Realistic pixel art

December 30, 2009

Realistic pixel art. When do we call it realistic, and whats the fun of doing this with pixels? Lets find out!

I discussed this topic with Varock Shade, who made a few pixel arts from photographs.

What is realistic pixel art?

Realism comes in many aspects. You could use realistic shapes, realistic colors or realistic proportions. If you would like something perfectly realistic, you better just take a picture. But with realistic shapes and smooth color contrasts, you can still give your own twist to it.

Portrait

pixel_portrait3_png

<- “A Pixelated Photograph” by Varock Shade – WIP and Original photograph

Varock Shade: “What I did with this portrait was leaving detail away. The hair locks are not visible in all places, you can not see her freckles and  moles.  If I did put all of them in there, the image would get much to busy. With pixel art, I have a limited amount of space and colors to use. One off pixel, like a mole would draw all attention of the eye and destroy the smoothness of the surfaces.

The whole face is dithered, to make nice transitions between colors and make everything smooth. However, you have to keep in mind that it gets a lot harder to have the skin still seem shiny with all this texture over it.”

portraits

The above image is by Alex Bond

It is again a portrait made by redrawing a photograph, which I was luckily able to find. Every thing is in proportion, every detail is visible. However, his version only uses a few colors, features dithering, and is much more stylistic than the original. Id call this a nice example of realistic pixel art, even though its so different from the next portrait:

pixel_floor_final_png

“Wind blowing trough her hair”, again by Varock Shade. – Wip and Refference

I think this is beautiful, I hope you do so too. It was recently finished.
Do check out that WIP.

Dithering and Anti Allias

Both two important terms for realistic pixel art. Required for smoothing things out, and taking away the pixelly feel.
Taking away the pixelly feel??? But then why would you still make pixel art?

I personally think that in a lot of cases you can make things  pretty and pixelish with colors. Like in Alex Bonds drawing that is very clear.

But in some cases, just having the idea that this is made pixel by pixel is enough. Like in this portrait.

sarahbrightmanportrait“Sara Brightman”, by Andy Oakley – WIP and referrence

If you zoom in on this beauty, you will notice the excellent dithering, and Anti Allias mastery! This is 16 colors.

However, to most people this will look like a photograph.

Until now I have only been featuring portraits. The reason to this is quite logical: Portraits have to be perfectly realistic or you will immediately notice. For most objects goes that they are originally designed by humans already. So if you alter that design, it will still look like the same object, as it is still human made.
For example, you can think of a thousand different ways to draw a toaster. The proportions of a toaster are not important.

Of course plants and animals are not designed by humans too, but they are less recognizable by the human eye.
This is also why we can’t keep recognize cats by their faces. Or at least not when you have to pick out of a 100. With humans, you can browse trough a database of a million different faces, and still know which ones the people you know are.

So, to make a face look realistic, it has to be very exactly right, especially if you try to copy someone specific. That’s a challenge!

A bit of it goes up for human bodies too, but often people wear clothes, and if you are drawing nudes there is still less detail than in peoples faces.

However, I here have a picture of a car.

pixel_car3_png

“Lisa’s Little 206″ by Varock Shade – WIP and Referrence

Filed under: Showcase, Style
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Coloring lineart

November 20, 2009

There are quite a few people allowing their linearts to be colored by other people.

What can you do with these? How can you make the artworks unique, while respecting the original?

Personally, when I color other peoples work, I am having a big problem on figuring where to start.
The people who made the linearts work in a totally different way than I do, so it feels unnatural. Also, I can often not imagine how those drawings would look colored, while I can with my own work.
I might paint over it, again and again. But how do other people do it?

Last week, the pixeljoint challenge was to color one of arachnes linearts.

I send out quite a few requests for comments on artworks from the creators. I got a lot more replies than I had expected! To keep the article interesting I decided to not put in all replies I got. I am sorry for that.
However, in this article you can find all the art works and their full descriptions. So for more inspiration, please go there!

