shortsword

Tortoise

Caelid Dog (Elden Ring)

Yeti (Final Fantasy 14)

Marlboro (Final Fantasy series)

Hedgehog Pie (Final Fantasy series)

Bomb Creature (Final Fantasy series)

Dirt/Grass (Side View)

Flesh Burster

Wraith

Killer Coconut

Gargoyle

Bloodbane Skeleton

Skeletons

Skulls

Moblin from Zelda: Breath of The Wild

Clubs from Zelda: Breath of The Wild

Boulders

Bamboo Tree

Cherry Blossom Tree

The Flesh Burster from the Darksiders videogame series is a large fiery zombie that will attack the player and self destruct when it reaches low health. I really liked the design so I drew it and thought I'd write a little about my process. In case you don't know what it looks like, here is two reference photos.

So I start with a loose sketch. I use sprites I've created for size reference. For big creatures like this, I like to give them a hunched pose, and this one in particular has a big belly.

Then I block in some colors and give him a simple face. I'll add the gaping stomach later.

So the shading part is always tricky for me to explain but really I always use the same light source with each of my sprites so it's gotten easier for me but as long as the key features are highlighted and the light is guiding the viewer where to look, you should be fine. I want the viewer to immediately see the face, large arms, and round belly so those will be more prominent. 

The gaping stomach has teeth-like structures that cave into his fiery core. I'll just start with a sketch and polish it later.

Now he really needs those scaly spike features on his upper body and stomach at this point so I'll add those in. Because I wanted his skin to look tougher, I gave him a shinier shade of color. I tried to draw a material sphere for reference in case you want to study it.

He's almost done, just needs fire. I kept the fire simple, it's mostly a reddish aura outline surrounding the sprite border with flames spiking up above his head.

So that's it for this tutorial, thanks for checking it out. I'll see you in the next one.

Thanks bro!

I really like seeing rpg monsters. Like monsters from the final fantasy series or dark fantasy monsters based off D&D. But environments are also good to see. I prefer pixel art. 

I've been having a lot of fun writing pixel art tutorials in the 2D art section of the community forum and I like the community search feature because it allows users to search up my tutorials, however I think it can be even better if we were able to filter our searches by user. So if someone wants to search up only my tutorials specifically instead of pixel art tutorials in general they could find all my tutorials right away. Just a small suggestion.

Thanks for the nice words!

Today, I drew a killer coconut.... What is that you ask? Well, it originally was planned to be a spooky treant seed/sprout sort of thing because I've been thinking about making a spooky forest tutorial in the future but the result ended up looking a coconut, so obviously I named the result "killer coconut". Anyway lets dive right in starting with the sketch. I planned it to be very round like a seed, but with a "jack-o-lantern" face. It needed a way to move so I gave it two super tiny legs. Since it was sprouting, I drew leaves on its head. So the sketch ended up looking like this.

After sketching, I always jump right into rough shading. 

This is alright but since I was planning it to have characteristics of a tree, I needed it to have bark with cracks in it (but in a way, the result also looked a bit fuzzy like a coconut).

I wanted the lighting to be spooky. Purples and greens are great for that as they are very common spooky colors. I changed his eyes in this step, making them green and giving him eyebrows somewhat resembling  tree branches so I thought it was a good idea. At first, I tried using green lighting for the bark texture but it looked too odd to me because I imagine this creature being in a foggy forest at night so purple was the better color choice as it is a colder color.  

At this point I could already see where the sprite is going so I just started polishing it. Not much else to explain if you ask me but since he doesn't have arms to attack forest trespassers, I needed his mouth to look very dangerous like it could eat someone whole so I enlarged it. Since I noticed it started resembling a coconut, I made the sprout resemble a palm tree.

So this is that is final sprite! I always surprise myself with my own art somehow, it's awesome. But last thing I want to say about the polishing stage of pixel art is scrap whatever your sprite doesn't need! You want the viewer to be able to understand what your sprite is pretty easily so it's a good idea to consider what things your sprite doesn't need such as extra features, colors, noisy pixels, canvas space, etc. Not to mention this is very meditative! Anyway, I got nothing else to say for this guy. I'll see you in the next tutorial!

Thanks Theoden.

