It is also a very bad idea to use dithering when animating a sprite, because keeping coherent dithering will be awfully hard. A lot of dithering between heavily contrasted colors will often give a dirty and noisy image. If one pixel is inside of a different color cluster withoutĪny adjacent pixel with the same color, remove it.Ĭontrary to popular belief, dithering isn’t as great as it seems. Round and straight lines are preferred so you get a precise, smooth and nice image.Īvoid lonely pixels. You should use as much perfect lines and curves as possible.Ī cluster is a group, a pack of connected pixels with the same color.Ĭluster shapes will greatly affect the final image.īony and crude clusters will give a sketchy aspect. Perfect curve: A curve made of perfect lines which step always depends on the other parts of the curve.ĭirty line: A line that has at least one sub-segment with more than one adjacent pixel on one end.Īs you may have noticed on the pictures above, dirty lines should be avoided. Perfect line: A line that has a constant vertical and horizontal step. Pillow shading is a nasty effect that occurs when the light source comes from the front.Īvoid pillow shading, unless you really know what you’re doing. NB: Obviously, this doesn’t work with any graphic style. This is as true for outlines, which has to fit with both the inner color and the umbrage of the surface.
#Sew art tutorial free#
Remember never to use more colors than necessary, and use gradients with contrasted brightness.įeel free to try using other generic palettes on your sprite to compare it with your palette so you can improve it.Īvoid as much as you can excessive contrasts between neighboring pixels.įor example, a black line over a white background usually won’t look natural.Ī line that fits the background color well gives a realistic volume effect. You should also use gradients with outspread tints to avoid washy color contrasts. This usually ends up bad and breaks contrasts. However, avoid using an over-saturated or an under-saturated palette. You can also try to use yellow-ish or cyan-ish saturated light colors, and blue-ish and purple-ish desaturated dark colors. Use gradients that depends on each other. If you are constructing a palette with gradients, avoid at any cost independent gradients (i.e. It also will make it easier to identify unwanted artifacts (i.e. Using a small palette will help you improving your skills much more easily, and will make creating sprites also easier. When two colors are very close, merge them into an intermediate one, so you see if it improves the result. Thankfully, they’re also generally quite easy to fix with some experience, and So even if you aren’t very skilled, follow those simple guidelines to make your sprites cleaner.Ī lot of basic mistakes will ruin the quality of your art. Some of the rules shown here are very easy to use, and/or are purely methodical
#Sew art tutorial how to#
In this tutorial, I will explain you how to use a couple techniques I used to improve Planet Centauri’s sprites before implementing them into the game (or before animating them).