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! 👋