Let's Play (And Recreate) Hollow Knight: Silksong

stream. I don't usually stream games, but of course we're going to stream Silkong. Duh. We're going to stream stream Silkong because let me put a Silk Song link in the description because that's just really rude of me not to have Silk Song in Well, they don't need more money. So, let's not put it. No, I'm kidding. Um, Silk Song is in the description. Let me go ahead and pull the chat out. And what we're gonna be doing today, guys, is we're gonna be playing Silkong. Um, and the reason why we're gonna be playing Silkong is not necessarily to play it and have fun, although that would be really cool because I'm a game developer. I've been making games for 15 years. And also, my first two games, you know, they're not viral games, but they're featured, you know, by Time Magazine. I say this all the time because I'm flexing, but Time Magazine, PC Gamer, Washington Post, Rolling Stone have featured my 2D games because of their art style, uh, because of the music, because of the feeling and the moodiness. That's kind of my specialty,

and that's also, I think, Team Cherry's specialty. They just do it a million times better. But I still have something to say and something to offer. So, I'm going to go ahead and play Silkong, and we're going to see, okay, how did they do this? We're going to open up Photoshop, look at their color schemes, and kind of figure out, okay, how did they make this thing look so beautiful? Um, we've got our gamepad because that's what you do when you're playing Silkong. And also in 2025, if you want to play Silkong, you have to buy it on GOG. At least that's what I did yesterday. So, I'm going to go ahead and open up my game uh Gogg here and um launch uh Silkong. It should be in my library here. Yeah, there it is. Let's go. And let's be real, Gogg has such a beautiful UI. I wish Steam would change theirs. Feel like I'm in 1999.

You like my game pad, Shafing? This game saves automatically at certain points. Please do not. And by the way, I've played like 30 seconds. Um, okay. Let's talk about the menu. The menu is the front door to your game. The menu tells you if this game is going to be good. I can't tell you how many times I've played games with you guys from you guys. And when the UI is beautiful, the game tends to be amazing. When the UI sucks, the game kind of sucks because UI, user interface, graphic design, having an understand of user experience with text and with images as buttons, it's kind of also an indicator that you know how to make a game. Team Cherry has, in my opinion, one of the greatest menus ever uh created because it's so clean, so simple, and so moody, and it sort of it grounds you in what the game's vibe is going to be. But this it's subtle, you know, the the little tiny animation,

the little tiny animations of the arrows just subtly. It's like two it's two frames, but that attention to detail tells the player, "Hey, we're thinking about you. We're caring about you." It's respecting the player and giving them tiny little flares. Let's take a look at the options menu. Same as the original. Nothing special here, guys. And by the way, an options menu is a great way to get a good review on Steam. If you have bad options and you don't let the player control the game, people get frustrated, especially for 3D games that really um bog down their their GPU. But with games like Hollow Knight, super simple options is totally fine. Okay, let's go ahead and start the game. I'm going to start a new game because I play, you can see I played for Was that Is that six minutes down there? Okay.

They say your beauty so frail and fine. They they see your peace woven of faith and toll. They forget your heart bound in slumber and servitude. When you wake, they shall see your truth, a beast's nature bare to all. This is from Farloom F. Farloom's Folly by the conductor Rammanu. I don't remember anything about the original game story if I'm being completely honest. So, I'm sorry. Um, but we're going to study, we're mainly studying the art and the style and the and the design and the game feel. So, this looks like it's a video file. Um, you can see just because of the subtle artifacts, which is totally fine, but this just for you guys to know, um, it's okay to create your cut scenes in Premiere, export it as a movie file, and put it into Unity.

Yeah, you can see that the the artifacts of the um the export. It's It's not perfectly clean like actual gameplay. And it's also this is either 24 to 30 frames per second whereas the game is easily 60 minimum. Oh, I love this. Reminds me of Dragon Ball for some reason. Oh. [Music] I love that. So beautiful. Hey, we've got a rooting interest, don't we, guys? We were a prisoner and now we're free. Act one. Fall.

This game feels so good already. [Music] Guys, you ready to hear some gorgeous music? One of the best songs from the original from Christopher Larkin is Green Path. And this this level feels and sounds like Green Path. That could have been bad. So, let's see here. What I'm so interested in, I was thinking about this earlier today before I was when I said when I thought about playing this game for a live stream. I thought, am I going to talk about how the character looks a little low resolution? Because she does. She looks like she's been scaled up a little bit, which I found very interesting.
Brenn. Okay, so first off, I want to talk about this. I just want to talk about so much, guys. Notice the subtle details of every like every

30 seconds there's a big oof there's an emphasis there's something that that's crunchy that happens instantly for the player an explosion something on screen chapter one act one you press a button and she grabs her sword it's all these little things that make the world feel like it's reacting to the player They seem like wastes of time and almost you might even think, well, this is feature creep, but it's not, especially in the first five minutes of a game. Look at the moss wiggling. So, it looks like Okay, so let's let's talk about parallax really quick. In Unity, there's two ways to achieve parallax. The first way is with a um perspective camera and you put the camera there and perspective occurs automatically as long as you're moving

things back sprites back into the Z-axis. That's the first way to do it. The problem with this is it's very hard to get precision. If you want something to be directly in line with the player, you have to actually put it in line with the player and then change the sorting group so things can be appear in front of it even though it's not in front of it. And that can get really kind of confusing. The other way to do it is to do it with an orthographic camera and code it with some kind of for loop where you put all the sprites into an array. Um, and the way that works is things in the background move at an inverse uh they're they move at a um they they they move slower than the camera. Okay. Something to think about when it comes to Metroid vanias and also platformers is look how instant the movement is. Okay, look. I press it. It's instant. There's no easing. Now, games like Ori in the Blind Forest

will have that easing. And that Thomas Maler, I had him on the podcast. He talked about this. He was like, I wanted to make a Metroid Vania where the player movement felt really smooth and and natural. It almost feels like a race car. Um, so this is instant. And by the way, guys, the reason I love Hollow Knight is not because I love Hollow Knight. I've never I think I've maybe played two hours of Hollow Knight. The reason I love Hollow Night and the reason it's inspired my my 2D games is because of what I'm talking about right now. It's these tiny small attention uh uh details that they've paid attention to that are that make the player feel so good to move. in my opinion is the reason Hollow Night's so successful is I mean obviously you have the gameplay and you have really good game design and level design. It's the game feel and the atmosphere and the mood. Okay. Also, when it comes to jumping with a Metroid Vania and also a platformer, giving the player control

over how high they jump is important. I could go short. And did you notice guys that it wasn't a perfectly smooth arc? It's not realistic gravity. I immediately go down. It's very rigid. Look, this is gravity. This is Hollow Knight because we want to give the player, excuse me, give the player control so that I if if a mistake is made, I know it's my fault. Now, if I hold it longer, it's a bigger jump. Now, you also notice that notice the animation that occurs if so many 2D games do this. They think that all they need is an initiation of the jump animation. That's what they think, right? What Team Cherry knows is that they need an animation for the beginning of the jump. And by the way, it's instant. It's not like this.

Watch. It's not like this. Let me let me move to full screen here. It's not this. We're not playing Mororrow or Elder Scrolls, which I don't even understand why they do that, but with Hollow Knight, it's immediately down. It's very anime. Um, it's reactive. You want the the moment the the player presses the A button, immediate jump, an immediate feel. But also what you want to notice is the moment she hits the top of the ark, it switches to another animation, which is her dress flies up and she her she starts to stretch down and notice her legs move up. It makes her feel like she's weighty and heavy. And in my opinion, getting that animation perfect is so hard.

