|
For some reason it is very time consuming for me to try and pick my own colors. It's difficult to pick the right hues and make sure that the 4 colors I'm working with for a particular object have enough contrast and enough variation to be able to accurately define the lights and darks of the object. Lately I've just taken to seeing some pixel art of a similar object and then copying their colors. For this particular wood I used 'Secret of Mana' as a reference.
I don't have a scanner or a pen + tablet combo so I typically just prototype my line art with the line tool in paint or the pencil tool in PS. Good clean line art is essential. If you have to change the proportions or shape of your image after you've shaded it's a long and ardous process. Much better to get all your proportions and shapes out of the way with some good line art so you can focus on your pixeling and shading.
You can see in this image I've got my basic shapes laid out and I've got a little reference palette for the colors I stole from 'Secret of Mana'.
O.K. I'll be up front about this, out side of a few art classes in high school I'm a self taught artist. I just do what I can make work. A classically trained artist likely doesn't start with the shadows, they probably start with the base color or something. Anyway, I started with the shadows and etched out the basic shape of the wood formations. At this point you should have something that is recognizable as wood.
In this next step, I ..uh.. keep working on the shadows except this time I use the next color. My advice with this step is to use a healthy amount of this second shadow color. If you just use it to put a one pixel wide buffer around your existing dark shadow color your wood will end up looking really flat. In this image you can see that I've used almost 50% of the wood area up with the 2 shadow colors.
Hmm yep, if you can't do this you shouldn't be pixeling ;)
So this step could have been broken down a little but it will suffice for our purposes. In this step we are starting our release candidate for the wood. When its done we should have something that's close to what our final wood will look like. Use your judgment when removing the line art and use the highlight color sparingly, especially in the places where you have a lot of shadow. It's ok to have areas of base color that don't have lines of other colors going through them. There is actually supposed to be two images with this step, but I lost one. Basically when I got done with this step the first time there was too much highlight, especially in the darker areas and they stood out awkwardly. This is the stage of the image where my meager art background fails me. I don't have any suggestions for how to polish the image at this stage. I just keep tweaking pixels, zooming out, looking at it, zooming back in, tweaking etc. Rinse and Repeat.
I did this art from scratch and I rushed a little, it's not quite as good as the original but I hope you get the idea. Good Luck!
|