Gargoyles are creepy statues that usually resemble a demon of some sort, at least in gaming. They are usually placed on a stone platforms one way or another. If you look up reference, they are usually in a squatting pose with large wings. The one I'm drawing in this tutorial will be just that. To start, there always needs to be sketch so here it is.

As you can hopefully see from the sketch alone, it has a demon-esque appearance squatting on a block of what will be stone. Next, shading. Whenever I want something to look menacing, I usually give their eyes this sort of "evil eyes" expression, either with a grin or a frown. 

Next, the arms and legs. We need to make sure the shoulder, forearm, and hand positions are obvious to the viewer. The hands are supposed to be gripping onto the stone block beneath. Don't forget the knee and foot. The knee should be shown jutting outward. 

The fingers might be a little tricky, it even took me a while but they should be reaching over the edge while the thumbs hang back.

Don't forget his chest. Although we are shading from above and it is in the shadow area, it shouldn't be that dark since light is bouncing off the stone platform and onto his chest.

Now for his wings. I'm going to completely resketch them from scratch to explain how to draw them. Since they're demon wings, first we'll draw these curved scythe-like shapes.

Then we add another wing bone in between the two existing bones, there should probably be more of these in between but I don't have a whole lot of pixel room to work with.

Now we sketch in the "webbing". I don't know the anatomy term but it's the skin that goes in between the bones. 

Then we start shading. I'll start with the bones This part is mostly anti-aliasing to get a nice smooth curve.

Here we shade the webbing. The areas where the web and bones meet should be slightly darkened . Also we can show little cuts and cracks in the webbing with shading.

Finally emphasize the sharp  nails to the tips of the wings and the gargoyle is finished!

So he's done but we still need the stone platform beneath him. First I'm going to reshape it to give it a more interesting silhouette. Then I'll sketch the faces in. The stone is pretty old so it should have cracks to look aged. 

Now how do we actually render the cracks? They are a bit hard to explain but cracks emerge from the corners and edges of stones and can branch out into more cracks the stronger they are, generally forming a bunch of squiggly Y shapes. I know telling you that is still a bit confusing so I drew some breakdowns to show what I mean.

 Once you have a grasp of how cracks form, we can polish and finalize the sprite. Just for a little bonus you can try adding grass to the base of the stone.

Well this concludes to the tutorial and I really need to go to sleep so I'll see you in the next one.

Thanks a lot. I know finding pixel art tutorials has been hard for me to find so I really think we need more of them. Back then I would see a lot of great pixel art which was exciting to see but also a bit depressing because I couldn't draw like that. I need to bring that to an end! So I try my best to break down my tutorials because that's the only way artists are going to learn.

In this tutorial I'm explaining my process of drawing a simple wraith. If you look up "wraith" on Google, you'll see plenty of ghostly figures wearing large tattered robes with a hood. Wraiths come in many varieties but that's one thing they usually have in common. I hear that they feed of the life force of victims so maybe that's why they are usually illustrated reaching their hand out, however they are intangible so they cannot be attacked without magic. So going off that information, here's a sketch. 

When I imagine wraiths, I imagine tall slender tattered robes so that's why I gave him a very tall figure. We need to pick a light source, I'll pick the top just because it's easy to shade. To keep it simple, I'm only adding in one color for now.

That's a little better but his clothes isn't tattered enough. Let's add more tears and scratches to his robe in the silhouette.

I really wanted him to look intangible so I'm going to do that by adding fog at his base. Since wraiths are usually dark anyway, adding fog should be really simple as it doesn't really need too much shading. All it needs is a few clusters here and there.

At this point, I noticed his shoulder placements were a little too high so I lowered them. I also made him relax one arm just because I wanted to.

Finally I just polished the sprite by adding another shade then cleaning up noisy pixels. I got rid of the hunch to make him look a bit more humanoid like he still has some intelligence remaining from his former self.

That's it for this tutorial. Hope you learned a thing or two. Keep drawing!

In the previous tutorial, we drew some standard skeletons. In this one, we're going a little more crazy. I love not only drawing my skeletons, but also larger monstrous ones! I've been looking at undead abominations on Google and Pinterest for a while now and their always such a sight to see! I think for this one, I want to draw a muscly abomination type skeleton so I'll start by sketching it out. It's going to be larger than the previous skeletons we drew so we're going to use it as size reference.

