How to draw PIXEL ART GAME CHARACTERS (PS TUTORIAL)

I can almost guarantee that if you stick around to the end of this tutorial, that's not a lot of time. Your skills are going to grow exponentially. I think you're going to be surprised at what you can achieve. Whether you're talented or not, whether you know anything about 2D art or not, you're going to be very surprised at the end of this tutorial cuz I have a few tricks that I've learned over the last decade of being a full-time game developer and making indie games. So, let's jump inside of Photoshop and get started. Now, before we begin drawing, let's go ahead and talk about your canvas size. How big should your Photoshop document be? Well, a game like say Celeste might use a tiny amount of pixels, 16x 16, right? Or Owl Boy might actually double that, 32x 32. It's really up to you on how much detail you want. All I'll say is it's important to create a square document. A square document is going to allow you to do a lot of different motions for your character. So, for example, they might want to slash a sword or punch or jump

or run. We're not going to change any of these settings here and I'm going to go ahead and click create. So, let's start with a few settings here and just go down the line. The first one we're going to do is go to edit preferences and let's just click general and we're going to make sure that the inter image interpolation is set to nearest neighbor. I'm not going to get into the weeds here, but image interpolation basically means how does this document scale, right? We're going to choose nearest neighbor, not this by cubic automatic. Okay, we're going to choose nearest neighbor, and it's going to ensure that the edges when we scale things are really harsh and sharp. We want to make sure that our rectangle and elliptical marquee tools don't have any anti-aliasing ticked. Well, the rectangle tool, you can't do anti-aliasing because a rectangle won't actually have any soft edges. But a elliptical marquee just might. So, let's be sure to disable anti-alias here. If I were to draw a circle now, it's going to

give us really clean edges here. Had we not done that, the edges would be soft. It would add anti-aliasing. We definitely don't want that. The next thing I want to do is when I'm actually selecting an object with the move tool here, you want to make sure that when you decide to scale it down or rotate it. So, as you can see once I've clicked the handle here, the interpolation setting here is set to by cubic. We definitely want it to be nearest neighbor. So, be sure to select that as well. So, now when we scale down, you can see it's trying to figure out what those harsh clean pixels should look like. All right. The next setting we want to set up is the lasso tool here. So, I love using the polygon lasso tool when I'm creating pixel art. So, what I'm going to do is just make sure when I select it, anti-alias is turned off. You can definitely do this for the lasso tool itself. Turn that off. The next tool I want to make sure that I fix here is the fill tool. So, if I had, let's say, an object

that looks like this, and I wanted to fill it in with orange here, I want to make sure anti-alias is turned off. Now, I can fill it in, and there's not going to be any anti-aliasing. The next tool I want to set up for the document is the shape tool. This is the vector art shape tool. So, let's go ahead and just select the ellipse tool here. We want to make sure it's set to pixels. It's by default going to be set to shape. And we also want to make sure anti-aliasing is ticked off. Before you even begin thinking about your character colors, you should be at least thinking or know what your game's landscapes are going to look like. What's the color of the first level, the second level, the third level? So, if you don't have those designs ready, it's totally fine to just Google search an image. So, what I'm going to do is just Google search an image that I think might look good in my world. I'm going to scale it down to about like this. I don't want any other colors in here that don't fit within my

world. Okay. So, I think yellow, blue, and green. That's fine. So, what I'm going to do is just blur this. I'm going to blur it significantly. So, something like this. So, this is going to give me an idea, just a general idea, a reference here of what my world looks like so that it can help me as I work with my character and choose the colors. Okay. So, let's go ahead and pick our colors. So, what I like to do, I don't really like using the swatches panel to be completely honest. What I like to do is just pick some pixels at the top here and start placing the colors I want to use for my character. Okay, so this is basically going to be where my little swatches palette is. And I can use the eyropper tool to select these colors up here. It's really up to you how you want to do it. You can use the swatches tab here, but I just rarely use that. I haven't used that in like a decade. So, I'm going to choose complimentary colors. Okay, complimentary colors to the background. So, what's a complimentary color of blue or this

yellowish green? Well, I think a reddish color might look great. Okay, so let's let's fill that in and take a look. I think this looks great. The reason why I chose a complimentary color is because I want the player to pop from the background. We don't want our audience while they're playing the game to get lost. They want to know at all times where the character is. This is especially important for 2D platforming games. Let's also choose a skin tone really quick. So, I'm just going to go to my color picker here, and I'm going to choose actually just a sort of orang-ish color, very light, very low saturation here, and maybe make it a little bit more yellow. Let's fill that in. Finally, let's think about the outline color. But I'm actually going to choose a very dark sort of grayish color. This dark green here. What I'm going to do for this video, and honestly, I kind of recommend you do this as well, is if you can sketch, even