I am going to feature some of the entries, and say what I think of them. Read on!

Made by Elk and Jeremy

Okay, so here are two completely different versions of the same creature.
The first one is made by Elk, the second by Jeremy. The original lineart is here.

In the first one, Elk gave the creature a beautiful shiny skin. Defining each scale, making it look like something snakelike. Set on a beach in a shining sun, it gives the feel of an chameleon too.

Elk:
“My aim is to create realistic pieces with alot of depth fusing the object (outline) with the background seemingless. Realism is important for me there to make it pretty and appealing for the viewer, the balance of colors within the picture (different saturation in objects i.e), being not 100% accurate but still calm for the eye.”

Jeremy however clearly did not go for Realism. A distinct color style, defining every muscle. It stands out very well on the dark background!

Jeremy:
“I liked the challenge, it was quite different in that the focus was on rendering rather than form, but not inhibiting creativity.
Comparing my version to Arachne’s work, colours and rendering style are the biggest difference, Arachne uses her flawless dithering, something I’ve found it’s best for me to avoid ;D
My colours were dictated by the *wonderful* Microsoft XP Paint Palette, which is pretty much the opposite to Arachne’s more muted tones.”

Something funny I noticed: While the original lineart pupil is round, Jeremys eye is a horizontal line, Elks a vertical one ;)

jumhmc

Again 2 very different images! Thanks HMC (first) and Jumpei (Second)! Original lineart here.

The first one shows a high contrast, smooth and slimy monster, in a desert setting. Very well chosen colors! The blue>green>yellow works great here!
Of course, if you would like to learn something, you should study the very well placed dithering here!
The pink flowers make an original and eye catching detail.

HMC:
 “I wanted to make the monster a bizarre cactus-creature.
I colored it and turned it into a plant with flowers coming out of it. Honestly, I just played around with colors until I got something I liked.”

Jumpei however did not use any dithering at all to make his version interesting!
It has a very interesting and polished wood-like texture. The original lineart is also still there, intact. He used the black of that very nicely!

Jumpei:
“Its not safe to say it is 100% mine as I only interpreted the shapes sugested by the lines, by giving the piece color and texture. The lineart was wonderfully done in a simple non binding way that gave me lots of room to create something different from the other participants.
I immediately had a general idea of doing an organic monsterous kind of tree, then I chose a base color, a color for shades and highlights.”

Comparing the two: Do you see what a difference there is by pulling the eyebrows to the front, or by making the whole eye area hollow? The volume can make quite a difference, but you are free to go in any direction you want. Linearts do not define volume!

cruszombi

And once more, two beautiful different entries!

The first one is made by Crusader333 and the second one by Zombi2.  Original lineart here.

Again, the two are totally different. Crusader used a scary light source, and added some weird drips of pixels upside down on some places. But more interesting, he added something to the line art. The cage was not in the original, but now it is the most interesting part of the image!

Crusader333:
“Well primarily I’m quite a surreal artist and I don’t really like to take things at face value. When initially looking at all the line works I was really attracted to the ‘Bird’ , but it took me several days to come up with an idea to be able to twist it. The idea of seeing the ribs as a birdcage came to me and I couldn’t resist. I also like to place a lot of emphasis on colour choice.”

Zombi’s way of working is everything but regular too.  Defining everything that was also defined in the original line art, but clearly with a hard palette to work with.

Zombi2:
“I generally make pictures in the graphical mode of the ZX Spectrum (80s home computer).
Apart from being high quality lineart, the bird is, because of the organic forms and low level of detail, quite suitable for the chosen approach. ”

I hope that you realized that there are so many ways to color something! Infinite styles and possibilities. Get inspired!

And to focus on coloring only, it can be interesting to take someone else’s line art. There is a big list of stuff thats free to take here. In the filename there is always the artists name, make sure to give proper credit if you use their lines!