Main things to note here is the bulky figure with a hunched pose. If we're going to draw a large monstrous skeleton, that's one great way to do it! For now, we're going with 2 arms and 1 skull but I could increase the count as I go. Next we need to take the details a bit further, block in some bones and muscles (or draw your own monster). For me, these don't need to be 100% realistic but the main bones should be obvious to the viewer. 

I now have a pretty loose sketch that I can analyze to make further changes. Something  about him looks too monkey to me, so I'll have to figure out what it is. I'll be right back after the changes.

So I think his pose looks better now. My guess is that his feet were too tiny, reminding me of a monkey. Just don't make my mistake if unless you're trying to draw an undead monkey. Anyway it's probably time to start shading him shade him. I broke down my final drawing into smaller bits so that I can explain the shading process a little more clearly. 

Bones

When shading bones such as ribs or limbs, I try to make sure they appear round.  I do that by showing light source projecting onto it directly and darkening around it with anti-aliasing. All it takes is a really small amount of pixel shading to do this. The result: 

Muscly Shapes

I honestly am not the best muscle artist but I know there are a few main muscles I need to bulge for my pixel art. There are mainly 3 I tend to show for the upper arm area: the shoulder (blue), bicep (green), and tricep (yellow).  

Bone Protrusions

When I show bones sticking out from muscles, I like to show a few tendons clinging onto the bone to make it look like the bone is stabbing out from within the creature. but it's not always necessary (like for the ribs on the right).

Blood

When drawing blood, you can have it drip straight down, or conjoin from the left and right then drip down, giving it a stickier appearance. 

Final Drawing

So here's the final sprite I came up with. I removed the huge shoulder from the original sketch I did. It added a nice silhouette but it just wasn't working out for me in the final piece. Since I ended up going with a bloody approach for this guy, I gave him a tongue to make him look blood-thirsty. I also added a goopy puddle of blood underneath him which reminds me of the zombies and mud men from the Castlevania series. Overall I'm really glad how this skeleton turned out. I really hope to see your guys' abominations. It could be a lot of fun if we all just drew undead monsters and shared them with each other. But anyways, that's it for this tutorial. See you in the next one.

Today we're going to try to draw some skeletons. In the last tutorial I talked about drawing skulls. In this one, we're going to draw the entire skeleton. So if you're comfortable with drawing skulls from the previous tutorial, it's time to move on to the next step. I took a simple skull to start with and gave the skeleton a pose sketch:

This will do for now. It's supposed to be his "battle" pose. Next we need to block in some more bones. 

This isn't super realistic anatomy since it's pixel art and I'm going for a cartoony style anyway, we just need to show the main bones like the ribs, shoulder, limbs, hands, and feet. Once you have those features sketched, practice some shading. I'm not sure but whenever I'm shading, I usually make the key features a bit brighter than the rest. Just a little thing to think about.

 So that's the skeleton I ended up with. I was satisfied with it but I want to take this tutorial a bit further by giving him various gear. If you've never drawn weapons and armor, you might want to practice those by themselves before adding them to skeletons but here were some examples I drew to give you ideas you might want to try. 

I will cover weapons and armor in a future tutorial because I think it's an important pixel art topic but for now this concludes the tutorial for now. Show me your skeleton drawings!

Since I love drawing undead creatures I want to explain my process of drawing them, however I can't do that in a single tutorial. Today I will only be covering skeleton faces. You can draw a skeleton face like this: 

This isn't wrong but they don't always have to look like that. They can actually drawn with many different facial expressions, glowy effects, horns, helmets, etc. We can start with the facial expression. When drawing your skeleton, you need to decide what facial expression suits it best. Is it mad? Happy? Silly? Crazy? Spooky? Evil? Grumpy? The list goes on... Here are some expressions I drew to give you ideas. 

Once you have decided the facial expression, draw it then shade it. When shading skulls, I usually make the brows, cheekbones, and forehead highlighted to give the skull some noticeable form. 

Now these are some great skulls but skeletons are usually conjured up by magic so it's nice to have some glowy effects. We can have their eyes glow, their mouth glow, their entire head glow with an aura, etc. There's many ways to do this. To share some ideas. I drew a few out. 

