Pixel-over Process - Part 1&2
Added 2022-10-29 17:44:40 +0000 UTCHere's a 44 minute video, and a 1hr video where I wrestle with pixels, painting over some 16 colour PC Engine sprites (from spriters-resource).
Probably best to watch at 2x, keep in the background or skip around.
Part 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_LNkjwIe0M
Program: Photoshop, using a 1-pixel brush. More info in video comment.
Comments
Thank you! Thatβs very helpful. I also found something else with some insight if anyone is interested: https://androidarts.com/palette/16pal.htm. (Of course the pixel art tutorial on your site also has a lot of good info on color choices.)
Roy
2022-12-24 14:49:12 +0000 UTCI think so... but where? I forget. Anyways, usually I try to add some hue shifts in the ramps/gradients to make the colours feel richer. It works okay for stuff like rocks and organic stuff, but not for sky gradients. My (white/tan) skin tones goes from a darker, almost purple tint to yellow. In some cases I use a blue/gray tint for parts where the sky might reflect... it's more notable on black skin though. I avoid using plain gray ramps and often add hue shifts to these. I merge dark and very light colours to save indices, as the eye generally can't tell these apart. Saturation needs to be kept in check too. It can vary a bit between colours, otherwise the piece will feel either muddy or garish. My greens tend to be warm if light, and cold if dark. Nowadays these type of greens are very common in pixel art, but in the past, greens were often plain saturated greens that got gradually darker. Sometimes I avoid making white white and black black, and instead use an "off" tone. With only 16 colours or so, you don't have to have a full black or white... they can be too strong to be useful. Eye whites and such can often use a light skin tone. The blues... it depends, but I often mix in a green/cyan. It's useful for ocean stuff. For yellows, I mix in some warm red, unless I really need a muddy/sandy yellow. Super saturated colours have their place, but I think they work best for particle effects and such which need to pop. Some old Amiga games with muddy palettes only had muddy colours available for effects and it didn't work so well. I tend to work with restricted palettes but nowadays you can work in 24-bit of course. Even so, a limited palette can give a game an identifiable style/feel, kind of like poster art, so that's one reason to do it. I think maybe 16/32/64 colours can be enough for an entire pixel art game unless there are more modern transparency effects and gradients happening. Machines like the Amiga can of course do copper effects, changing colours per scanline for sky gradients or gradients in text... I generally don't count these towards the total even though a screenshot does. Those are some brief thoughts about palettes.
Niklas Jansson
2022-12-24 13:33:54 +0000 UTCHave you ever explained how you choose color palettes?
Roy
2022-12-24 02:10:05 +0000 UTC
