Making a pixel rabbit in photoshop
In this workshop I learned how to create pixel art using photoshop, I started by opening a new document and making it a 32 x 32 artboard, this means that I am able to create more after the first drawing I make.
Next, I chose the pencil option and set the size to 1 pixel, now that it was set up I started by drawing a rabbit side view.
Below is what I did, with each artboard I copied the previous one and used how I set out the layers to either slightly adjust or redo the art so I finished with an animation of the rabbit jumping. The things I kept the same were the colour palette to keep it consistent and the face and ears, this helped me have a base start so I could slightly adjust it with how the body moved.
The inspiration that I took to draw this comes from the NES game Tiny toon adventures, I remembered this game from when I was a child and decided on using this as inspiration to draw a rabbit, except it wasn’t as human-like as the characters.
These are the sprites from the game, one of the things I really liked was the simple clothing that they were wearing, and applied it to my character as it felt empty and simple without it.
I used a reference for the third and fourth artboards, this helped me to draw the action pose as I was struggling a bit when I was looking at real-life references and animated rabbits but it didn’t exactly turn out the way I wanted it to.
These were the final images of the pixel art, overall I am happy with how it turned out, especially the colours and the outline.
What did I find challenging?
One thing I found challenging was making the body look right without the pixels blending together, this was because I tried to use too many details at once without thinking about how it should look. This is when I decided to look up references for a jumping rabbit as it helped me a little bit, I do wish I made the middle section a bit more varied as when I tried out animating and it just ended up being a bit too snappy with going back to the original.
References
Pixel, N. (no date) Artstation – Marketplace, Pixel Rabbit. Nadia Pixel. Available at: https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/game-dev (Accessed: December 13, 2022).
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