Also skeletons don't always just have a boring bald head. They can have horns or headwear such as medieval helmets, Viking helmets, or spooky wraith hoodies like these:

I you're struggling with your skeletons, I hope this tutorial gives you enough ideas to start designing your own. I will be talking more about skeletons in future tutorials.

Next Tutorial

These are very well done! Great use of saturation and minimal spacing!

The cat in the top image looks like a spooky witch's cat, implying that the character is a witch so I'd say the top image.

That's not a bad idea 🤔.

It's like a keese from Zelda BOTW!

Thanks! It definitely took a while to draw the whole scene but I learned a lot in the process.

Moblins are troll-like enemies in the Zelda series. In Zelda: Breath of The Wild, the first ones you'll probably encounter are found around the forests and Hyrule ruins just beyond the isolated plateau. These one's are brown and usually wielding Boko Bats. They look like this.

I drew one today and it turned out like this.

If you like what you see and want to draw like this, continue reading. I may have good pixel art knowledge to pass on. So how did I draw this? Well I looked at reference of Moblins from the game. I really loved the pose of the 3rd reference image I posted so I tried going with that. So I began a sketch.

I know it looks nothing like a Moblin yet but that's ok, it will get there eventually. If you don't know how big to draw your sprite, maybe you can compare it to another sprite. For example I made a Bokoblin tutorial (which I think understanding would help a ton for this tutorial) and I ended up drawing a bokoblin. Since I play Zelda: Breath of The Wild, I know how big Moblins are relative to Bokoblins. They are about this much bigger than bokoblins.

So since that size looks about right, it's time to move on. I started with the head.

I just wanted to get some features in like the eyes, nose, mouth, and horn since those are pretty important. Then I started the arms.

I wanted to show the different arm parts like the shoulder, bicep, and forearm. The hand isn't so important yet since I needed to add the boko bat first before I can draw his hand. Next up, the torso.

Simple, just his pectorals and his belly. We'll continue them later. I moved on to the legs.

Similar to the arms, I wanted to legs to show the different joints as well. Ok what now? Well looking back at this tough menacing moblin... 

we can see that our moblin's pose is off. It doesn't emphasize how strong and tough he is so I had to get the pose to look closer to that.

This is better. I also drew in a placeholder in red for the boko bat (his weapon) because it helps with knowing how the final pose is going to look. Now that his pose looks similar to the one we want it's time to start polishing the sprite! The polishing stage always take a while but it's usually the most satisfying for me. I went back to his head and started trying to really get the details in.

So now his head features are pretty well defined. I added his ears, teeth, and gave his nose crinkles like he has in the game. I also changed his colors to be closer to his original colors as well. This is good so I moved on to the arms a second time. He has pretty long forearms so I had to emphasize that, also he wears bands on them.

The more we refine the details like the head and the arm, the easier it becomes to imagine the final pose. This allows us to erase bad original sketch lines/pixels and draw new ones if we have to. I continued his torso some more.

This is pretty good. His pectorals are drawn more accurately and I gave him ribs and belly button to add more detail. I thought his waist level was a little too high and should be brought down a bit though so I ended up changing that later, you'll see. Anyway I redrew his legs.

Great. So he has some decent shading on his thighs, he wears leg bands now, and he has toe nails like he's supposed to but only one thing... He's NAKED! 😲 We definitely have to fix that as soon as possible so I passed him a loin cloth.

This is alright, but his loin cloth could use more texture, we can make it look more draped by adding some lines curving downward from his waist and we can make it look more tattered by drawing small tears at the bottom. I also took this moment to make him look slightly skinnier by making his belly cave in more.

Pretty much all that's left is to draw the boko bat and finish shading his other arm. I have a tutorial on how to draw the boko bat already so if you don't know how to draw one, I suggest you check it out. Anyway here's the final piece!

Thanks for checking out this tutorial. I hope you enjoyed it and learned a ton! See you in the next one.

Bokoblins are tribal humanoid creatures from the Zelda series. In Zelda: Breath of The Wild, they set up camps all over Hyrule. When they're not doing much, they're usually sitting by a campfire cooking meat. They are very territorial so when Link comes near their camps, they'll try to attack him on sight. They can wield a variety of weapons often crafted out of wood such as clubs, spears, or bows but the most iconic one is probably the brown one wielding a club. He looks like this.

