2D Game Art Tutorial (Stylized Landscape in 20 Minutes!)

Hey guys, how's it going? We're going to jump inside of Photoshop and we're going to make some 2D art. It's going to be very similar to what you might see in some of my previous games that I've launched on Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PlayStation. Now, I'm doing 1920x 1080 pixels. I've created a little gradient here. Now, the question is, where are you going to get a color palette like this? Right? Cuz if you kind of blur your eyes here, it kind of looks like a horizon, right? Well, that's not just random. It's actually just me googling snowy. I wrote loi landscape and I found this image here, but you could pick any image you want. Um, copy it into Photoshop, right? And just pick and choose some of the colors and create this gradient here. So, the first thing I'm going to do is just start with the sky color, which is this right here. Okay. Now, I'm going to use the lasso tool. And I don't really know exactly what we're going to design here. Um, but I'm going to create sort of a polygon very sort of low poly look here. Um, so

I'm just going to start in the background here and we're going to create some mountains. So again, we're using the polygon lasso tool here. So I'm going to do something like this. And this is a really good example of why we're using this color palette here. I press I, which is the eyedropper tool, and I'm just going to collect colors slowly as we come towards the camera. Okay. [Music] It needs to look good in its simplest, most basic form. Okay, we're going to be adding plenty of details very, very soon. Okay, so I'm going to just shift these just a little bit and get it look looking good in the abstract first. Okay, pretty good. I I you know I think it's fine. I'm going to add one more effect. Okay. You'll notice there's a dark purple here. What is that? Well, it's kind of the it's kind

of like space almost like you might even see stars up there, but it also can be clouds like dark storm clouds coming in like a blizzard. It helps to zoom out. Does it look good there or over here? Nope. I like it on the right side actually. So, we're going to make it on the right side. Okay. I've decided. There we go. Now, I have some really cool brushes that we're going to be using. Okay. Like these god ray brushes here. Create some cool god rays. I also have these cool um flowers here. You can paint some small little blue flowers maybe peeking through the snow. But let's go ahead and just create one. Just so you guys know how to create some brushes. If I wanted to create a pine tree brush, I could just create one little pine tree here. something like I don't know this. There we go. And I'm gonna just save this. I'm gonna squash it a little

bit. Now, you want to make sure you duplicate this into a new document. There you go. I'm going to click trim here so that it trims all the pixels away. And then I'm going to go define brush preset. And there it is. We're going to call this pine tree. Now, it's really important that you take the time to create these brushes, guys, because it's going to make things so much easier for you. All right, so for example, let's start on this layer here. Okay, I'm going to create a new layer, and I'm going to slowly paint. I'm going to press this uh left bracket and right bracket to scale it up. And I can just make sure my opacity is 100%. And I'm just going to use the same color, right, as this [Music] Now, let's just move backwards. Okay, let's move to this layer here. Now, because we're going backwards, we're going to go a little bit smaller. Okay, so a little bit smaller than the

ones in front of it. Let's keep going backwards. Let's do this color here. And again, we're going to add plenty of detail, guys. A little bit smaller. [Music] Now, what do we do about this? Okay. Do we do a white tree? A big old white tree. I think we probably could get away with it for sure, right? Um I think that's totally fine. So, let's go ahead and do that. We could do one here. I like to sort of have it intersect right at that line there. That's always cool. Um something like this. And maybe a bigger one right here. And right here. So that looks great. I think we could do one more in front. And just do it right here. And now let's go ahead and add in some lighting. And the lighting is going to make everything really, really pop. Now the first thing