the slightest sketching skill, I would go ahead and sketch on a piece of paper with a pencil and then just take a picture with your phone and bring it into Photoshop. So, I'm going to do that. If we scale it down like this, you'll notice that you can't even see it, right? So the onion skinning is pretty much ineffective. It's it's useless. So we're going to remove that. And actually what we can do is pull the image itself out of the Photoshop tabs and we can have it as a reference right next to us. So I'm going to show you really quick how we can sort of create our very simple outline in Photoshop here in this document. Now, your first instinct would probably be to go to the brush tool here and paint with the brush tool. Okay? But what you'll notice is as I draw here, it's adding a ton of anti-aliasing. It's just not the right tool for us for pixel art. So, what we're going to use is actually the pencil tool. So, if you

click and hold on the brush, we're going to choose the pencil tool here. I'm going to shrink the size of this brush. You can do that by just pressing the left bracket on your keyboard or the right bracket to make it bigger. And you can see here we can slowly start drawing the outline of our character. What I'm going to do before I begin drawing with the pencil is I'm actually going to create some generic shapes so that I don't have to rely on my sort of inner math in my head. I'm going to rely on Photoshop's math. Okay.

We're almost done with the generic shape here. Let's go ahead and create his arms. What I recommend when you're drawing arms is first think about where the hands are. Okay. So, our hands should be just about where his waist is. So, I think something like that could definitely work. But I'm going to scale up just a little bit here. Maybe do a square for hands. And you'll notice that I have the grid turned on in Photoshop. Okay. If yours isn't turned on, go to view, show, pixel grid. Okay. So now that's what it looks like turned off. But having it turned on is very helpful because I can see exactly where I am horizontally here. So let's go to the pencil here. And I'm going to do just like his legs, a very simplistic line for his arms.

Awesome. That feels pretty good. All right, last but not least, let's work on his face. Okay, so let's select the face here. What I'm going to do is actually create a new layer. I'm going to hold alt and then select. What this means is this layer will be masked on top of this layer. Okay. So, if I create a circle using the elliptical marquee tool, I can actually do his hair with just a circle and fill it in. Let's do some orange vibrant almost yellow hair. Kind of like blonde, right? And I can actually duplicate this circle and move it over here as well. Just like that. Maybe like that. Now, let's go ahead and draw his eyes. [Music] Okay, so I know what you're thinking, Thomas, this looks horrible. Well, what we're going to do is move on to the perfecting stage. Okay, so the perfecting stage is when you can merge

all of the layers together and start erasing pixels, adding shading, changing the colors, adding highlights, low lightss. So, let's go ahead and begin the perfecting stage. The standard way of adding an outline to your character would be to create a new layer and just start drawing outside the edges. But I actually don't want to do it this way because it takes a long time and also it isn't necessarily intuitive. It's actually kind of difficult to understand where you should draw a pixel. I'm going to select layer 14 here which is my character. I'm going to go to effects, stroke. I'm going to add just a very simple one pixel stroke. I'm going to make sure it's set to outside. Set the opacity to 100%. And then click okay. Now, this is not perfect, right? It's

really not working well for us because if we zoom out, it kind of doesn't feel like pixel art anymore because it's got that anti-aliasing on the edge. So, what we're going to do is we're actually going to duplicate this layer. I'm going to just rasterize the whole thing and I'm going to drop down the opacity significantly. And then I'm going to lock the layer. Now, I'm going to create a new layer to start drawing our lines. The rule is if I see anything that is a light square, I'm not going to draw. Okay? I'm only going to draw where I see the dark squares. So there, the only real problem I see here is his feet and his mouth. Okay. So what I'm going to do is actually remove these pixels down here. Just don't see the benefit here. And I'm actually going to change the color of his shoes because they were matching the black line. I'm actually going to change the color of his shoes to red. And also

his mouth. His mouth is a little messed up here. All right. So, now that we have the outline created, we can begin adding highlights and low lightss. The highlights and low lightss are going to help make the image really pop, but also it's going to help areas like this right here. See this area right here? It's kind of difficult to see the distinction between his right arm and his chest. But adding a highlight there or a low light is going to help make that more distinct. So, in order to add a highlight in a low light, we first need to be thinking about where the sun is coming from. So, I think I want the sun coming from over here. I like my sun coming from the top left. So, I'm not going to draw the sun. I can actually just in my head know that the sun is coming from over here. What that means is all of our highlights are going to be on the left side. Okay? And all of the shadows are going to be on the right side. So, let's go ahead and do that.

[Music] Let's go ahead and start adding some low lightss here. So, I'm going to zoom in here, create a new layer for our low lightss. I'm going to set the opacity for my layer to something like 40%. And begin adding low lightss here. [Music]

All right, guys. Thanks for watching. It really means a lot that you stuck around and tried out this tutorial. If you like this video, be sure to like, subscribe for more content like this about game development. And also, leave a com what am I saying? comment below and I'll try and answer as best as I