saint11

Voting Thread

If you have any other theme ideas, please let me know in the comments!

As always, thank you so much for your support! 

<3

Top Down Attack

Here's my take on how I would make a top down attack animation. I only made one direction, and I can try making more in the future, but I don't think it's necessary, just follow the same logic. Imagine a the legs, torso and head as layered stacks and they should slide in the direction of the attack.

Here's some other related tutorials:

• Top-Down Run 
• 2018-10-09 21:24:30 +0000 UTC View Post

Isometric part 1

Here's some tips and tricks about drawing in the isometric perspective, I decided to call this "part 1" because I think this is a really big topic with a lot of room to explore.

Also, check it out this great cheat sheet, it helped me a lot while making this tutorial: http://www.dennisbusch.de/knowhow.php

As always thanks a lot for your support :)

Top Down Walk Cycle

This tutorial is very similar to another tutorial of mine, the Top Down Run Cycle but walking, as you can see has some differences. Also I tried to use this to share some more tips on the subject and how I usually work when making this type of animation.

Don't forget that the walk cycle is a very important animation and is where you can add a lot of personality to the character, like making it bouncy, or...

How to start making pixel art #3 - A basic Aseprite animation

Finally publishing my incredibly late article on how to make a simple animation on Aseprite!

I focused on people that are really starting out and I'll start focusing on advanced techniques in the future.

Here's the link:

https://medium.com/pixel-grimoire/how-to-start-making-pixel-art-3-c9eb70270fa1

Making Pixel Art #2 - Cluster sketching and painting

I just posted my second article on my in-depth series about how to start learning pixel art! Check out the post on Medium: https://medium.com/pixel-grimoire/how-to-start-making-pixel-art-2-bcd705cb04d7

Making Pixel Art #1 - An absolute beginner’s guide

I just posted my first article on an in-depth series about how to start learning pixel art I'm planning to make! Check out the first post on Medium: https://medium.com/@saintjust/how-to-start-making-pixel-art-2d1e31a5ceab 

I tried posting it on Patreon too but the formatting was too broken :/ If you prefer reading it here, just let me know and I'll find a way to post it here to...

Swords!

This tutorial is a little similar to my second tutorial, about attack, but this time I've focused on swords.

Many of the stances and poses were based on videos by Skallagrim, check his stuff out if you need more info on the subject :)

Remember, when drawing historical weapons is always good to do some research, you don't need to make everything accurate but it's always good to know what rules you are b...

Wood Textures

Here's a little guide on how to draw wood textures!

Wood is not a necessarily hard thing to draw, but if you want to make it detailed it is very time consuming. I always try to focus first on the big shapes and only when I'm happy with it I draw the texture. Otherwise I may waste a lot of time drawing a texture on a shape that's not good enough and have to redraw everything.

Here's some other related tutorials:

2018-06-20 15:36:46 +0000 UTC View Post

Resizing Pixel Art

Before anything, sorry for all the text, I always try to keep my tutorias as compact as possible but for this I couldn't think of a way of explaining all that without lots of text.

If you want to resize your pixel art you are in for a rough ride, this is one of the most annoying things about this art style. Most of the automatic tools do a really bad job and you will need, almost invariably, to redraw most of it.

2018-06-05 17:14:43 +0000 UTC View Post

Illumination Techniques

Here's my 70th tutorial!

I had to do a lot of research for this one and leaned a lot in the process. Researching photography techniques is always a good way to learn how to draw and frame subjects.

Other tutorials where I talk about similar subjects:

• Shading 
• Process 
• 2018-05-15 17:00:14 +0000 UTC View Post

Gems

This tutorial is about gems, something that I really like drawing, but I never really gave too much though about how it's really made and researching for this tutorial was very fun. The gem cutting process is very interesting and much more artesanal and precise than I expected.

Another reference for this is my very first tutorial. check it out: https://www.patreon.com/posts/simple-shine-6837557

Firearm Design

When designing firearms my main advice is: always have some real world reference. Firearms are very complex mechanical devices and it's very easy for them to look fake or like a toy gun. Having the right details is what sells the realism.

Even though I'm not really into guns (I never even touched one) this was a fun tutorial to make. I think I might focus on designing and studding specific subjects, like one more often.

Thanks a lot for all the support and until the next tutorial :)

Holograms/Ghost effect

This tutorial took way longer than I expected, but finally, here it is!

I decided to make a tutorial about ghosts and holograms because they have a lot in common, they both are semi-translucent human shapes. Of course, one has a sci-fi theme the other is usually more macabre, but the effect is very similar.

I hope this will be useful!

Other tutorials on the subject:

• Glitch: 2018-04-03 20:00:38 +0000 UTC View Post

Defend/Take Hit

And here's another tutorial about getting hit!

Just remember that player feedback is a very important thing and communicating that characters took damage is just as important as if they didn't. Not having a "defend" animation or feedback might confuse the players into thinking that the hit missed and they will keep trying to hit the enemy wondering what went wrong.