I want to do is add just a subtle, very subtle overlay of white to look like the sun is setting right here. Okay. Okay. So, I'm going to click overlay. There we go. Just like this. Drop down the opacity. Okay. And we're going to also create a simulation of fog. Okay. So, I'm going to hold alt and make sure that this layer is over top and masked onto this layer. And that's going to allow me to do some gradients over it. So, I can do a very subtle gradient. Just very, very subtle to create fog. And we're just using the gradient tool. And we're just slowly creating this subtle fog effect. Make things look a little bit more cold. Very, very good. This blue here, I'm going to do a little bit more here, but we want to add a little bit of a detail. But really quick, let's actually merge these trees into that layer. There we

go. And create just a very subtle fog. I'm going to go up at an angle a little bit. Drop it down. Okay. And we're gonna add a little bit more detail here. I'm going to use the lasso tool, but it's going to be the the first lasso tool here, not the polygon lasso tool. And I'm going to cut out little circles. Okay. Just little tiny circles. Okay. Why am I doing this? Well, to create a fog effect. If we do a motion blur onto that, like this, and change the angle to that, now it looks like there's fog rolling in. See that? very subtle fog effect. Okay, again we're going to do the same thing with this layer here. Again, we just cut out little circles and then do a motion blur just like that. And we're just creating some very subtle fog.

Nothing too crazy here. Right, we're going to do we're not going to do anything with this layer here. Looks great. What I do want to do really quick is add a little bit of a bloom. Bloom is when light peels or or spills over a horizon, okay? Or over a silhouette. So, I can actually add a little bit of a bloom here, just like this. And now it doesn't look so intense at the top there. Almost looks like it's um fading into some fog there. That looks really, really cool. Okay, let's go ahead and get this layer looking proper. Okay. You'll notice that this layer looks kind of out of place, and it's because it's purely white. So, we're going to try and simulate snow here, um, that sort of caked itself onto this tree. So, I'm going to do this. I'm going to create this lasso tool, or use the lasso tool, and I'm going to just basically add in some very subtle pops of dark blue so it looks like the pine tree has snow peeking through, right? And it's

not going to be very intense. We're just going to use a brush here. A very subtle soft brush. And I'm going to take this blue here. Do that. Looking good. And then slowly fade out certain portions of it. So it's not super intense. We're just creating a little bit of a detail here. That looks good to me. I'm going to take that, duplicate it, stretch it, and just add a little bit of texturing here. I'm going to flip it horizontal. Just duplicating that layer. And I'm just going to position it in such a way that it looks like it makes sense. Okay, there we go. That one looks cool. Okay, one more. You just sort of have to think about it in your mind's eye, right? That looks good, too. All right, merge those layers together. And again, just sort of mask out just a little bit the areas that you don't

like. That looks good to me. Very, very subtle. Very, very subtle. Yep, that looks good. So, it now has a little bit more of a threedimensional look. Now, what's really going to make things pop is adding shadows. Okay, so we're going to add some shadows to this. We're going to start at the front here. I'm going to make sure I merge all these layers together. So, let's just go ahead and merge all of our various layers together with all those the fog and the shading. I'm just going to merge them down. Okay. Merge those layers. Good. Good. Good. Awesome. Let's start with this layer here. We're going to create a simulation of a shadow. Okay. So, this is actually going to make things really pop. So let's just pretend that the sun is coming from over here. Okay. And in fact, we could even simulate that, right? We could we could um just create a pulse of white um beneath behind this

like that. See? And I could even pull this down. And then even on the front layer, the very very top layer, you do a subtle pulse like this, but not as intense. Okay. So that's great. So now we know the sun is coming from over here, right? Well, let's go ahead and jump to this layer here, and I'm going to add shading. I'm going to use the polygon lasso tool. And remember, if the sun's coming from the right side, that means there's going to be a shadow on this side. See that? So, I'm just going to take this, fill this in with this blue color here. A little bit of a gradient like that. See that? Look at that. There would be even a shadow under here as well. There would be a shadow under here as well. And there would also be a shadow being cast like this. So I can just do this. Look at that. Ain't that cool? So I'm going to create a new layer

here actually so I can have a little bit more control over this. There we go. Okay. Okay. And I can even add a little bit of a motion blur to that to make it look a little bit more blended. Let's go to the blur. Motion blur. There we go. That looks great. We could even do it for this as well. Looking good. Now, you notice that this is kind of blending in with that. So, what we're going to do is go to the other one here, this layer behind it, and do the same thing so that it's a little bit more dark over on this side. Okay. Not as much detail. Just going to use our mind's eye here. Not as much detail. See that? And then we're going to do it right here as well. Again, shadow that sort of getting cast at an angle, right? [Music]

