Drawing on youtube, can you tell me what I'm doing right or wrong in my process?

[TheMonsterAtlas]

So I have a video of my drawing a mountain side, not finished and a lot of the work has to be redone because my computer crashed. So maybe you can tell me things I'm doing wrong when creating pixels or is there something I'm doing right?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqAWyAV7kOo

[Seiseki]

Your line art is really shoddy, clean up your lines before you do anything else.
Also it seems like you're not using shading properly, instead of drawing 1px lines for the rocky texture, try painting larger shadowed areas to give depth.
You'll have to imagine where the light hits, which areas should be dark which ones should be highlighted.
Look at this example http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixelart/45616.htm

Try getting line art and basic shading right with only a few colors and then you can add more colors and smoother transitions.

[PypeBros]

try painting larger shadowed areas to give depth.

*painting*. That's really the word. I'm far from being a good pixel artist, but I have noticed that people who do great pixel art start with something that looks more like a painting sketches than like a drawing sketch. They work with *areas* of colours to convey volumes more than with lines.

[Mike]

It's better if you imagine it like as if you were pulling a form from the darkness.  In order to see forms from nothingness I first need a dark color, then I use a light one and squint really hard as I bring out the form and attempt to create depth.  Squinting and seeing it in 1x or smaller than 1x(preview in ggale) is key for me.

Personally I can't stand starting with a 1x pixel brush now.  I start with a big brush and gradually go smaller.  The smaller the brush gets the harder/longer/difficult the piece becomes at least for me anyway.

[PypeBros]

It's better if you imagine it like as if you were pulling a form from the darkness.

I'll try that next time ... it feels like a very clever guideline .. dark things have lower contrast, fewer details ...

[Ryumaru]

"Painting" is definitely the way to go- especially if you are desiring work that is at all representational. Stylistic abstraction is much better suited for line art in background elements.



My example is pretty poor, but hopefully my words will make up for it. Besides being stuck to the drawing, which can easily lead you to create flattened forms, the painting process allows you to " extract" shapes- to make sense of random pixel clusters and selectively heighten one over the other. This makes for a much more organic way of creation and lends itself so well to background elements, especially rocks. By always " painting" with values and having a light source in mind your forms will tend to have a more 3-dimensional quality than they might otherwise.

[Phlakes]

Yeah, I can vouch for what these guys said. I used to be a [line art]-[fill line art]-[shade] kind of person, until I started experimenting a bit, and I absolutely love the painting style. It feels a lot more fluid and natural and, so far, always looks better. At least for natural shapes. Like mountain sides.

[TheMonsterAtlas]

So you guys are saying I should pain the darkest shade first, then fill it with lighter colors as I go? Like Bob Ross?

[Ryumaru]

darkest to lightest or middle tone and branching out towards highlights and shadows are both good methods. Lightest to darkest however, is not preferred.

[TheMonsterAtlas]

darkest to lightest or middle tone and branching out towards highlights and shadows are both good methods. Lightest to darkest however, is not preferred.

That makes a lot more sense now that I think of it. Our works are a lot like paintings. I use to draw the outline because I wanted to color something in but painting it just makes it look more beautiful.