Indie dev here to help! ⭐PLEASE follow my new game on Kickstarter link! www.kickstarter.com/projects/petermilko/the-last-phoenix ►DISCORD discord.gg/YVqfFhV7pc ►PATREON www.patreon.com/sadslime ►TWITTER: twitter.com/PeterMilko ►DWERVE game dwerve.com/ ►FREE ART & GAMES: petermilko.itch.io/ ►ASEPRITE pixelart program: www.humblebundle.com/store/aseprite?partner=pixelpete 👕 PANICPOP clothing panicpop.com/
Oversaturated colors if used correctly can look amazing, but probably I like them a lot because I like flashy artwork, I unironically like making my eyes bleed
"don't rely on these numbers, what you need to rely on is your eye". Thanks a lot for this advice, I'm always worrying about the numbers every time I adjust the color I didn't realize that I should be looking at the color, not the numbers. Guess engineering really took a toll on me lol.
I keep telling myself to just eyeball it. But later I look at the numbers and find them all coming out to 12.5, 25, 33.3, 50, 66.7 75, and 87.5.
3 года назад
That initial tip about saturation being for less serious and more "fun" games, I didn't think of it this way, but it really opened my eyes. Awesome approach that I will surely follow.
Saturated colors can still work on a serious game, you just need to make them feel like they're not out of place in the story, look at OFF for example, this game is really stylized and has really flashy colors, but it has a serious tone, and it works because it's not set in the real world, it's in an alternate surrealist reality where some things might not even make sense
This is why all colour pickers should have not only RGB and HSV, but HCL as well. The latter is like HSV but the hue is optically corrected to appear to have identical saturation.
5:05 this is a good point. I recently made a striped cyan / gold rim for some sandstone desert ruin walls / floors i made a tileset of. And let me tell you, the VERTICAL stripes look like they are cyan / sandstone, while the HORIZONTAL stripes look cyan / gold-orange. I was literally looking at my sprite sheet going "WTF? I accidentally tinted the vertical stripes the same color as my sandstone? How did i do that?", then zoomed in and used the color picker to find it WAS the exact same gold color as the horizontal strip.. But as i moved the brush tool pixel over the vertical striped area, it literally changed hue in front of my eyes. This is because our eyes (or rather our brains) are subject to optical illusions. This is something we MUST take into account when making our sprites. So it might feel really "bad" to use a DIFFERENT hue for the SAME object, depending on if its vertical / horizontal or what other colors it borders, but it IS actually necessary for the human brain to NOT get optical illusion that "changes the hue" as our brain translates the patterns. Really really confusing stuff, if you're not aware of it. In the beginning i was really stubborn, thinking "NO! I can NOT stray from the math! They MUST all be 10 values apart in brightness, i need exact proper hues!". But then you realize, if your human brain literally sees the WRONG hue, you gotta compensate for that.. This isnt about color blindness, this is about regular optical illusions. Search youtube for examples, some of them are spectacular, like colors wildly changing depending on adjacent colors. We just have to keep this in mind and realize that we're NOT computers, we're biological organisms. So the way we experience colors is the max priority, NOT the accuracy of the math.
Exactly, I base my color palettes entirely on how the colors look together, how I perceive them and if they have enough contrast to be distinguishable from eachother even in black and white
This was an awesome illustration of color palettes, mild color theory and how Aseprite works. I'll definitely look into getting Aseprite after having watched several of your vids.
Man, I'm not an artist, just a programmer wanting to venture out to have more independence in the game arts. I spent a week watching videos, looking for which program to use, who to follow. Finally I found this channel. What a find! I'm sharing it with everyone I know. Your teaching is a huge differential, I'm finally learning from scratch !! Congratulations and thank you very much! A hello from Brazil
Man, I just discovered your channel the other day and I've been binge watching all your videos. Really love your relaxed approach to pixel art. You seem to genuinely love what you do, and your casual demeanor is both welcoming and very educational. You seem like a cool guy I'd like to hang with. I really need to get my hands on that Aseprite program so I can follow along. Keep up the great work! Loving the channel
I'm pretty sure that there's a free version named Libresprite, and it's a version from when Aseprite was open-source, and the devs of Libresprite have kept it up-to-date with Aseprite. Edit: I included a TL;DR in this that was essentially what I was saying. I took it out.
Pete you're a legend, honestly, you're now a go-to resource for me 100% Also I noticed the 1000 subs video was only a few months ago! now look at you! good for you man!
