The Spiral Mines [ Pixel art process ]

lunaticmoon (63)in #steemiteducation • 7 years ago (edited)

Creating A Fantasy Mine In Pixel Art

Pixel art is a art form that was used for retro games in the 80's when early games were released, back then you had to write in code to create it but today you can simply use a pencil tool and sketch away with it. In modern or current uses of pixel art, they're used to creative a certain aesthetic! It is a very very VERY easy thing to learn but hard to master.

But before I get into any detail I want you guys to check out @jonny-clearwater's Pixel Art Weekly Contest! It's been a very long ongoing contest in steemit and I personally follow it and check it every week, its a nice community of people and its growing, I hope you guys join in to vote or create pieces too, I love the creative spark this contest encourages.
This weeks theme was Caves/Mines!
Please click me to go to the contest!

Without further ado lets get into my process on how i created this piece!
I hope this will enlighten you on my thought process on pixel art, I am no expert but i love to share my current knowledge anyway! One of my main goto things when starting a piece is never keep your canvas white, put a random colour in there to make it not so intimidating.

So for this piece I was imagining a pathway to a hall with loads of spires or other walk ways to different places to give a scale of how big this place is, but to begin with this i started with the foreground pathway.

Some fantasy or diablo esque caves going on, and some reference i used was the mines of moria from lord of the rings!

Added some simple foreground elements to keep up the viewer interest and also mine as an artist i like to work on random things when im bored of one topic and come back to fix things later, Im not a fussy person haha.

We needed a wall to end this so it redirects the viewer to look backwards.

A large crystal crumbling to be soon mined maybe!

I added more foreground elements of a mining platform carrying cargo maybe.

Going back to what I said earlier I wanted to make this place feel insanely MASSIVE and vast, so i added more walk ways to show how big this cave can be.

How do you make something big look bigger? In my case I simply put another walkway.

Heres the fun part now I get to do some shading, whenever Im shading with pixel art, there is only ever going to three colour varients of that colour otherwise it gets too cluttered, the image speaks for itself on my method. However this is not how all people should do pixel art its simply just my style to keep clean with colours thats all :)
Go wild if you feel the need to! But for me, less is more.

More detailing work, those were some smooth lookin' rocks, if you put a few lines on the edge and suddenly spark out randomly in the middle here and there things will look like a rock in pixel art with cracks!

I felt the brown highlight on the rocks was taking away the viewers attention so i went for something more mute so you can marvel at the crystal then the background, then the background leads your eyes to the giant rocks going down the path way takes you back to the crystal! Its a composition that creates a smooth cycle.

I hope you all enjoyed this post as I sincerely did, making this piece was an experience to mix some quite different colors and make mute colour give detail. If you enjoyed this content, please do upvote and if you're a generous person resteem! Even more so do follow! I will post weekly pixel art pieces and daily sketches.

Until next time, Keep learning folks