Look how reactive when I press X. Immediate. Okay, let's go. Oh, I really don't like Castlevania. Do you know what my favorite Castlevania is? Who can guess what my favorite Castlevania is? It's the one that's not a Metroid vania. Hey, I'm trying to remember. There's no ledge grabbing in the original one, right? So, that's what makes this kind of unique. I don't remember that. Guys, do you notice the effect when I grab a ledge? It's a little flash, a little lens flare. Did you see that? Subtle little things like that create game feel. [Music] Everything is so reactive, even landing on the ground.

We'll talk about how this art style is achieved in a sec, guys. We're going to open up Photoshop and I'll show you. Listen to that music, guys. Oh, the music. Music. No. Uh, Castlevania 64. It's my favorite. It's my favorite Castlevania. I think it's great. Look at that. All this attention to detail, guys. Makes the player feel like he's uh we're actually in the world. Look at that. It's very subtle. It just moves down, but it's the sound that does the work. Oh, it feels great, man. Give me a sec, guys. My wife's calling me. Listen to this music while while I text my wife back.

Okie dokie. And by the way, guys, if you want to learn how to uh how to do 2D art like this and how to do 3D art like um my 3D games that I work on. Um and obviously I don't do handdrawn art like this. I do more like vector style, which is what Neverong is. But if you want to learn how to do 2D art for your indie games, click the link below to get 25% off my art program and it supports the channel. Yeah. Listen. Listen to the ambience. Let's study it, guys. [Music] Listen. Do you hear the ambience? Let's Let's uh let's turn the music off and you guys get an idea of uh how ambience can interact with music.

Listen. Let's study what we hear. Subtle crickets. There's subtle water moving. Probably just the sound of air. White noise. Yeah, Jason. You're right, man. Really good. All right, let's keep going. All right, guys. Give me just a minute. Okay. I've got to take a call from my wife. Give me just a sec. [Music]

[Music] [Music] [Music]

[Music] [Music] [Music] y'all. This this game feels so good. By

the way, I just love Hollow Knight. And guys, if you could forgive me for commenting on every little thing, but also forgive me for sucking. As you guys know, I've probably told you this a thousand times. I'm a game developer, which but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm a gamer, and I know that sounds really lame, but that is the truth. And I would agree that it's a disadvantage. I love that I can do that. What a great ability. Oh my goodness. Guess I didn't know I could do that. What's over here, baby? Whose game is this? [Music] You know what they You know what they say. That's exactly right. Platformers don't sell unless they're good. Although this isn't a platformer really. I mean,

I guess it is. is it's more of a a Metroid Vania Souls like and it's just perfect. It's a perfect game. It's not a platformer. It's a perfect game. [Music] Let's discuss why cutting these plants is so important. It gives the player a feeling of um agency even though you don't actually get any rewards from it. So that's really important. [Music] Oh, that music is so good. [Music]

[Music] Put in Thomas is about to die 30 seconds into the game. [Applause] [Music] We'll talk about the art style in a sec, guys, and how we can replicate it. Just give me a minute to play a little bit more. We'll talk about how they're using color here. [Music] Freaking love this game. Not anymore. I hate this game. Okay, well, pay attention. Sorry, I've been talking this whole time.

[Music] [Music] I read some negative reviews on Steam, which there's only like 5% of them were negative. And there were people complaining about how it's it like it's hard immediately. I'm not saying it actually is because I was just being stupid there, but um yeah, there were people saying it's like hard immediately. I don't know if that's actually true [Music] in [Music] [Music]

You guys want to open up Photoshop here and take a look at the graphics and see how we can replicate this art style? We'll definitely be talking about color and um how to blend that color into the background. try. I have to study it really quick how how they're doing the the dark shadows in the background. I think that's one. Yeah. Okay. I'll open up Photoshop. We'll we'll take a look.
Freaking love this music. So pretty.

Hello. Thank you for the mosberry. [Music] I think it's definitely I mean assuming the game is as good as it everybody says it is I think it should be game of the year. Yeah. I mean it's a cultural phenomenon. It's one of those games where you're like, "This should not be doing well because it's an indie title. It's It's super personal. It's artsy and it feels small, yet everybody's obsessed with it.

And I I think it deserves Yeah, I think it I it would definitely deserve game of the year. My opinion, [Music] music is so good. I've emailed Christopher Larkin a lot and he doesn't respond. I just want to talk to him, figure out how he makes such beautiful music. It's so special. [Music] And guys, when we when we talk about replicating this art style when we open up photo Photoshop, my my goal for you is for you to understand, oh, that's how color works. Um, it's not random. The way a lot of 2D artists or like game

hobbyists who are trying to do an art style like this, they they just guess and check. And it's not really a guess and check. There's there's sort of theory behind a lot of this and I'm going to break it down for you. I'm not going to do it as good as this obviously, but I'm going to show you how they do it. At least how I think they do it, but we'll do it in a sec here. My scar keeps burning. Have you talked to Dumbledore? My scar keeps burning. Oh, the sound is so freaking good. What's crazy is so far it looks like Team Cherry was like, "We know what works. We know what people like. We're not really going to do

anything different." No. It's like it because it feels the exact same as Hollow Knight. It's not like they were like, "Well, let's go 3D, you know, or let's do a higher fidelity art style." Nope. Pretty much the same. That's right. Social. It's like It's like music theory, building chords and melodies. There's like a color theory you can learn. Yeah, absolutely. Oh boy. Do we have a boss here? Thomas is going to humiliate himself here. Told you. [Music] Come in.

[Music] Hey, hey, hey. [Music] We'll do art style in just a second, guys. Open up Photoshop and replicate. I just wanted to see if I could beat this boss here. I haven't played yet. I haven't played yet, so this is fun. [Music] I think I I I have played I think I got here. That's what I mean. I got to this

uh yesterday, but I didn't beat the boss cuz I had to do another live stream. [Music] [Music] Ah, Thomas.
Okay, let's do some art style stuff here. Um, I want to screenshot one of these areas just to kind of be able to replicate it. This is a good one here. And let's break it down on how it's done. Okay, you guys ready?

Pause this. Do you know it really helps to listen to music when you're doing illustration? It helps a lot. Okay, I'm open up Photoshop here and let's break down some of the colors that are used here, guys. Give me just a sec. [Music] All right, here is a screenshot. All right, let's discuss. Let's figure out the the common colors that are being used here. Okay, we've got a vibrant almost kelly green, right? We've got a

bluish almost navy green. Okay. So, these are our two colors that are being used. Okay. So, what we're going to do here is we're going to create sort of a gradient color palette. All right. And the gradient color palette is going to include our highlights, our low lightss, and our hue shifts. So, we're not saying that this is how artwork is done by default or like from scratch. What I'm trying to do is break down what's going on here. and the theory behind it. So, first off, we're going to just do this. I'm going to need to close this really quick. Let's quit to the menu. Give me a sec here. All right. So, here's

sort of the color shift that's occurring. We'll talk about the color shift in a sec and how it works. But there's our color shift. And what I mean is we'll talk about how we apply the color shift. Um, let's talk about the highlights here. Really, this is about the strongest highlight you get. I don't know what's going on here. I think that this is because of that halo around our character here that's causing this to be more yellow. I guess we could do that if we wanted to. And then grab the brightest point. I think that's fine actually. Yeah. Okay. So, this is our color shift that's occurring. And then also don't forget the foreground. You you guys can see what I'm doing here. I'm figuring out, okay, what's the hue shift that's occurring? And I'm putting I'm going to put that along the horizontal of the gradient. The vertical is going to be the the lightness. Okay. So,

that's why I'm going to remove that actually. So, I'm going to do this. And this is a great way to practice um studying people's art is to figure out what colors they're using and how they mathematically work. Okay. So, the horizontal is that's the hue shift that's occurring in this level. Now, we're going to talk about the lighting, the highlights and low lightss. So, what's the darkest point? This right here. That's dark. It's Is that black? It's pure black. So, they're officially using pure black. And I'm going to put that here. And then I'm going to think about, okay, what are the what are the vibrant colors? So, that's our brightest point there. That's our highlight. So, I'm going to put that here. There we go. Something like that. Put it right here. Yep.

