Art Tutorial 2! (Patreon)

Here it is! Let me know about any comments or questions and I will try to get back to you soon.

This is a loose transcription based on my script for the video:

Because I think it will be instructive, I'm going to break down an animation I made. This is not a typical game animation, I spent more time on this then I would for an in-game asset, but rather something I made to try out a few techniques which I will show you.

Let's start with making the drawing. Getty has an open image program that has set aside a portion of Getty's gigantic image library and made it available to the public. Sometimes I will just go on here and look for stuff that could be collaged together or to get interesting textures and layouts.

Many of the elements of the drawing are edited pieces of this original image followed up with paint overs to tie it all together and some elements I did all by myself. There's also a lot of color indexing and shading through dithering.

In order to create some movement and excitement in the image, I've gone through each frame and applied a variety of filters which I have then re-indexed back to the base black and white colors. That is one way to achieve an animated dithering effect. If you are curious about how this is done, I advise you to watch my first visual art tutorial. Applying one filter to the entire image makes it a little bit too plain, so usually I try to use layers to make things move around in a less synchronized and more syncopated manner.

This is the demon's head. After I drew it I left it as a static image instead of trying to make it more visually exciting. I did this in order to balance out the movement and energy of the rest of the image, sort of a stable point that doesn't fatigue the viewer's eyes. Because my stuff is already sometimes pretty unclear as I am working in a low resolution that is often very noisy, I know I can't just make everything constantly as fuzzy and distorted as possible, as much as I might like that. I will warn that without the movement surrounding it, it is kind of boring by itself, especially if you zoom into it.

The upward drifting particulate matter in the image is a rendering of a very simple particle system in blender that has been color indexed into black and white. I have started using blender in a couple of different ways and I'm by no means a master, but I've been able to get some cool stuff done with relatively simple knowledge, like this transition animation from Family Vacation, which is a simulation of growing roots done in blender.

The last thing I did was this piece was to place a paper texture over the whole image and then index it into two colors. You can do a lot to spice up any piece or visual asset you are working with if you give it a little texture. Messing around with indexing, transparency and blend modes can also create some fun effects. The organic feel of a texture over pixel art makes it look less like something made on a computer, which is not always what you want, but sometimes it can be nice.

[ending thanks you and gratefulness]