Really good video! Describing the colors by describing the mood they create as well as the HSV values behind it give both the technical and emotional sides to knowing how to pick the right color. Love your in depth breakdown, and it makes it really easy to follow. Keep up the amazing work!! Will definitely be sharing this video around.
Man, thank you SO much for these tutorials. I'm a complete beginner, and I've probably spent about 50 hours in aseprite making the same sprites over and over again, and videos like this have helped me learn so much faster than I'd be able to on my own! I'll definitely be supporting Dwerve
5:16 "mathematically the differences are the same, but they don't look it" really this is because of the colourspace you are working in... HSV, RGB, CIELab, XYZ or CIELuv etc. and not all of them are perceptually uniform, and brightness(or lightness or value) differences don't necessarily give the same difference to our eyes. RGB and derived colourspaces (like HSV) have nice and convenient math, but you can't really use those values to predict the colour differences, you'd need to work in something like CIELab or CIELuv for that. Those tend to also work better for gradients between colours. (in the sense that they are slightly smoother, and won't get brighter/darker bands as much) That said, RGB is a good enough approximation that it mostly doesn't matter.
Pete, thanks for all the tutorial and the good free stuff you give. It’s so meaningfull for beginner like me. I pray you have a good life, keep creating! 🤟🏼
Awesome tutorials! I have pretty much zero experience with drawing/pixel art and these videos have been super good in teaching me the basics and to not take myself too seriously when experimenting. Thank you for making them!
Great videos. Actually learning something. My art is improving a lot. Never thought I could draw like this. Cool. Asperite looks like a great tool, so if you have another key laying around, I wouldn't mind taking it off your hands... That's the kinda guy I am. Please keep up the good work, Dwerve looks great too.
Aseprite looks really great and I'd love a key for it. I use Paint and it does the job, but it gets really tedious when you try to do animations. I love the load palette from colors function, very handy!
I can’t tear myself away from your videos! Really, since Im new to pixel art Im very impressed with your skills dude. I have a question. It was in this video that you somehow turned your layer/frame tab to the right side. So Im very curious how you did this, coz I went through all the settings, but didnt find anything like this anywhere. UPD. Well I found the answer, I just had to watch the following videos namely the "water" tutorial.
@@justinflores7781 I'm a platformer guy. I'd like to take the game through very different scenarios, settings and lightings, so having some basic knowledge on color theory goes a long way
4:48 "And those are our primary colors." What you have there is red, yellow and cyan. Those are not the primary colors, neither in subtractive nor additive colorspace. In subtractive color (paint, print and ink) the primary colors are cyan, magenta and yellow. And in additive color (lights, screens and pixels) the primary colors are red, green, and blue.
@Dexter And why the red looks darker than the other two. Red is just one light, the R in RGB, while both yellow and cyan need two pixels to be light up in order to work. RB for magenta, and RG for yellow.
Really get this saturation in, really get the idea on your head of your game is colourful or not. 2 minutes later - These sliders, they don't matter. It's all about your eye.
Hello Peter, greetings from Paraguay, I have been learning pixel art for a week, and when I thought of seeking help, I came running to your channell. I am making a portrait of myself, they told me that I can start with the NES palette, but I do not like the colors for that composition, I saw this video and it helped me a lot, I always wanted to use a palette like the one in Titan Souls and now I will be able to, in addition to learning the tricks of the gradient, thank you very much! By the way, how is it that you have a key for Aseprite? That interests me, that would help me a lot :D
Aesprite seems like it is really user-friendly! I use Gimp right now and it is alright, but I would certainly appreciate a key for Aesprite. I love your newer videos, too!
Started watching several of your videos and after many it has just clicked that you rely on your mouse! 😮 So much so for my paralysis “I need this, and then that, then watch all these tutorials AND THEN I’ll finally start doing some pixel art”
I actually find it very difficult to create a palette with no guidance or context. Its easiest if you know what you want to create. Do you need colors for an outdoor scene or indoor? What are the lighting conditions (any direct light, only ambient, night scene)? Then if you know the basic rules of how light works then you will know exactly how the palette should be. Then once you work all that out then you can modify them to be more artistic.