So, effectively right here is the color palette of the game or this level. Okay. And we could pick and choose from these colors here with an eyrop tool depending on how close we are to the camera and how far away we are from the camera. Does that make sense so far, guys? Now, let's talk about our pops of color. Pops of color are used to identify things that are very important in the game, like the main player or the main character. Um, or items you can collect. Although, I'm pretty sure, and by the way, if you take a look here, the these are actually varying tones of white, which I find really interesting. I'm surprised they did that. Um, but yeah, the white is also a I guess we could consider that a pop of color. Is it pure white? No, it's a cream, right?

It's a little bit of a subtle cream. Is it pure white? Yeah, it's not. It's almost like a bluish cream. Interesting. Okay. Um, let's go ahead and save this color palette um by simply moving it to the top left of our canvas here, shrinking it. And we're going to talk about how to use this uh how to use this for um when you're creating artwork for a 2D game. Okay, you ready? What I'm going to do is um man, it's just going to help me to flip it. I'm gonna blur this a little bit because there's there's not a full rhyme

or reason there. There we go. That's what we want. I'm gonna take this here. I'm g scale this up. Sorry, I'm kind of thinking out loud here, guys. So, we'll go from here. Dim blue. Oh, we have a problem. Houston, hang tight, guys. My color theory is not working. Hang tight. There we go. So, what we need to do here, we need a white here and we need to set it to overlay. There we go. So, horizontally is our um horizontally is our hue shift and then vertically is our darkness shift. And what I found works really, really

well when you're picking your colors going from background to foreground. Let me review this really quick so you guys are are know what I'm doing. I've found the hue shift from left to right. So this this is a great this right here sort of shows you the general hue shift of color that we have from background all the way to foreground. Okay, there's a hue shift occurring from the background all the way to the foreground. It's it's a gradation of color, and that's mimicking how fog and atmospheric fog works. Vertically, you're seeing just lightness going darker and darker and darker. Okay, I'm going to flip it for my own sanity. So, what do we see here? I can actually draw it with a pencil or with a with with my Yeah, with my pencil. I can go. Oh, so this is sort of the line of color that occurs as we get closer and closer to the camera

background. And things get more green and more black as we get closer to the camera. I'm going to show you how this works. Okay. And let's go ahead and throw in our pop of color just so we can pick and choose it when we need it. I promise this will make sense, guys. And by the way, this isn't random. I'm This is how I do things. Honestly, I've been doing things for like the last six years. And if for those of you are watching and you're like, "Well, wait, who is this guy?" And you don't know. Um, this is sort of my game, Never Song. Um, right here. So, this is kind of how the artwork looks in my games. So, I kind of follow very similar principles to what like um how what Hollow Knight does. Okay, just so you're aware. Um, and then my other game, Pinstripe Game, similar sort of theory, color theory going on.

Okay, so that's our color palette. Um, let's talk really quickly about like generically how we do this. We start with the top lefthand corner and we're just going to go down. And frankly, I kind of want to take this is sort of the path I want to take. We'll start like this. I feel like that's the path I want to take. Something like that. Right about at this midpoint is where the the m the where the player is going to be. Okay. I know that this sounds confusing. Um, I know that sounds confusing, but this is where the player is going to be standing. And we can justify that by clicking this and going, okay, well, what that's the color of the of the ground the player's walking on. At what point in this color chart

is that right about here? You see? So, that's kind of where I want it. So, that's the shape I'm going to I'm going to choose when picking colors, I think. And I'm not going to pretend, guys, that this is going to be perfect by default. This is the first time I've done this uh with with Silkong. So, we'll see if I'm right. So, that's our sky, right? Our background sky. And I'm just going to slowly pick colors in that arc. And this is just generic shapes just to make sure my color theory is correct. Once I know it's correct, I can then go in and create detailing. Um, so let's follow this arc forward. Right. And honestly, I could Hollow

Knight sort of makes it feel like things are underground. So there's this kind of thing happening, right? Let's keep going forward to about right here. Okay. And then the player was right here. Right about here. So, I feel like this needs to be more like that right here. Maybe even less. You want a nice distinction. Yeah. You want a nice distinction for where the player can walk, right? And you'll notice that there's this sort of bulbous um all these bulbous shapes where the player can't walk, right? But where he can walk, it's literally

squares. So that's why we're going to use squares uh for where the player can walk. And we'll add detailing and all that later. So this is where the player can walk. Right about here is the color we're going to choose for where the player can walk. We'll do one right here as well. Okay. All right. And what I'm trying to show you guys is the math behind this uh the math um and the theory behind it. Hollow Knight has this precision to it. Everything is highly fine-tuned. And sure, it can be instinct, but my theory is is it's more like a strong understanding of how color theory works. And they replicate that over and over and over and over and over for every single level. Now, if I ever get Team Cherry on the podcast, they might say, "No, Thomas, this is not how we do it." and I would say, "Okay, that's totally fine. I understand."

I was wrong, but this is how I would do it. Okay, let's do some foreground stuff. You'll notice that the foreground elements never cover the ground. Okay? Uh they just don't. They never cover the player either. Now, if something's in front of the player and you want it to cover the player to create depth, the rule is is that you don't cover the full player. It's never bigger than the player. That's the rule. Like that would be that's breaking the rule right there. So, we can do it right here. This is why it's important to potentially code your parallax because it's a lot easier to predict this kind of stuff when the parallax is coded. Does that make sense? Um, okay. I want more bulbous looking. There we go. I'm just getting the generic shape

here, guys. I'm just getting the generic shape. Um, all right. Let's move forward. I think we have room for a couple more parallax layers. And then one more here. All the way down to pure black. Remember, they're using 000000. And the pure black is honestly what makes this feel so rich, but it's not a lot of the screen. And we'll we'll get more pure black in a sec because we're going to create that vignette effect. Um, but yeah, that's the general vibe, guys. Okay. And then the character. And what what we're discussing right now is lighting and color theory. We're not discussing like handdrawn art or anything like that. We're discussing the general shape and color theory going on. Now, let's

talk about really quickly if we go ahead and get take a look at the screenshot here. Sometimes, every once in a while, there's this gray, right? Stuff like this. that is its own separate color scheme. It's sort of this subtle blue. It's like a creamy gray. So, the way we would put that into our color palette like this. Now, I cannot give you a reason, a rhyme or reason why that color was chosen other than they needed a grayish stone color and they wanted it to have a subtle tint of green. My theory is though that they're using a lot of post-processing, so they're not doing all of this in Photoshop, but this is sort of more like what you would do for concept art to kind of see, okay, what do I want this final final look to be? Okay. All right. So, let's go ahead and figure that out really quick. I could just grab these here and just very And by the way, I've said this a

million times. Um, you want to make sure it looks good in the abstract first before you start adding detailing. So, we're just going to make sure this abstract stone works. Something like that. Do you guys see if I zoom out here, it's starting to look like an actual world. Look, you see that? So, you want it to look good in the abstract first. So, this is how our color theory works. All right, let's talk about that vignette effect and fog and particles and all of that. Okay, so the vignette is occurring. If we double check this, we've got a vignette that basically I think there's two vignettes going on.