Here [Music] we go. And we're just going to do a subtle pulse. Look at that. Isn't that cool? All right. Let's add a little bit of a shadow here to make it look like there's a deep valley there. Nothing too crazy, though. All right. And maybe even add just a pulse of just just to create some texture, guys. Just some very subtle, very, very subtle shadows being cast. Almost like these are being cast. Okay, so I'm just going to do that. Oopsie. We're just going to do this. There we go. Oh, that looks great. And maybe add a little bit of a motion blur to that. Yeah, looks good. And then finally, a

kiss of sunlight. over the top here just using the paintbrush. Very subtle kiss of sunlight. And you could even do a little bit of kisses right here. Okay, we could do one here. We could do one here. Okay, we could even add some over here. And just kiss a very subtle kiss like this. And then fade out the bottoms and the sides so you don't see those harsh edges. And now we have that subtle kiss there. Okay. All right. One final thing that we want to do to add to this. Well, there's two final things. The first one is let's add some clouds. Okay. So, watch this. We're going to do a a very subtle pulse like this. We're going to use that lasso tool, though, and we're going to cut out like this. See that? Just cutting out those clouds. And then do a motion blur. We're going to do a motion blur

perfectly at 0 degrees. So, we still get some of those sharp lines, right? But it's still kind of blurry. And then we're going to fade this out. This edge here, I don't really like how that looks over there. So, we're going to do something like this. Very, very good. All right. And then one final in front of everything. Okay. So again, pulse of white and we're going to cut out significant circles like this. Just really random here. We don't want it to be too intense. And then a motion blur. This one can be a very, very strong motion blur. And I might even squash it down like this. And drop the opacity down. Okay. Very, very good. Now, let's add some dabs of snow. Okay, I'm going to use the pencil tool. And we're just going to click

variety of smaller bits of snow. Now, it doesn't look very cool now. [Music] Small ones here. Okay. I'm going to duplicate that layer and then do a motion blur. Okay. But the motion blur is going to be at a 45° angle like this. Very, very good. Just like that. And then I'm going to push it to the right a little bit so it looks like it's being dragged behind. Okay. Merge all these layers together. I'm going to drop the opacity down using a mask tool, but only for some areas. Okay. We don't want the whole thing to show up because it looks really kind of I don't know manufactured. So, we're going to do something like this. Very good. Awesome. Now, if you don't like the way your snow looks, you can actually just Google, and I don't recommend, you know, shipping a commercial product this way, but snow or blizzard PNG is something

you can search for. I actually like it against black because I can copy that image, paste it, and then do a multiply or a screen effect just like that. See? Drop it down. And then we can even fade out one side. There we go. Very, very good. So, just pull that up just like that. And then remember that brush I mentioned, the sun shaft brush or the god rays brush. It's another way of putting it. We can just do this. Do a full opacity and just click and add those god rays. And look, if you wanted to add a little bit of a character, right, you could just I like my characters to be very, very tiny. So, we could do a boy. Um, let's see here.

Silhouette of a boy. So, we could do a little head here with his jacket. I'm just using the pencil tool here. Nothing crazy. Doing that. And then we could take the polygon lasso tool. Do something like this. And then let's find a very contrasted color. Maybe this orange. Um, and do it over top of his hat or his head here. And then do something like this. Maybe a red. Right. Good. Just like this. Good. A little white eyes. Right. And then maybe mittens. There's our little boy. And ideally in Unity, and this is more of a concept, but ideally in Unity, you would program a shadow, right? I'm going to tweak the colors a little bit of the boy. I don't really like his

colors, so I'm going to merge all these layers together here. Merge them together. Let's do a little bit of a shift because I don't really like those colors. Let's shift the hue and saturation. Oo. Drop the saturation down. That looks great. So, that is our final result. Okay. Very, very simple. Um, in reality, took me about 30 minutes, but I'm going to cut this video down. Um so