Welcome to my Pixel Art Tutorial – New female character – part 1 post!

Hi everyone!

I’ve got some ideas of a couple of things I want to animate and I would love a couple of new characters for those projects.

If I was good at art I’d just create some characters using my imagination… but, ah, I still find it really hard to both think of original concepts and also translate what’s in my brain onto a screen.

I’m sure lots of people are in the same boat… so we’re going to find some inspiration and then tweak it to suit.

I need a character that can walk and point at things, but still has some kind of expression… and I’m thinking a female character to start.

Something like this would be super expressive… but might be quite hard to animate… I don’t think I’m quite at this level yet…

I really like this inspiration…

It’s clearly made for a game and the animations are super helpful in figuring out how each limb might move… but I think I’m looking for something with a little more character…

This is all ridiculously cute… but not really what I’m after at all.

I can’t promise I won’t play with a similar style in the future… look at them run, haha…

The 2nd character above in the purple hair is kind of close to what I was thinking… but for the moment I’m going to use the below as inspiration…

These characters are from a game from 2017 called Omega Strike (still available on Steam for $5).

These characters are designed in a way where they can be easy to animate, but I think can also be pretty expressive… and if I like this style there seems to be unlimited potential in creating new characters and settings… I really like the black outline on the characters in the foreground and no outline on the buildings in the background.

The developer/animator also has so many animations on Twitter to refer back to… like this one…

Snake sells the best weapon upgrades in Omega Strike #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #indiedev #pixelart pic.twitter.com/YBB04DCj8r

— Woblyware (@Woblyware) July 15, 2017

Lots to play with here… and lots to refer back to if I get stuck.

I’m using Aseprite to play with all this… but you can literally use any art tool, pixel art tool or pixel art site to do the same. Here is a guide to a free online pixel art tool pixilart.com.

I like to start with the legs… there is more chance that I count each pixel correctly if I go from the bottom up…

We’re looking at this character straight on… so our eyes are directly inline with the character (as opposed to a top down view, or a 45 downwards view. The characters are all turned slightly away from us towards their left… so their right side is more prominent.

This character’s left foot (they are facing us so it’s on the right side of our image) is in profile while their right foot is facing us… so it appears smaller… a little like a peg-leg but not really.

Add in the torso and arms…

The light source comes from the character’s left side (the right side of our screen).

I think part of the reason these characters are potentially easier to animate, but remain expressive is because the body is 16 pixels tall and the head itself is 16 pixels tall. That’s not true of really any of the other characters, but by having a big face it can still be very expressive.

Obviously I can’t use this character because that would infringe on the copyright owned by Woblyware Oy.

What I do want to do is figure out the animation movements and proportions and then create my own characters.

The way I’m going to do this is to basically create a silhouette with each limb coloured differently and then figure out how to animate each part seperately…

Like this incredible tutorial by Slynyrd… who might be the best pixel art teacher in the world…

So I’m about halfway through the walking animation cycle so far… I’ve had to change the proportions of the legs and arms a little, but once I’ve finished I’ll be about to create the look of each limb to suit the silhouette and go from there.

Once I’ve finished all of that… I’ll create a follow up post to show you how I’ve gone.

Thanks for reading my Pixel Art Tutorial – New female character – part 1 post!