There's this one which is going to include I think it's perfectly black. This vignette is over the entire thing. Subtle. But then there's also one behind the player that's a white overlay like that. something like that. Is it an overlay or is it set to screen? It might even be have a little bit of an orange hint tint to it. But I my theory is is that's because of post-processing where they've added a subtle yellow shift to the highlights of the of the level.

There we go. That looks good. Very subtle. This I'm going to make it a little bit darker or a little bit more visible here. There we go. Good. Awesome. Okay. And there's also a a low light shadowing that's occurring as well. And that is occurring behind the second layer of the midground. And that's what creates a shadow effect. And I'm learning this with you guys right now studying this thing. Yeah, I think it's a we're getting a low light here or the shadows are something like this and then there there's a punch.

Yeah, like that. So, it's almost like there's three layers. Obviously, you could also use 2D lighting, but it could be that they have three layers of overlays. Um you have a foreground which is black. You have a just just behind the the the the the ground layer is a subtle um bluish tint. And then right in front of that is that overlay of yellow almost like a flashlight. Right. And I think that one is actually Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That one is not on the ground. It's just below the ground or just behind the ground right here. Yep. We'll brighten that up. And that I think that is there to create distinction between the ground um and the player. Okay. So that's the idea here.

All right. Let's think here how and and also subtle uh intricacies in front of the player. these black um moss. We'll talk about all that detailing in a second, but I want to make sure that we've at least knocked it out in the abstract first. Uh-huh. Yeah, I think we've knocked it out in the abstract. These highlights here are beautiful. Let's talk about how how that can possibly be achieved here. Let's think about the logic here. What I'm going to do, I'm going to call this the foreground vignette. And then I'm going to delete our color palette. We don't need that anymore. Um, we have a character here. And

this here, we're going to merge that together. And let's talk about just creating some subtle inner shadows here. Okay. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to create some inner shadows to create a sense that these bushes are being lit by some some light coming out of the player. So, I'm going to take this color here and go with a little bit of a yellow here. Yep. Okay, that's that's what that's what we need to do. So, why am I'm doing this in the abstract right now. I'm just trying to figure out, okay, what's the sequence of events for illustrating this? Well, we went from a certain color to a certain color coming forward. We went light to dark. Um, and then you add highlights to every layer of this yellow highlight.

You could even, I think, do it to this. Not that Thomas, you idiot. This right here, but very subtle and and not um not so intense. Yep. Subtle subtle paste layer style there. So, we're just taking a singular color that is a highlight and we're kind of putting it on every layer. Now, you can do this by hand, you can do it with effects. Um yeah, a lot of a lot of artists they try and do everything from their head. They think, well, I should be I a good artist and a true artist would know exactly how to do this by with instinct and not with a system. And that's not me. You know,

everything's got to be a system for me. Uh the same is true, I believe, with this as well. A subtle highlight. And you we can again we can do this by hand and illustrate all of these highlights and then cut everything into pieces. And then you have a tile set, but for for the purposes of this video, I'm just going to do with with uh um inner shadows here. Jebby, come here, buddy. Jeb. Hey, it's okay, dude. Hey, wake up. Wake up. Do you guys see why these inner shadows are so valuable? They c they make it look like the light is wrapping around a threedimensional object. Let's take a look at this inner shadow here and see if we can make it look better. That's good. Look at that. Do you see, guys? Even this this I feel like needs to be a little

bit more blue. This is where I'm sort of gonna eyeball it. By the way, I feel like we need another uh layer behind that. We'll do that in a sec here. Okay. Now, this we're going to do one more layer. I'm going to turn off my vignettes. Do you guys see why that vignette is so valuable? Um, I'm going to grab this color here. And all I'm going to do, in fact, I could actually just grab this color here. And I'll show you why. Um, grab my pencil. And I'm just going to make sure that the we're going a little bit smaller for the background. And I

can just do this. just to create some like more of a cave vibe there. I'm actually gonna go bigger here. Here we go. Um, and then I'm going to grab do a color overlay. This is so funny. I'm going to grab a color overlay here. I'm going to rasterize that layer style. And then I'm going to do a subtle color color overlay of what's in front of it, but just sort of blend a little bit. See guys? You see that? rasterize layer style. Gonna do an inner shadow there as well. There we go. Oh, and guys, we got to talk all about um sun shafts. We'll talk about sun shafts in a sec. Let's turn on our vignettes again. This is a little bit much. So, what I'm going to do is drop that down a little bit and then do one more on top of it that's a little bit more vibrant vibrant. The reason why I think

the practical reason why Hollow Knight does this is to separate the player from the background at all times. Um, which helps it helps it be a strong platforming game. Okay. Boy, that that helps a ton. Let's think here. Let's do some of that moss and then do that that branch in front of the We're not trying to replicate this perfectly, but it's it's um I think it's worth a shot to do that moss. We're just going to do this. Grab that filler in. Wait, what? Oh, there we go. And we're going to make it perfectly black. Actually, we're just going to do this.

Just sort of eyeball it. Now, obviously, guys, you need to cut all this into pieces and have all of your different chunks for this this theme. And you would use these sprites in Unity. But right now, we're just doing it in Photoshop just to get an idea of what those pieces would even be. Does that make sense? By the way, those you just joining us, check out the course below if you want to master 2D art and have a really strong understanding like I'm showing you here. I go into detail with characters, enemies, objects, more detail into color theory, uh you know, cartoons, serious style, pixel art. I go into all of that with the course below. It's 25% off. It's a great course. No risk to you because it's a 30-day money back guarantee. If you're not happy with the course, just email me. I'll give you a refund. In fact, you don't even have to email me. Just email my assistant. The email address is on the website. And you can just get a refund, no questions

asked. I'm not going to bug you. I'm not going to ask you questions. Refund immediately. Get 25% off. And you're also going to get my 3D art program completely free. So, learn from an actual indie game dev who's been featured by Time magazine about what exactly you need to know and honestly what you don't need to know to create breathtaking 2D art. Hey, this looks pretty good, honestly. Um, let's talk really quickly about that that tree branch. Um, I like all of my shapes to be pretty well defined with clean geometry. So, what I do is I'm going to use the pen tool here and just create a nice shape. Can I define that path? For some reason, I can't define paths lately in in Photoshop. Photoshop's changed the way the or at least my settings got changed. Um, so annoying. There we go. And then if you want to tweak the path,

you can um with this here. So, just a nice smoother. I like to have it look really smooth. And then we can add etching and detailing and all of that. Um um but I like to have all of my shapes really clean and like mathematically correct. Also, I'm going to make it sort of smooth right there. Sort of have it flow right into there. And then I'm going to rasterize this and then delete that. I think guys, I'm being completely honest with you guys. I think I'm I might make a 2D game next after I'm done with my first 3D game. Guys, does the color theory make sense? What I just mentioned or what I just did with the with the color theory, does it make sense to you guys? Can you do the same color theory with 3D

games? Yes, but it's done with lighting. It's not done in Photoshop, it's done with lighting. So, having a really strong sense of color theory with 2D art is like exponentially valuable for 3D because then you can use lighting and fog um and shadows to to sort of create this shift in color. Okay, now this is where things get a little complicated, which is um suddenly we need to go from this vector art feel to a more detailed look. Now, I want to practice something live with you guys because I've never done it before. What I want to try is I want to try and add strokes to things. I have never done this before and I just want to try it and see what what happens. Um, I have a theory that it's going to look terrible. Terrible.