I already drew him a while back but I tried to break down my process for this tutorial. As always, I start with a loose sketch just to know where in general his body parts will go. 

With this sketch you can already get a general sense of where the different parts will go (head, ears, arms, legs, club, torso). Then I add in basic colors, as well as a few simple details.

You can now see that he has a face, along with a horn and some clothing but he still needs a lot more details. We can start with his face. When I draw faces, I like to make the features pop out such as the brow ridge and cheek bones. The way I do this is with shading!

Now you can see that the face is a bit more defined, the brow ridge and cheek bones pop out a bit more and I gave him a pig nose, but the other parts of him still aren't super defined. Continue to shade the rest of his body. 

So now you can see he has a bit of muscle on his pectorals, arms, and legs but his equipment texture still isn't well-defined yet. We have to fix that. The club shouldn't be rounded off like that, there should be a wood chop there since it's cut from wood. His loin cloth should be a bit ragged and tattered and his wrist band should have a bit more shading to it. Also if you pay attention to the reference images, he has a tribal necklace so we'll add that in too.

This is pretty close to finished, the final step is just to polish. It takes a lot of careful attention to detail. Unfortunately I don't know how to explain this part other than constantly practice referring to reference and comparing your drawing to it. If you look at your drawing and feel like something is off, there probably is because you don't feel that same way looking at the original reference images. I noticed that way I currently drew him isn't hunched enough and his waist looks too wide for a bokoblin so I had fixed those things. I made his head a bit rounder and wider looking because they have pretty wide heads. I also gave him toe and finger nails. This  is the final sprite I ended up with. 

I was pretty proud of how it turned out so I gave him a full scene from Zelda: Breath of The Wild too! 

I should probably give him a bokoblin buddy though because he looks a bit lonely but hopefully someday I can teach you guys how to draw all of this one tutorial at a time! Alright that's it for this tutorial, see you in the next one. It will probably be on how to draw Moblins or something!

If you guys are still struggling, maybe my other slime tutorial will help. 

Chuchus are slime enemies from the Zelda series. They vary in appearance from game to game but today we're dealing with the ones from Majora's Mask. In Majora's Mask. Here are what they look like.

As you can see, their teeth are pretty ugly and they have eye stalks which is pretty cool. If I remember correctly, the green one always has an mana vial inside of him and the red one always has a heart. I drew some sprites of them which I think turned out good enough for a tutorial. 

So what did I do? I started with a sketch obviously. 

It's pretty horrible but at least you can see the blob is there along with eye stalks and an ugly mouth as it's supposed to. For the sake of time, I'm not going to explain how drew each chuchu variant, but for this tutorial I'll be explaining the green one and I think you'll get the idea for all the chuchus. I blocked in colors for the slime, mouth, and eyes.

These colors aren't final but they'll do for now. Looking at the reference I can obviously see that the slime is green. I can see that the mouth has a dark peachy color and the teeth has an ugly color as well. The eye's are mostly yellow so I used yellow to start with. Next I went for a bit of basic shading.

You can see that there's a sense of light direction now, there's light coming from somewhere above shining downward onto the slime. There's no light coming from under slime on our right so there's some shadow around there. The drawing still looks pretty messy though, for example mouth, teeth, and eyes still aren't well defined yet so looking at more reference, I drew a better mouth and eyes. He should have a slight grin and dirty colored teeth. Since this is pixel art, it might be a bit hard to draw all his teeth like he has originally but that's okay. Just draw the ones that stick out most. Most people won't notice or complain probably. Also the eye stalks aren't shapes like thin lines, the have a more droopy cone shape.

This is looking a lot better now however for shiny things such as slimes, I like to use strong contrast. The highlight color almost always comes pretty close to pure white when I'm shining sprites. Here's the color used. 

Just with that little small bright spot, he's looking a lot slimier now. What's next? Well, some pixels bordering his sprite still look a bit choppy and noisy to me. Also some things about him still look off just a little so I went ahead and fixed those things.

So for me, I'd say this is perfect... at least for the chuchu himself, however remember that he always carries a mana vial within him so we have to draw that. 

