AuthorTopic: Pixel Art Tutorial: How to make a nice looking Bush/Brush  (Read 2691 times)

Offline Mwaayk

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Offline Hunited

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Re: Pixel Art Tutorial: How to make a nice looking Bush/Brush

Reply #1 on: October 10, 2017, 10:48:30 pm
This is more a kind of tall grass than a bush.

Offline Mwaayk

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Re: Pixel Art Tutorial: How to make a nice looking Bush/Brush

Reply #2 on: October 11, 2017, 03:17:36 am
This is more a kind of tall grass than a bush.

I originally labelled it as brush (tall patch of grass) but there's just a lot people who were confused so I had to renamed it as "bush".  ;D

Offline eishiya

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Re: Pixel Art Tutorial: How to make a nice looking Bush/Brush

Reply #3 on: October 11, 2017, 01:45:28 pm
Tall grass is tall grass, not brush and certainly not a bush xP Brush is plants that are larger than grass, such as small shrubs, and is generally distinguished from grass.


Your end result in this tutorial looks great, but I feel like your steps aren't very informative. You're demonstrating what to do, but not explaining why your decisions have the good effect that they do. Your explanation for step 1 is great, but the rest feels like "I did this, so do this" rather than "this has this effect, so do this". In other words, your tutorial shows but doesn't teach. That's a common way to do tutorials and it gets the clicks, but I feel like you could do even better and teach people more by explaining more of the (possibly subconscious) thought process behind your decisions.

Some things you didn't explain that are probably obvious to you and other people who don't need this tutorial in the first place, but would be useful for the people who do need this tutorial:
- Why the grass doesn't all start at the same level, why some starts higher up.
- Why the background grass is darker.
- Why the shadows go where they go. "Light from above = shadows below" might seem like an explanation at first glance, but that's not how light works and grass blades aren't spheres, so that's not quite the reason shadows below looks good.

These are all stylistic choices leading to a better composition, not natural consequences of the light or of the fact that it's grass. In your tutorial you don't distinguish between decisions made for composition and decisions made because that's "how things work", so you run the risk of misleading people. This is an important distinction that would benefit many artists to learn early, but which is often glossed over. You don't need to actually explain all your reasoning in a brief tutorial like this, but you should try to make it clear what type of reasoning is behind your decisions. "It's not realistic, but it looks nice" and "this part would be lit, but it looks better shaded" are perfectly fine things to put in a brief tutorial.