But we're going to try it out. Are all of the black lines in Hollow Knight the same color? They are not. Look, that's because of uh probably either an atmospheric fog that's applied to the engine that's covering the black or the overlay or it's done and rasterize in Photoshop, but we're going to replicate that. Okay. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take this stroke here and I'm going to get this color right about here. And we're going to make it pretty subtle. Now, I think Team Cherry handdraws all their stuff, or at least they handdraw it in Photoshop with actual lines. But I'm I just want to see what it looks like here with, let's say, just simple lines with an effect. I want to see how that works. And this is experimental for me, guys. I've never

done this before. I don't think I've done this before. But again, you want everything to look good in the abstract. So, if you can use like effects to just put it on there um and not handdraw it, more power to you. You know, we want it to look good in the abstract anyway. And so, if I can do this super simple first and then start going in and adding um more details to the lines, I'm going to do that. I'm just going to add a little stroke to this guy here. Okay. So far so good. All right. So, we kind of have know what our general shapes are or w lit width of the lines are. It looks like we want to go a little bit thinner. Yeah, let's go thinner.

So, we're going to do three, no, four. And we're going to do that for every single one, actually. So, this is why I like to do it with an effect first, so that I can kind of gauge how big the lines should be, and then we can sort of mimic that by hand drawing the rest. Does that make sense? And I'm I'm being completely blunt, honest with you guys. that I have never done line work before. I'm pretty sure. I don't want to say never. I'm pretty sure I've never done line work before. Um, but we're going to replicate this line work and and make it look handdrawn. I'm going to try to. We'll see. This is this is uh all new for me. All right. So, that's the general vibe. Good, good, good, good, good. And I'm not going to make it look exactly like this. I can guarantee you guys that. But I want to I want to at least practice. Okay, these bushes are all probably

stamped. I'm trying to spot if they're duplicated or not. How cool is that? Just the attention to detail is just mindboggling, you know. Okay. Um, what was I saying? Oh, one more thing. I'm trying to think here what I want to do. Line work is so funny. Uh, you can add a drop shadow to your layers and it's going to make things look like much more nestled. I forgot to do that. So, let me show you what I mean by that. I'm going to do that. Copy layer style. Actually, let's just do it by hand or or individually here. Drop shadow. Yeah. Yeah, that looks so good. Okay.

Uh, drop shadow. And notice how I haven't rasterized the layers or the layer styles. Um, drop shadow. And all we're doing here, guys, is we're we're just discussing um the math behind all this. We're not doing detailing or anything like that. We're just studying the math and how it all works. That's the that's the best way I can describe it is the math. I don't know a better word. Yeah, there we go. There we go. that I don't even know if that needs a drop shadow, honestly. Nice, Tommy. Very good. Very good.

How old am I? 35. You mentioned Oh, you want me to do the sun shafts really quick? I could do the sun shafts. Sun shafts are probably the easiest thing to create. I'm not sure how Hollite does them. Let's see here. There's none here, but I'm going to show you. You just do a 45 degree angle. and just do a gradient. This is a cheat code, by the way. If you want to look like you're really smart, um, just do this, right? But we're going to mask this or or or hide. And then also, by the way, you merge these together and then you do a one layer that's got a sort of a motion blur on it or even a gshion blur like this. And now it looks kind of like it's blooming. And sometimes I even duplicate it so

it's really hard or like a heavy light like that. All right, let's figure out really quick how we can add some detailing here. This is going to be really interesting. So, if we take a look at our bushes here, they just have tiny little dots, right? And I'm not going to go ahead and I'm not going to add detailing yet to anything on the inside. I just want to get the outer edge of everything looking right. Does that make sense? We're going to work on the outer edge of all of our layers and then we're going to go in and add detailing on top of it all. Um, I could be wrong here. I'm just going to try this out. So, if we take a look at the let's say this layer here, um, all I got to do is take my pencil and go super duper small. I want to make sure we grab the exact color. So, you you have to turn off all of your um you have to turn off all of your overlays. There's one more that I'm missing.

What's these two? Yeah. So, what you do is you make sure you're grabbing the right color. So, it's that one. And then I should be able to just start punching these in. And it's automatically drawing the lines for me. See? So, I'm just trying to get a base layer of of an outline. And then I can go in and start adding in. See that? Let's listen to some music because I'm starting to lose motivation. The best way to uh get one of the best ways that I found to to really capture a vibe and a mood is to turn on music that sounds like what it looks. Um so if we type in silk song. Seriously. Okay.

The Silk Song soundtrack isn't up yet on Spotify. Thomas, how do you do Blender, Unity, Photoshop animation perfectly? I don't think I do them perfectly, but that's just cuz I've been doing this since I was I think 12. This is just I mean honestly I'm the the thing I'm best at in life is this. Does this make sense what I'm doing? Guys, notice how the strokes are already being applied because it's an effect on that layer. I'm actually having a lot of fun doing this.

same thing, guys, on every single layer. Um, this one here, I'm going to turn off the I'm going to make sure I grab the right color. You got to make sure that drop shadow is not hitting it, though. Okay. So, you got to turn off the drop shadow of that layer and grab this color here. There we go. That way it's perfect. I have to get really close to the camera or to the screen to do this. And we're going to go in and add detailing to the like the insides of stuff. But right now, I'm just getting the edging right. And I will admit, you know, this the final piece is going to look much more simplistic than Hollow Knight because

I'm not I'm not a hand drawer. I'm using a mouse. So, it's just a totally different approach uh when it comes to detailing. Now, the color theory stuff, I suspect that I'm correct about how they did it. um about when it comes to color theory. So, I I wouldn't be surprised if my approach was very similar to theirs, but this is where things get very different from probably what Team Cherry does. Turn off that drop shadow there. Grab the right color. Oh my goodness, this soundtrack is so good. Mom, I love you.

Are they losing detail as they go further back? No, they're not. Actually, things are getting smaller. Yeah, things get smaller and smaller. Notice, guys, how when I'm doing leaves like this, I'm not doing them evenly spaced. I'm doing them in sort of groups almost. [Music] the moment. The problem is once you commit to this level of detail, you got

to really commit, you know, because then everything else looks bad. All right, good. Thomas, you're doing great, buddy. Thanks, Thomas. No, you you you don't worry about it, buddy. I'm I'm I'm not being nice. I'm telling you the truth. Thanks. I appreciate that. You don't need to flatter. I'm not flattering you. All right. I love you. I love you, too. Thanks for your kind words. You didn't have to. [Music] My life is yours. And you open the door and you have everything to see tonight. I love you now.

We'll do this on the foreground as well or on the ground that you can walk on. See that? How do we feel? Yes, Ecoin. I make games. cuz I've been making games for my whole life. Make sure we turn on the drop shadow for things that I turned off earlier. Oh, some coffee. [Music] Now, with the ground like this, I don't know if we want to make it all fluffy looking. We're just going to do some fluff.