I often just choose the starting color from a screenshot of my computer or from a Preset Palette (either from the Picture Editor itself or from a Palette Site). Only then do I really feel confident that all colors I use will be good colors. This applies to all art forms. Right now, I'm making Vector Graphics (because I feel like I made too much Pixel Art before) but I still pick my colors in the same way. Wait a moment: Why am I still watching a Pixel Art tutorial channel if I take a break from Pixel Art? That's the power of an entertaining video channel: It can make you watch Tutorials you don't really need ever time you watch them. **Edit:** Even though I take a break from Pixel Art in favour of Vector Graphics right now, they couldn't be nearly as good without the tricks I learnt from pixeling before: The most helpful trick I can think of the quickest is aligning (at least most) points on a grid of 16x16 "tiny units" per tile (not pixels, because ,,Partial Pixels" don't exist). Especially in games, this makes it much easier to scale things. Also, my current project (at least for now) doesn't have a complicated enough graphics style that this second tip would make everything easier instead of wasting time, but I usually make a Pixel Art version of the future vector graphics before I retrace everything with curves, so I'm sometimes still making Pixel Art when the final result will be Vector Graphics. Maybe I'll make Pixel Art Versions of some of the later Characters before remaking them, but for now that one Idea Doodle from my phone was sufficient to craft the first character graphic.
I chose *HSL* *Hue* - What you understand “color” to be. You know, like “red”, “orange”, “blue”, etc. *Saturation* - How intense the color is, or how intense the color is. 100% saturation gives you the brightest color, and as saturation decreases, the color becomes more gray. *Brightness (or “luminosity”)* - Lightness of a color. 0% brightness is black.
saturation inflicts the mood you are trying to achive, but it doest mean anything in difficulty or age rating, some examples that clash with what you said is Cyberpunk Edgerunners, which use very saturated colors in their designs and play a major role in the lighting of some of the most beutiful scenes they have to offer, and minecraft, whihc by all means should fit your criteria for easy, or kid games, yet have some very unsaturated colors in the mix of things. as a rule of thumb, saturation influences the overall energy of the piece/game, so vibrant saturated colors are energetic and bold, while dull colors are more realistic and subtle.
I use Paint too, to keep my colors consistent I just made a really big image file where I only keep all of my colors in the form of 16x16 squares, so I can copy paste them onto another canvas an use them at any moment
I wanted to buy aesprite yesterday it was on discount on humble bundle but didnt had the chance to do so xD But what I do for now is copy paste on gimp... it works for nooow lol Also thanks a lot for the tips Pixel Pete. Really neat video... I looked a LOT of videos about color palette... non were telling me all of this, only how mathematical it was or wtv, or would tell me to go on a website to chose one..... We definitely learn faster by getting our hands on the projects than to just let others does everything for us. But also theres a middle ground. We also learn faster if you "steal like an artist". I think this video totally is in this middle ground and omg thanks xD !! A lot... !
What sucks is I have a nice drawing tablet and a laptop but the color display is absolute garbage. I did a whole piece in this gorgeous soft salmon pink and then once it was exported and posted online it looked like an angry creepy red on my phone. Super huge bummer.
On the topic of color saturation, the idea that the lack of color SHOULD represent seriousness (while representing the opposite with a vibrant look) is kind of an erroneous principle imo (it's also a bad cliche, even more so when you associate colorful things exclusively to kid toys and generally having fun). Take Gears of War for example, or even Doom 2016. While both are gory, they're so visually monochrome (GoW even more so) they become bland to look at. If the idea for a serious theme really was to put me to sleep than to be concerned about the characters or where the story's going, then great, it's done the job. But having a serious narrative does not necessarily require a full bleaching of the palette. Rather, it can be made out of a smaller selection of the rainbow where only contrasting pairs are allowed (a bright color next to a dark color from the opposite side of the HSV-derived wheel). You can even have a lot of dark space with a bit of neon space in between for either a "cyberpunk" look, or for a dramatic scene. Point is, the color saturation is irrelevant when there's the option to have dark areas in the visuals. Plus you're less likely to put the observer to sleep if you don't overdo the color bleaching.
Say I'm shading something: should I strive to pick all/most of my shades from my existing palette? I notice that in your lessons, you usually shade things by manually adjusting a color's variance, or by blending it with the opacity technique. But as a noob, I thought doing so would give me too many colors and make things clash eventually. Or is that not really something to worry about, as long as I'm using my existing palette as at least a starting point for picking/blending shades?
Some people are bad at manually picking good colors. Its easier to start with a pallet of colors you like and make more using those. Just use them as a starting point then manually add the shades you need etc.
The Asprite key still available? ^^ Just found your channel and is helping me a lot on the matter of pixel art! I've subscribed and followed on Twitter.
Could you please make a tutorial about making the variants of a single object with different colors (keeping the same shading and lighting values on each object) on Aseprite? For example one gem with many versions of it with different colors.
Just a question form a novice pixel artist. do you think it is better to work with a preset palette, such as those offered by Aseprite or create your own, and the whole question is based on the assumption that I am trying to improve
