2D Game Art Tutorial (Stylized Landscape In 15 Minutes)

all right I'm a big fan of making things quickly and keeping it simple for you guys so what I've done is just Googled a Studio Ghibli illustration that I really like and I'm going to start taking the colors here and create a gradient okay this gradient is going to be used as basically our color palette if you have great color your illustration already looks 10 times better than if you didn't understand color theory and try to do it on your own so why did I create a gradient that looks like this because it kind of looks like a horizon right or like if you make video games it looks like a Sky Box now we can use these colors to inform us of what things are going to look like as we come towards the camera I like to start with very solid colors so we're just going to start with a solid base of blue here we're going to add in that dark gradient at the top here very subtle and then this light gradient right here at the base and we're just

going to use some circles create some clouds let's add some clouds behind this as well using this color here and these are going to pour over into the sky up above okay just like that we're going to create some very subtle and simple trees okay now it helps if you start really big actually and do like this and then you add the detailing like this and we're just going to come forward again we're still doing our trees we'll worry about our grass in just a second we're gonna have a beautiful field again very large just to create some very simple shapes just to get an idea of the shaping of the tree line and then go small again to add the details all right that looks good to me there we go that's it I'm just going to fill it in again we're just using the pencil tool here to create some very simplistic shapes okay coming forward

same sort of mentality here oh that looks great very very good yeah just like that and then one more towards the front this is going to be our foreground everything needs to look great in the abstract first guys I keep saying that because it's so important I'm gonna just try and get some cool looking shapes here all right one final thing is I think we need some very subtle trees right about here and I'm gonna blend that by just filling in this green here and then dropping its opacity down just about like that and I think that is the final layer that we need we're going to go in and start adding detailing with brushes okay my custom brushes are below totally free go ahead and download those brushes if you haven't but I'm going to go ahead and use my grass block in Brush this is

basically a Magic Brush um click click click click click and you'll notice that it's creating some very subtle changes in the coloring here grab this color we're going to go smaller here maybe a little bit smaller than that there we go [Music] we're going to use our fluff Block in Brush and just slowly [Music] make the trees look a little bit more fluffy okay [Music] now for our clouds we're actually going to use a very large version of this brush okay so we're just going to scale up like this and just make them look poofy and fluffy

and soft right [Music] I'm going to merge these layers together here and we want to keep them all separate guys because we want to make sure that we have the ability to create some Parallax okay so far so good to create a three-dimensional looked trees what you can do is grab this darker color here and just punch some circles as if you're creating a new layer of trees okay just like that okay and then what you do is you actually mask that layer you just created and pretend that these trees in the background are actually filling over see that

it's sort of spilling over you can even drop the opacity down to create some blends oh yeah sometimes you want this harsh clean difference between the two we can do some highlights using the same mentality okay so I'm going to grab this color here and I'm just going to punch in some highlights here if they don't look good don't worry what we're going to do is again mask those out to create a rounded look I'm going to do a full opacity of the Mask we go and we can just punch drop the opacity down one final thing to create some distinction between this layer and that layer is I'm just going to

just add a very subtle doesn't look subtle now but just drop the opacity down distinction between the two okay one more so that looks great we're going to apply the same principles to this tree line in the back [Music] now with clouds you can make clouds look really really cool with the same thought process of the trees

I feel like this layer needs a little bit more highlights let's let's go ahead and clean up our layers so I'm just going to merge all of the detailing [Music] all right so we're gonna get this color here and we're gonna make it a lot more vibrant okay and I'm going to use my grass blocking brush here and I'm going to start adding some highlights [Music] to this Ridge here I can't over State how important it is to have a second monitor to just look at your illustration in a different context okay foreign [Music] a very subtle highlight here okay we do another layer with just some kisses of light

all right so it looks like the sun is really hitting pretty hard here so I think we could get away with adding some detailed grass okay some vibrant detailed grass so I'm going to pick the yellow here the yellowish green and I'm going to use this detail brush This Grass detail brush and I'm just gonna add in some subtle grass details okay okay we could also add in some subtle highlights there's a brush just for grass highlights and we could do a vibrant vibrant yellowy White [Music] all right the next layer up let's go ahead and add some more detailing here

[Music] foreign I think we could do some flowers okay so I have this flower brush here and we're going to just use some red okay some orangey red just like that tiny little flowers [Music] [Music] eyeballing it here nice add some drop shadow to it just to make it look like they're standing out just a little bit we also want there to be a nice little blend so I'm going to drop the opacity down just like that see and let's give it some Dimension okay let's come forward just a tad

and a big one there I'm here one there okay okay and then using our pencil tool just a tiny little white dot in the middle of the flower just like that okay so let's add just an extra highlight and we can do this by simply using the effects so let's go to our layer effects here add an inner shadow it's not actually a shadow though it's just going to be this subtle overlay of white we're going to do one more okay in this case it's just a very subtle Rim just like that okay you can play with the angle and the opacity of it and we're going to click OK here I'm going to copy this layer style I'm going to paste it on every single layer just adding a subtle subtle highlight to every single layer even the clouds even the clouds

our grass layer here okay that one's a little intense so I'm going to drop that down good you could even do it to this layer here some layers it doesn't look very good on so we're not going to do it on that layer all right so now we can just go ahead and add some pine trees we have a pine tree brush here and I'm just gonna add some behind this hill here and we're going to add some coloring to the pine trees right so let's go ahead and take this color here and we're going to use the same pine tree brush to add in some color okay we drop that opacity down a little bit and we remember the sun is coming from the right side here so we're going to add just some very subtle details to the right side of the tree to mimic that sunlight all right we're going to use this color here and

we're also going to use our grass blocking brush and we're going to be very careful here but we're going to add just some subtle Shadows being cast by these trees [Music] drop the opacity down just a bit here we go same is true for this one and now I've reached the point of well any illustration that I do for a video game I just start to tweak okay don't feel guilty once you get to the final point of view illustration and you feel like it's just not what you want and that's what happened in this illustration it happens every time I'm doing an illustration so here you can just see me trying out all these different things I call this kind of like the Instagram filter moment where you where you start adding filters

and deleting stuff adding fog and then you'll see I'll delete the fog I'm adding some gaussian blur to the foreground to make it look a little bit more like Hollow Knight and then I'm just tweaking uh the the Hue the saturation of the layers making it look a little bit more Moody a little bit more interesting um the original color looked great but it wasn't the style I think that most of my games have you can also see I've added a foreground here just using that same pine tree brush and I'm just tweaking and changing all of these colors here this process is really difficult to Define for you and give you a tutorial all I'll say is that it is a guess and check process of slowly adding and tweaking stuff it's a mix of what we originally had with that original color palette but a little bit more rainy looks kind of like maybe Scotland

or Ireland very moody but this is the end result I can't emphasize enough how important um that final session is of just making edits um to the Hue and saturation and it's it's one of those things where you really have to practice um but that is the end result be sure to download these uh brushes below they're totally free and I really feel like they're going to help you out a lot and you can make something just like this with those brushes and also just grabbing a color palette from some illustrators that you really like all right guys be sure to subscribe leave a like and I'll talk to you later