Ain't that cool, guys? I freaking love this. [Music] And we'll make that stone look good there in a sec. I mean, honestly, guys, watch this. You can do stuff like that. Sort of have an over overhang, but we're not going to worry about that right now. But that gray was there just to show you how that works. We'll get that working in a sec. Okay. All right. Now, let's go ahead and add

detailing to this foreground. See how we're going from the abstract and going um um we're going from the abstract and then we're getting more and more detailed and detailed detailing. Having you guys here cheering me on is really encouraging me. Thank you so much. Um, yeah, let's add some detailing here. We're going to go a little bit bigger for our leaves.

And then uh black same thing. I don't like that. Hang on. There we go.

All right, it's battle music now for the detailing. I wish I had a coffee. I think we need this here to be a little bit darker in the stroke. Like that. Yeah. All right. Let's use our brains here. Ah, I think I got it. What we need to do Let's let's do a little bit of studying here. [Music] What we need is we need a a bush piece that we can

use over and over and over again. And little little leaves there. I think I got it. All right. What I need I want to just I want to practice back here, guys. So, what I'm going to do, I'm going to create one bush. Make sure it's the same size as this. And like I said, you know, this detailing process is going to look a little bit different. I'm not going to be able to replicate exactly their style because that's not my style. But, we're going to add a

stroke, an inner shadow, a drop shadow to this guy. And you could start putting these all over the place right here. But what you want to do is you want to make sure there's sort of a darkness to them. I think this is how they're going to do it. Inner shadow going in that direction. Kind of experimenting here. Hang tight, guys. That stroke. Yeah, that black is the wrong color.

What the f? Hold on. Here we go. [Music] Kind of want to listen to the Undertale soundtrack. I'm gonna just merge all this together and then do a uh Do you guys see what I'm doing here? Now I have a detailing piece that I can use at my disposal. Thomas wins again. And I'll show you guys something real cool in a sec. Go a little bit bigger here.

Plants grow in groups. It's never even. So, you want to try and group things a little bit more like this. M [Music] let me show you guys something though. Let's take a look at the detailing for the pieces. They have little dots and sometimes they have a stroke, sometimes they don't. We kind of just eyeball it. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a little bit of a dot here, a highlight dot. like this. Let's do a little bit of an inner shadow. That's an additional one.

Oh yeah, baby. Oh, this song. So, we're gonna have two pieces that we can use. We're gonna have this one. [Music] Starting to look like Paper Mario, which I kind of like. Um, looks good. And this is all just using a mouse sort of eyeballing things, guys. When it gets

darker, closer to the center, you start to fade it out. Gonna enter the green path. Gonna enter the green path. I'm gonna enter the green path. Going to enter the green path. Just eyeballing it. I'm just eyeballing it, baby. And we can do even look at this, guys. We can do even smaller dots. right here to make it look a little bit more even more detailed in certain areas. Like I said, the problem with adding this much detailing is you got to go you got to commit and say, "Okay, well, I got I can't just do it in some spots. I got to do it everywhere."

Let's just save that and take a look. I think the smaller dots we need to get rid of. Um [Music] I don't know. Let's see what we can do here. [Music] [Music] Do you guys see why I did that initial edge first? Just helps you so much to be able to see

kind of the the generic shape that you're after. But once you get an idea of how this is all going to look, then then you can start cutting things into pieces. Obviously, um I feel like I need darkness. I think we'll we'll talk about that in a sec. Actually, we don't even have it. There we go. I was like, where is it? Yay. [Music] This is great. [Music]

Yes. Just reusing pieces, baby. No, you guys are not following the right steps. You don't do the blur yet. It's it's a process. You don't lay the carpet before the foundation. We're not going to do that. Patience, patience, patience, my love. All right, you guys ready for this this row here? Now, all I got to do is sort of a hue saturation shift. I think I don't even know if I have to do that here. I guess we could. We could do a little bit of a shift. Start in the abstract. Always start in the abstract and work your way into more detailing

as you move towards the camera. Again, if you want to support the channel, guys, check out that course below and you're going to learn how to do stuff like this. Now, like I said, guys, I'm not Team Cherry. I got my own style, right? But the benefit by the way of using smart objects like I'm doing um is I can I can edit this stuff cuz it's looking a little bit like they're shiny and I don't know if I like that. Watch this. I'm going to I'm going to get some that's just a little subtle here. There we go. Just eyeballing it. There we go.

Let's move our way back onto this layer here. And what we're going to do is see the reason why we started with color first is we could just use it and sort of follow it. So I can just do a little bit of a shift towards blue here. drop the saturation and the brightness down and just sort of match that background. Do you see that? And then I can shrink the size and follow the edging. Does that make sense, guys? I hope it does. I'm not sure.

I don't like this piece here. This one right here looks like it's frog eggs. I think I need to reduce the uh opacity on that one. We're going to need to start rasterizing layers soon. And look, the further away from the camera things get, the less detailed they are. So eventually we're going to just blur this stuff and we're not going to see much. So I don't think we need that much detailing for the background, but we'll talk about that in a sec. A workflow workflow is totally different. This is not a good workflow. This is this is getting an idea for what things look like. Then you have to

think, okay, how do I cut all this up and reuse it? That's a whole other other question. But right now, it's just figuring out what the art style is and how the colors work. Yeah, we can add a little bit of detailing to the layer below. Notice how I'm just using the same sort of stamp. And we can tweak the stamp, guys. And suddenly everything's going to be much more detailed. But let's just do subtle subtle for this part. There we go. Desaturate it. Darken it. Yeah, there we go.

Drop the opacity. There we go. [Music] And I'm going to get a one here that's a little bit more round. So I'm just going to grab a little bit of white. And there we go. Drop down the opacity. I want to show you guys something in just a sec. Okay, notice how I haven't really rasterized any of this stuff. What you can do is go in and add a ton of detailing to this single smart object

and everything will update. That make sense. Just eyeballing it, guys. [Music] I guess we could probably add a little bit of detailing to that layer. So, let's go ahead and do it. Uh, Photoshop's about to explode. We're going much smaller here. There we go. Even smaller. And I'm just going to drop the opacity down. Do a little bit more white here.

Yeah, we need to do a little bit of a hue shift there. There we go. [Music] I'll show you guys why we want why we're going to use smart objects here in just a sec. They just make things so much easier because I can go in and go, "Okay, I want to make this look more sketchy." And it'll just sort of happen automatically.

Okay. Kind of feel like that's enough detail. Well, I mean, we might want to do one more over here. There we go. If something ever looks like a flat wall, you know you got a problem. That looks like a flat wall to me. So, what I'm going to do is grab this and just put it on the very far back portion here. There we go. That's great. That's what we needed. Okay, that's fine for me. I think that foreground we want to make uh a little bit more detailed as well. All right. All right. Be sure to check out the guys if you find this content helpful and you

think it's helpful and you want to learn more and you want to invest in your future. Um, check out the uh what am I looking at? Hang on. Check out the course below. And yes, guys, it supports the channel. That's why I I sell the courses. It helps a lot as I finish up Twisted Tower, my third commercial release. We're getting there.

Oh, thank you. I found it. Okay. All right. And then also we need to do that layer right over here. And then we're done with, you know, adding the highlights and stuff. There we go. [Music] All right, let me just add a little bit of a fluffy

piece there. So, just one right there. Yeah. Okay, before we rasterize anything, what we want to do, what we want to do is we want to go into our single object that we just duplicated a gajillion times, and I'm going to make it look handdrawn. This is a bit of a risk because it's going to cause everything else to look bad. Um, but what I'm going to do here, I don't like those bubbles, by the way. These little tiny bubbles. And I can't quite figure out why.