This is great!, but one very last thing for the green chuchu. Since it's pretty clear where the light is coming from now as the sprite is near completion, we should also know where the shadows go as well. The mana vial isn't completely translucent so it will block some light casting a shadow behind it, resulting in something like this. 

Now you can see the shadow coming from the vial is a bit thicker. So that's it for the green chuchu! Well done if you've made it this far! 👏You can also give him slight color tints! For example where he catches more shadow, you can use a slight blue tint, and where he catches more sun, you can use a slight yellow tint. 

It's a very minor difference that's entirely up to you but I just have fun messing with colors in the end. So anyway that's mostly it! The red and blue chuchu have more or less the same process and I'm sure if you can draw a green chuchu, you can draw the others as well. I have Aseprite so I just select the individual colors and tweak them. Anyway have fun and keep drawing! Or playing Zelda! Whichever floats your boat. I'm off to brainstorming my next pixel art tutorial! 👋

Boko Clubs are weapons commonly used by Bokoblins in Zelda: Breath of The Wild. They are made of wood and have bands on the handle for extra grip. They vary in size and shape but they all have one thing in common and that's that they're used for combat. Here are some images of Boko Clubs.

Boko Club

Spiked Boko Club

Boko Bat

Spiked Boko Bat

Today I drew a few but there are other variations of Boko Clubs and similar weapons wielded by "Moblins". Here are the ones I drew although the tree branch doesn't really count as a club.  

In order to draw these sprites, we're going to need to know how to draw wood for sure so that's why I though drawing the tree branch was a good warm-up. The tree branch sprite was rather simple to make because it doesn't need a whole lot of texture since it's so thin. We can start by drawing the silhouette and adding some basic coloring.

This is already half way there for the tree branch the next step is to basically polish the sprite with better shading and texturing. 

I'd say this is good enough. There aren't many noisy pixels in the sprite. The shading on the wood is pretty smooth and readable. The individual leaves are pretty well defined. I think it's time to take things to the next level so we're drawing a basic Boko Club now. We can start with a simple silhouette as usual then adding colors.

All that's missing now is shading and texturing. To start the shading, we can compare the shading to that of a cylinder. I know they're not exactly the same but there is enough similarity to use as reference. So looking at the cylinder, I added some basic lighting to the head of the club.

The texturing is a bit complex but hopefully I can explain it so that it's a bit easier to understand. Here is my finished Boko Club. 

So basically, I made the texture very rough and lumpy because that's what you'd expect from the texture of tree bark. There should be little cracks and irregular bumps on the club because it basically comes from the chopped remains of a tree. This might take a while and a bit of practice but once you learn this, the future clubs should be a lot easier to draw. Next up is the Boko Bat which is basically a larger version of the Boko Club.

Since the Boko Bat is very similar to the Boko Club, we can actually use the original Boko Club to start with. I took the head of the original Boko Club and just extended it out a bit. The silhouette should be narrow by the grip and get wider towards the other end. 

Since hopefully you didn't skip ahead and we both now know how to draw wood texture, I'm pretty sure you can fill in the blanks. Keep in mind that the Boko Bat head isn't the same original shape as the Boko Club so you might want to change it. The end of the Boko Bat head resembles more of a pointy tree trunk than a chopped stump. Once you finish the bat we can try adding spikes to one. 

I drew another variation of the Boko Bat just to add more variation to the new design coming up, the "Spiked Boko Bat".

This is a good base to start adding spikes. As you're adding the spikes, the club would probably catch more shadow around the spikes so keep that in mind as you're shading.

 Once you finish the sprite, maybe we can do one more, the smaller "Spiked Boko Club". It's similar to the original Boko Club but flatter with spikes wrapped onto it by ropes. Since it's flat, the shading would be flat as well so there wouldn't be as much shadow around the right side of the club as the original Boko Club did.

This is a good base, now we need to attach spikes. We can blob in some spikes and overlapping ropes to hold them in place. 

After that, the final steps are shade and polish. Similar to the spikes on the "Boko Bat" we drew earlier, adding spikes and ropes to this club would also cause a bit of shadow around them. You'll probably need to zoom in when you're shading here but by the end of drawing this sprite you should see nice dark lines defining the entire shape of the club.

I think that's all I have for today's tutorial. I hope you've reached the end and learned a lot. I'll try to continue adding more tutorials in the future.