For more colored line arts, have  a look at this article too!

And in the comments, there is room for discussion about this article.

colours and rendering style are the biggest difference, Arachne uses her flawless dithering, something I’ve found it’s best for me to avoid ;D
Filed under: Collaborations and Challenges, Style
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What is pixel art?

October 31, 2009

The exact definition is discussable, but in this article I would like to give a nice explanation to those who do not know yet. If you already know what pixel art is but do not agree with my statements, please comment :)

Pixel art in short

pixelart

Pixel art is the creation of digital art, pixel by pixel. A pixel is a digital screen element in shape of a square, and creating pixel art means that you make bitmap illustrations, placing every pixel by hand.

In modern digital art a lot is often generated by computers. Computers automatically add new colors, smoothing things out or even generate whole image parts. In pixel art, you have full control, and thereby it is possible to deliver digital works of higher quality. However, it is a lot more time consuming, in that way that it is hardly ever worth it. Therefor pixel art is mostly made by hobbyists nowadays.

Pixel art generally uses under 256 colors, while modern screens can display up to 4.2 billion distinct colors.

The origins of pixel art

Years ago, video cards were not as powerful as they are now. People designing graphics for digital use had to work with a lot of restrictions, for example like how much or which colors could be used. The video game market grew fast, and those games needed graphics, like tiles and sprites. The people in charge of making those sprites had to stand out artistically, but also technically because of the difficult restrictions they had to work with.

An example is the ZX spectrum, which could only display 8 colors. The screen was divided into a grid of 8×8 pixel regions, and in such a region only 2 different colors could be used.

The video cards developed further and further. At some point everyone could create images with 256 colors.  Tools were made for speeding up the work, such as gradient generators. The artists that worked with this came into the demoscene subculture. When people figured out it would be more of a challenge to quit working with that many colors, the modern pixel art was born.

People now make their own restrictions, set their own rules, and some do it more like it was done in the early days than others. Some pay a lot of attention to their color counts, some do not. Some people like to practise with those old restrictions, some people like not to.

Pixel art also got a new role in commercial art, some companies figured ways to sell pixel art. They make use of the iconic effect you can achieve with pixel art, using large visible squares. Also a lot of work is done in isometric projection, a projection that works great with pixel art. Two examples of that are the famous habbohotel and of course the company Eboy.

How to make pixel art

Windows users already have one of the easiest pixel creation softwares installed on their computer: MSPaint. This program can be found under the name “Paint” in the accessories .

Mac users will have to download pixen and linux users can download MTpaint. Both are free, and MTpaint is also available for windows.
More on software for pixel art here

Take the pencil tool, the tool with the simplest function. It should create just a single pixel only when you click. With this you can draw your whole picture.
Try to stay away from the other drawing tools. Of course you can use the bucket fill now and then to speed up some work, but thats about it.
Reuse as many colors as possible, use the eyedropper to select a color that you have already used.
And that is it! With this knowledge, you know the basics of any work of pixel art!

When you are done, save your work as PNG, proper GIF (never save as gif in MSPaint as it ruins your colors) or BMP. With these filesystems you will never loose any image quality. However, you will if you will use filetypes such as JPG.
Never save pixel art as JPG

Never do:

Never resize pixel art
Never use gradients
When not needed, do not use transparant layers (it is only needed really in games, or to save time in commercial work, but this lessens the quality)
Never use automatic anti alliasing
Never use any automatically generated effect
Never have your work color reduced automatically
And never ever save pixel art as JPG, unless you are really afraid of it getting stolen.

Do:

Use preset palettes
Use preset restrictions
Set yourself a maximum number of colors used
Work on small scale
Use ^2 numbers for number of colors and canvas size (2,4,8,16,32 etc)
Show your work to the world and ask for feedback on PJ and WotP
Have fun!

Now that you know what my definition of pixel art is, start making some!

MrLollige

Filed under: Style, Tutorials
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