I feel like that's going to already make it look less like it's frog eggs. Um, okay. And then this right here is way too yellow. Yeah, that looks better. Looks more like cozy leaves now. Um but but we still need we need um like dots, little tiny dots. So let's take a look at what Hollow Knight did. Okay, there's not a lot of strokes on those. Okay,

what we'll do, we're going to do a very subtle highlight even. I think we can do that. Let's think about this. If I take the stroke off, it's just going to make it look like bubbles again. Maybe. Let's see. When you put a highlight inside of a highlight, it looks like a bubble. That's what it is. Um, yeah, I agree with you that making it more flat like a stamp, like a dot is going to be smart as well. So, let's go ahead and do that. So, I'm going to grab the highlight here. We're just trying a bunch of different options here, guys. Um, let's do this. Merge these layers together. Drop it down. There we go. Going to start going for that handdrawn look. I definitely feel a little nervous about it.

I do feel nervous about it. It helps to zoom out. So, I have I have a smaller screen on my right side that I can see things really small. Um, it helps to be able to do that. And I'll fade all this out. I'll make it sort of have a gradient to it. This is going to be my first pass. I know I'm not going to like this, but it's worth a shot. And we'll do a a fade here. Let's try that. Almost. We're getting there. Do you see guys why we're why we're using a single smart object? It helps so much.

Let's zoom out. [Music] better.

Yeah, that looks a lot better. Now, let's go with some brighter dots. [Music] Let's do overlay and see what it looks like. No. [Music] Hey, that looks cool. Oh, yeah. that's giving off that that that just that flavor uh that spotted shiny flavor that that Hollow Knight does so well. I think we're getting there.

[Music] Okay, we're going to go tiny little dots. Few more. We're going to smudge them a little bit. Go some dark as well. Man, if I were Team Cherry, I would have all these art assets. What I mean is like I think what they're doing is they have a bunch of art assets that are probably not actually. I was going to say they're like smart objects that so that they can make edits like this. That's what I would do. But then again, I'm not I'm an idiot. Um, just adding that subtle detailing, guys,

to make it feel really, really rich. And I'm going to I'm going to add some strokes as well to make this feel like it's drawn. I'll show you how to do that in a sec. Okay. That looks good. Yeah. All right. Here we go. Here's how I'm going to add strokes. It's going to I hopefully this is interesting to you guys. I'm going to grab that color. Okay. Okay. So, here's the thing. We need to make this a smart object. And then we're going to draw on top of the smart object.

Kind of have to be smart here. certain lines just don't look good. We'll do a drop shadow on this to create more of a highlighted effect. But this is like a big bang for your buck because you do it once and then it just looks good throughout the rest of the the work because you've duplicated a bajillion times. But you'll see, guys, once I do this, it's dangerous because it makes the rest of everything else look bad. Uh, so you just got to be really careful and commit to this sort of level of detailing. Scratch disc is full. Oh my word. I'm going to rasterize this.

Scratch. This is full. I've officially run out of room on my PC. My recycle bin isn't even full. Um, I got to delete some files. I will I'll do a darker shadow in a sec. So, this is only 100 megabytes. Let me delete some files really quick, guys. Okay, I think I've got I've deleted enough things here. I need to do a big PC cleanup.

Empty out the files. Let's give it a go. I'll give it a go here. So, I just deleted like a gig. We'll add more black. I promise. Hang tight. Delete your five versions of Unity. Yep. Oh, look. It didn't bring in our new version here. I wonder why. Let me open that up and see what's going on. Look at that. Something happened there. All right, let's see if this looks good. We'll see. My computer's about to fry.

Okay, here we go. Trying to figure out what I don't like. Something is super um saturated about it. So, I'm going to grab that uh the

highlights there. Just put them there. And I'm going to basically fade it out. It's just a little too saturated. That might do it. Yeah, that's better. We're going to clean up the the ground edge, guys. I promise. Okay. We're not gonna we're not going to mess with the edging of of the ground just yet. All right. I kind of feel I kind of feel like I'm ready to rasterize things, you know?

Yeah, we're we're ready to rasterize. Let's go. I'm going to remove the drop shadow. We don't want to rasterize the drop shadow. Not right now because we're going to use gradients for that. Okay. So, there's that one. It's scary to rasterize things, isn't it, guys? A lot of weird look. That looks weird right there. Okay, we're going to rasterize this. You ready, guys? Here we go.

Remove that drop shadow. Merge layers. Let's get rid of that. We may do a colorization there. Hang tight. We're rasterizing because uh we want to start adding gradients and and and paintbrush effects and stuff like that

to this. Okay. So, we got rasterized layers. Here we go. Boom. Boom. This I feel like we could do a little bit more. Let's double check. But that this needs to be a little bit more blue, honestly. So, I'm going to merge those together. And we're going to do a little bit of a blue here. Oh, this is black. Um, there's our sun shafts. This right here. Yeah, we need a little bit more of this. And honestly,

[Music] yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. There we go. Okay. what we're missing. There we go. We'll do one here as well. This one's more subtle. That's what I'm talking about. Okay, we're going to do some darkness. add some darkness and gradients and shading and all that stuff to this. But overall, I think we're we're we're we're kind of there. I feel good about it. Honestly, it's a different style, but you guys get the idea. Hopefully, the math checked out. You know, it needs more contrast as well. I mean, we could

we could definitely do a punch of contrast on the top layer, right? But we're not going to worry about that right now. All right. Next up, let's clean up the edges here. Um, what I'm gonna do is just start doing some cuts. Do that. Oh man, the ra the the drop shadow of that layer rasterized. For the purposes of today's tutorial, I'm not going to worry about it. Okay, guys. But I can just use this lasso tool, this polygon lasso tool, and start creating um subtle line work. That way I don't have to use a um crap. That way I don't have to use a pen tablet to just draw

subtle line work there. Let's see here. It's going to go underneath that bush actually like this. See, you can do it here as well. this kind of detailing. It only makes sense to do this when you're done with the with the color in the the the color theory. Honestly, that's the only time it really makes sense to me. Um, this is bugging me right here. So, we're going to use a little bit of a a fill technique here to to get rid of that.

There we go. See, even that little piece right there is bothering me. Oh yeah, baby. So good. This is bothering me, too. That fade right there. And also I wanted to show you guys you can just create little cuts um on the stroke to make it feel like there's a pen or it was done with a pen so that it's not perfect. Like for example, I could grab this and just do this. So now it feels like it's drawn with a pen. I wish I wouldn't have rasterized that drop shadow. I think I can get rid of it. There we go. Thank the Lord. Okay. All right. Let's make it feel a little bit more handdrawn, guys.

And kind of what I'm doing honestly is just discovering an art style. This is why it's so important to do this. You just sort of play, have fun, play, and you'll figure out your own style. [Music] Look, watch. Making everything feel handdrawn. We'll add darkness here in a sec to to various layers. Okay, these feel particularly vector. So, watch this. What I'm going to do is

I can start adding like little cuts here. See? Or maybe just actually handdraw it. No, this is how I've been doing it for years. I've I've found my voice and my style. And that's not me being a jerk to you. I'm trying to say every artist has their style. Um what works for them. What because the best way to be an artist is to be an autopilot. And I'm in auto. I've been doing this for I don't know how long, 30 years drawing since I was five. And this is how I've always done it. It's this approach

of starting abstract. If I handdraw it, I can't start from the abstract. Um, that's just my style. So, you should never feel pressured as an artist to do things a certain way. Um, this is how I've always done it and it works for me. Thank you, Nick. Hope you're doing well, buddy. This is bothering me right here. [Music] This is going to make me feel so much better just doing this. Thank you, Lord.