Here's some other tutorials that might be useful on the subject:

• Take Hit/Death: 2018-03-20 15:19:50 +0000 UTC View Post

Top Down Houses

For making houses and other structures in top down I always recommend looking for reference, for example, this tutorial was based on Zelda: Minish Cap art. 

Representing things in top down 2D comes with a very hard perspective problem that's very hard to solve. Here I use one of my favorite methods, fake perspective (fake because everything here is isometric) and then making everything straight using footers, barrels, grass or pretty much anything. This way you still have the illusion of ...

Ice and Snow Tutorial

Here's my ice and snow tutorial! I have to admit that I don't have much experience with snow myself (I live in Brazil) most of what I've learn is from pictures and videos.

My ultimate advice is always search for reference, ice colors can change in weird ways, become over saturated and very glossy. And also check my shine tutorial.

As always, thank you so much for all the support and until next tuto...

Spaceship Design

When designing spaceships I always follow a iterative process and if something doesn't work I can always fall back one step and change things.

I also urge you to read this amazing article by Arne: https://androidarts.com/spaceships/spaceship_design.htm

And here are some other tutorials that I made that can be useful while in this subject:

• 2018-02-06 16:20:16 +0000 UTC View Post

Slide/Roll/Dash

I decided to group these three animations because they are all variations on the same theme, an abrupt movement for escaping or reaching something.

They all follow the same pattern, a very short or non-existent preparation (especially for player characters) a loop for the duration of the action and a recovery animation, usually with an overshoot.

Here's some other tutorials that I made that can help with this theme:

• 2018-01-23 14:30:19 +0000 UTC View Post

Wall Slide / Wall Kick

And we are back with another animation tutorial! It's kinda weird to explain wall slide and kick before explaining jump, but I think it's all about conveying a strong horizontal movement for the kick and the pressing on the wall for the slide.

Although this is how I usually draw my characters I think it's possible to make a million different poses for this, as long as you show the character movement and connect properly to the other animation stages (like jump>wall>kick>fall).

A...

Modern / Indoors

It's been a very intense end of year, but I managed to finish this week's tutorial! It's about modern indoor scenery. The tips here are built around my personal style, so they definitely don't apply to all cases, but can work as a starting point.

On another topic, I'm considering switching to making tutorials every other week, which will leave me with more time to make tutorial live streams, personal projects and will allow me to make more research and polished tutorials. Let me know what you ...

Death / Take Hit Tutorial

This week's tutorial is about death and take hit animations. Remember that most of this action can be conveyed through the correct use of easing.

Here some other tutorials that can be useful on this subject:

• Blood and guts
• Animation easing 
• 2017-12-12 16:34:00 +0000 UTC View Post

Ludum Dare #40!

This week I won't be posting a tutorial because I joined Ludum Dare. If you are not familiar with it, it is a really cool game jam event where you have to make a game in 48 hours by yourself.

I made the game source code, animations and everything else used in the game available for everyone too study, mix, and share under the  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, like my tutorials.

The game can be played here: 2017-12-05 13:50:33 +0000 UTC View Post

Sand

I like drawing sand because it's one of those things that I can use some simple tricks to draw and that's basically:

draw wave > make the center thicker > add a shadow > repeat

Also, I'm trying to make my tutorials a little more focused, like I used to do before, a little less text and a little more drawing breakdowns, let's see if this works for the next themes.

As always thank you very much for the support and have a good week!

Vegetation part 3

After a one week break, here's another vegetation tutorial! I love making those.

In this one I focused on making more realistic textures from photo references and on tropical and jungle vegetation.

If you want, here part 1 and part 2.

Thank a lot for your support and let's draw some plants :)

Cuteness

Here's this weeks tutorial and it's about drawing cute stuff!

Drawing cute characters is not really my specialty but I put some guidelines of what I usually think when trying to draw cute characters. Just remember that there are many different ways to achieve this cute effect, this tutorial show only the way I usually work.

Aaron Blaise made a really cool video about this, check it out: https://ww...

Modular Animation

One day late, but here it is! Modular animation :D

Honestly, I don't like making modular animation, I try to use them only for big sprites or other situations where it would save me lots of time. Even with many advantages, like being able to animate procedurally it's still feels stiffer and unnatural than animating frame by frame.

My favorite way to work is a weird mix of hand drawn frames with modular parts, fixing the rotation artifacts manually.

As always thank you fo...

Breaking Objects

Those are some general guidelines for animating breaking objects that I usually use. Just don't forget that different materials have different behaviors!

Some other useful tutorials on this subject:

• Explosion 
• Fire 
• 2017-10-24 13:01:13 +0000 UTC View Post

Darkness

This is my take on darkness and how to use it in cool ways.

When drawing dark things I like to appeal to the viewers imagination, showing only what I really have to show and letting them complete the image by themselves.

As always, thank you a lot for the support and until next week!

UI: The 9-Slice

I decided to break up the UI theme into several parts and this is the first one. The 9-slice (and the 3-slice) is, in my opinion, the basic element of every UI and a good place to start, since you can reuse it pretty much everywhere.

Here's a quick reference of what I like to call the parts of the 9-slice and the 3-slice