Animated Pixel Art Tutorial [OC][CC][Tutorial]

I'm using Photoshop CS4 for this tutorial. I'm sure other versions of Photoshop will work largely the same way.

First things first: You want to be using the pencil tool! It's within the brush tool. Cycle through the brush options with Shift+B to find it.

The eraser tool also has a pencil mode, but it's accessed through the drop-down menu on the top bar.

Make yourself a palette!

Here I have made two colour ramps that start and end with the same shadow and highlight. In this case because I was planning to draw an orc, I thought a green and a brown ramp would work best.

Look up some colour and light theory stuff to help build a ramp of your own! The fundamental points :
- Everything ramps down to the same "black" or deep shadow colour
- The most saturated area is the middle of the ramp, getting less saturated towards white

I learned to build this kind of ramp from either Niklas Jansen's site (http://androidarts.com/) or his twitter (https://twitter.com/AndroidArts). This guy's work is an invaluable resource, and anything I do is laughable next to this guy.

Okay, so I do a rough design using my palette.

There is a never ending all-out war regarding whether or not you should limit your colour palette or not. I don't really think it matters, myself.

In this case I am sticking 100% to my palette as it a) offers a fun challenge and b) means you never have to fret too hard about choosing the right colour.

Then I iterate on the design. I like to keep my other designs on the screen so I can see what works better or worse at a glance. Keep refining. You may find yourself going back to a previous design and branching in a different direction.

Also, keep everything as simple as possible.

Now it's time for animation!

Make sure you're on frame animation and not timeline. You can switch by clicking on this button.

I'm making my canvas 30x30 px. I think that's a comfortable size to work, and if I were using this in a game I think I could work consistently in that size.

Here's what my setup looks like at the beginning.

I'm going to make a folder with my design locked at the bottom of my layer stack. If I mess up and need to grab a copy of the design, it's in a convenient place.
It's locked so I don't accidentally mess it up.

I decided to give him a weapon.

I imagine this guy is a guard NPC, so I'm going to do an "alerted" animation.

This will serve as my start frame.

Next I'll figure out what the final pose is going to look like. This might get tweaked, so I'm not getting too fussy with it. But it's important to have a good idea what where you're going to start and end.

Name your frames something! This will make it easier to keep them organized.

I also like to colour them so I can tell what layer I have selected at a glance.

Save your work! Save often! Every time you pause, hit Ctrl+S. It'll save you heartache down the road.

We need some key poses. These are important poses we want the character to hit that will communicate what's happening.

In this animation I want our orc friend to be startled, then switch quickly to an attack pose.

Here's what it looks like animated so far.

I like to think about my timing in the layers pane. If I want an action to be quick, I use fewer frames. Prolonged actions use more frames. Makes sense, right?

So in this case I want the startled action to be prolonged, and when he gets his wits about him he springs quickly into action. I'm actually going to use four inbetween for the first and second parts, but I know that I plan to hold the second keyframe for a few beats, so that'll give me the timing I want.

You'll notice that I'm renaming my layers as I go. Usually I skip this step, but it's a good practice to get into.

The inbetweens will start much rougher. These drawings are more concerned about selling the motion rather than good pixel art design. Silhouette is what you want to pay attention to at this stage, so I suggest using one colour.

Here's what all of our drawing look like side-by-side so far. I don't work this way, but it's interesting to look at, and it help show us if our movements are making nice arcs.

Same, but animated.

I've finished roughing in the rest of the inbetweens. You'll notice that they are pretty rough, but the poses all read clearly. Below in the animation you will see that the movement is fairly smooth and readable, so I'm ready to move on to cleaning up the inbetweens.

You might notice in the third last frame I used a smear drawing. These are useful for selling quick movement. They can be tricky to use, but when pulled off properly they can add clarity and appeal.

You may also notice that I wound up adding another frame at the beginning. I thought a blink would be help sell the fact that he's being startled. Most people blink right before they turn their heads, and that's especially true when you're startled.

All clean!

This is probably the longest part of the process. If I were being really fussy I could spent way longer on the rough animation and do a lot of really cool stuff, but I chose not to here. After all, I'm not going to be using this for anything really.

This is what my screen looks like at the end.

For animated .gif images I use the "Save for Web and Devices" dialogue window.

Make sure you have loop set to "Forever" and Quality set to "Nearest Neighbor." The quality setting ensures that if you scale up the image (I chose to scale to 300%), your pixel edges remain crisp. The other interpolation methods will make the edges fuzzy, which likely isn't what you want.

Final product.

I opted to add a little effect to his head when he does his "take." I had three frames at first but it felt weird, so I wound up going with two. It also has some anti-aliasing (still within the colour palette), which makes it less harsh and also makes it visible against any bg colour.