Okay, here we go. Add some stone here. So, that bush there is going to have sort of an overhang. Watch this. This is going to This is going to be so cool, guys. I want to show you something. There we go. Now it's stone. And the here you're

probably thinking, well, how do we make it look better? I'll show you. So, you just grab that and you just do subtle shades. There we go. Now, it looks like that there's a bush sort of pouring over the stonework. The same is true right here. We could just do um same hue, saturation, shift. Very good. Very good. I gotta admit, guys, I'm having so much fun. I haven't done 2D art like this in a long time and I'm having a blast. Thanks for hanging out. Again, just doing a little subtle shift here.

Jebby, Jebby, Jebby, it's okay. So far so good, baby. We'll do a little bit of a handdrawn line there. So, this is I I don't know what you'd call this phase. It's the It's the things start to make sense phase where you just go into autopilot because you start to see things in your mind's eye. But it's really hard to see things in my mind's eye when nothing is abstractly put down yet. So, I have to put things down abstractly first for me to start getting an idea of what it is. Um, I don't know, Nick. There's a lot of people who have a crown in the chat and I don't know

All right. Now, we're going to add some darkness and shading to things. Um, I think it needs to be subtle. I don't think it needs to be aggressive. I also want to use the fill feature for in Photoshop to fill in some areas that I feel look a little repetitive. Um, so for example, I could say, well, this looks a little repetitive right here. So I can grab this and just grab certain areas and fill them in with the fill tool and it'll

make things look custom. Let's try it. We'll see. There we go. See, now we have this sort of weird shape here. I like that. I think we need to do the same up here, here, here, here. Edit fill. Where am I? We need to merge that with the layer below it. Which layer is that? Huh? I'm not going to worry about that, honestly. What is that? What is that piece of crap right there?

Get rid of that trash. All right, let's go ahead and bring in some uh one of you mentioned adding more darkness and shading to things. And then we're going to blur things and then add some detailing to the foreground. Good. I like that. Let's do it with this one as well. Makes it feel moodier. I like that. Very good. This one I feel like we need to use a brush. a Thomas brush. Go a little bit blacker and greener. There we go. What is that crap?

I don't know what that is. Let's delete that. Maybe blur this a little bit. Okay, watch this guys. This is going to be fun. here. Yep. A little bit of depth. Oh yeah, baby. Oh, and then right here, we're just going to add a little bit of darkness as well. Why are you there? What is that? Nobody

asked for you to be there. This one I feel like we want to go a little bit darker as a whole. Yeah, there we go. And we're going to add some detailing here to this tree. Watch this, guys. I know that looks really smooth. Totally fine. It's totally fine to start with simple lines that are like vector and then you just go in and cut. Look. And then it looks handdrawn. To the person who told me just draw it by hand, well, this is how I do things. I don't want to draw things by hand. I want them to look like they're drawn by hand because I like to have control over the exact shape. If I was to draw that by hand, well, I couldn't do it. I don't have the skill.

I want to show you guys something. My favorite thing about trees is doing stuff like this. Watch if I do. Watch. This is so cool. Watch. Something about that just works for me. It looks like a vine is sort of running over the edge of it here. I feel like we need to fill it in a little bit right here. Yeah, you could do one right here, maybe. See? And then I'm going to take this. I'm going to duplicate it so that it's uh There we go. It's a little handdrawn there. Merge the layers together. Go a little bit bigger.

These guys motion blur down, baby. Okay. Do a little bit of a handdrawn approach to this top layer. I think we can blur. Right. We got foreground elements do not blur in Hollow Knight. A little bit. They do a little bit. I think what we could probably do is just blur the bottom part. [Music]

No, I liked it crisp. I think we just need to add darkness to this layer right here. Yes. Oh. Oh, that's what I wanted. [Music] Delicious. Brilliant. And fun. And then we're going to add a little bit of moss. I want to show you guys the trick to adding moss to trees. 1. 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10. [Music] Moss was added to the trees. Um, hey, and then watch the trick to particle effects. We're just going to do tiny white dots for now. Don't underestimate the value of particles. But what you don't want to do is it just all one color. I don't think so. What we're going to do is we're going to do an outer glow of white.

We're going to rasterize the layer style. And then over top of it, what we're going to do is we're going to do some cool like changes in color. Blues, maybe a light pink that's the same color as our player. See this yellow? gives it sort of a neon glow, right? Um, and then one final thing you can do with that is just for the purposes of this concept art, we're going to do a blur to make it look like they're blooming a little bit, but not for all of them. And we're just going to go in there and punch some of them to feel a little bit more bloomy,

especially when they're near bright areas. [Applause] That looks great, Thomas. You did amazing. Um, what Unity will have for you is a nice post-processing effect to do some bloom. So, but we're going to do it manually here, like this. [Music] What else are we missing here?

Um. Oh yeah, we're missing that. That's really easy, actually.

Thomas, first, you're awesome. Second, this is my taxdeductible donation to you. Third, you need to run a a Kickstarter for Twisted Tower. Yeah, I don't know. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that, 3D Printer Academy. Um, I don't really want to do a Kickstarter for the a game that I'm basically done with, but I think for the next game I might do one. I don't really want to work with a publisher for the next one. [Music] But thank you.

Do you know what I want to master really quick is I want to master this this the way they're doing this stone. I'm going to do it my way as best I did it my way. [Music] I want to figure this out.

Like I said, guys, I'm just figuring this out with you guys. Do you kind of see it? It's coming together. And just remember guys, um, check out that course below if you want to learn how to do this. If you want to learn 2D art from a Time magazine featured game artist, this is my I'm working on my third commercial release. Not this, but I'm I'm currently working on my third

commercial release, which is currently published by 3D Realms. So, I am a game developer. I'm an indie game developer, if you don't know. And um yeah, you're going to learn from somebody who's actually making indie games as a job. Um see if it's something you're interested in. Click the link below. You're going to get 25% off. Um and you'll also get my um my 3D art course completely free, but only for this sale event. So feel free to check it out below. Oh, that made a big difference, I think. That's great. Very cool. You think so? 3D Printer Academy, that's awesome.

So yeah, stones the way you do it is you think about kind of the shadows they create. I'm really glad I got a chance to catch the stream. This is from Ricky Libra. $10. Thank you so much. Just finished Never Song and you're a huge inspiration in my game dev journey. Thank you. This one's particularly harder for some reason. I don't know why. It's not going to look good.

[Music] I think it's fine. We just need this right here to be honestly this can just be cut out. That's not bad. This uh is bugging me.

Just like the onewing dove. [Music] [Music]

That was fun. Hope you guys learned a ton. I had a blast. Huge thank you. By the way, if you want your name um on the next live stream on Monday, check out the course below. But I wanted to say a huge thank you to Robert, Chad, Erico, Mccclac, Robert, Darren, Jerry, Danny, Awas, Aaron, Tiffany, everybody who enrolled in the 2D art course. Where's the Oh, there it is. Uh, everybody who enrolled in the 2D art course, it means the world to me that you check out 2D Art Pro and that you trust me with your game art journey. Look guys, there's three hours left, six or three days left, 16 hours left to join the uh art program. This supports the channel, supports the podcast, but more importantly, it does support your future. So check it out below. 25% off, and you also get my 3D art program completely free, taught by an actual

indie game dev who's been featured by Time magazine. Hey, that's me. Check it out below. See if it's something you're interested in. And yeah, it's great. I love you guys. Hope that was helpful. Hope you had a good time. and I will see you later.