Pixel Art: Design Your Avatar in Aseprite

1. Introduction: Hey guys, welcome to our pixel avatar Skillshare class. I'm an artist, I draw, I paint, and I do digital art as well. In this course, we're going to be using a pixel art program called a sprite, but you don't need any previous experience with it or really any other digital art program to take part in this course. We're going to learn how to draw a character using a reference photo. Then we're going to animate an export it. And we'll also learn a little color theory along the way to help your character really pop. I hope you enjoyed this class. I really look forward to seeing your cool pixelated avatars. Let's get started. 2. Tools and Navigation: To create a new sprite click File, New, set the size to 32 by 32 pixels and click OK. Draw with the pencil tool using left-click or right-click and pick colors from the color bar using those same button. To save your file, click on File, Save. I'm going to name it Skillshare underscore tutorial. There are some handy keyboard shortcuts you can use to navigate the workspace. Zoom in and out with your mouse wheel, or by using the number of keys one through six to get a better look around the canvas, move around by holding down the space bar as you left-click and drag. You can also do this by dragging while holding down the middle mouse button. Here are the tools and here are the individual tool settings. Let's look at the pencil tool. This will be your main drawing tool. Up here. You can change its shape and size under alpha compositing, you can change the transparency of your lines. Dynamics only applies if you're using a graphics tablet, pixel perfect removes extra pixels in your lines and makes them nice and clean. You can toggle on and off the horizontal and vertical symmetry lines. Above the pencil tool, we have our selection tools. You can select, Move, and Transform parts of the sprite using one of the selection tools. The rectangular marquee tool will select a rectangular shape. The Elliptical Marquee Tool will select an elliptical shape. The lasso tool lets you freehand draw the shape you want to select. The Polygonal Lasso Tool lets you draw a polygonal selection shape. And the Magic Wand Tool lets you select areas of pixels. You can select all your Canvas using the shortcut Control a, and you can press the shortcut Control D to deselect the selection tool settings can be found up here as well under the menu bar titled select. The eraser tool is essentially the same as the pencil tool, but it deletes the unwanted pixels. You can also erase with the right mouse button if you've selected the background color to be transparent and your ink settings are set to simple ink. The eyedropper tool lets you sample colors from the canvas. The motor will move the horizontal or vertical position of a cell, hold down shift while moving to lock to a horizontal or vertical axis. Use the paint bucket tool to fill a selected or an empty area on your Canvas. The gradient tool lets you make a gradient from your selected foreground and background colors. There are some cool gradient options you can experiment with. Here. The line tool lets you draw a line. The curved line tool lets you draw a curved line. The Rectangle and the Ellipse tools respectively, let you draw rectangles and ellipses that are also filled versions of both doors. The counter to, uh, let you draw organic shapes. The polygon tool lets you draw geometric shapes. The blur tool blurs the pixels. The jumble tool rearranges the pixels, giving them a noisier scattered look. Color palette are preloaded sets of colors. Here, you can change your color palette to one of A's price color palette presets. Also, you can load and save your own color palettes here and sort your color palette here. Now here is the color bar. Every color has a hue, saturation and lightness value, which you can modify using these sliders. Down here we have the Layers window as well as the animation timeline. Whichever layer is selected is the one who's pixels won't be affected. Right-click on the layer to see its options. Layer properties let you rename a layer as well as change its blending mode and opacity. We will cover the animation timeline later in this course. 3. Making an Avatar: Let's start by taking a reference photo. A front-facing selfie with your smartphone will do once you've taken the photo and have it on your computer in a sprite, click File Open and select your photo. A sprite, we'll create a new tab for your image. Click on the tab and drag it to the left side of the workspace. Now we're going to start working on an avatar while having our reference photo next to it. Let's start by turning on vertical symmetry, then selecting a desired skin color and drawing the shape of the head with the filled ellipse tool. We're going to separate the portrait into three main colored shapes. Skin, hair and shirt. Don't worry about the details just yet. That will come later. In general, it's good to start with the big shapes first and then move to medium shapes and finished with the details. It looks like I've made my head too short. So I will select my forehead with the rectangular marquee tool lifted up and fill in the blanks while adjusting the shape of the hair. When choosing colors, It's important to think about the color harmony, balance, and contrast. Saturation is a great tool to make something stand out. But if everything on your canvas is saturated, the nothing will stand out. Next, I'm going to add simplified facial features, starting with the eyes, mouth, nose, and ears. Every shape in real life has a light side and a shadow side. This is what makes things look 3D. The light will be hitting our avatar from the top. That means there'll be a cast shadow under the chin and under the hair. Now I'll start adding secondary details to the facial features, like whites of the eyes and reddish cheeks, as well as the brown color and red horizontal stripes to my shirt. I'll outline my shirt with a darker green color to add some contrast and make it pop out from the background. I'll also add some texture to the hair by painting in lighter and darker shades of brown. Now it's time to add the highlights under Brush Settings. I'll change the ink mode to alpha compositing and lower my opacity by half. Next, I'm just looking and comparing the reference photo with the avatar and adding small adjustments and colored details. Some of these areas look flat and uninteresting. So I'll try to fix them by adding some contrast or saturation to the colors. Let's look at the color wheel. Each color has a complimentary color. The most common color pairs are red, green, yellow, purple, and blue, orange because they are opposite each other on the color wheel. Down here, I'll create a new layer and set it to a background layer. I'm going to use the hue saturation value sliders for adjusting the colors. Since my character's skin color is that these saturated orange, I'll make my background that these saturated bluish color, this will make my character stand out. 4. Adding Animation: Down here next to our layers, we have the timeline. We can add new frames by right-clicking on the frame number and pressing new frame or the shortcut Alt and, or by clicking the plus icon down here, adding new frames will duplicate our existing frame. Now we're going to learn how to do a simple up and down animation. Let's duplicate our frame, select the Move tool and move it up by one pixel. It looks like our animation is moving too fast to slow it down. We're going to duplicate our frames again. That seems about right. Now. I'm going to add some movement to the hair. That looks cool. Now I'm going to add some background effects. Just because it's, the background doesn't mean it has to be boring. This is the time to experiment and play around because the background animation can be anything you want. Just make each frame a bit different and have fun with it. I'm also going to add some outer glow to my character to make it pop out even more. 5. Exporting: With the animation finished, it's time to export. First, let's save our file and then click File Export, choose the file destination folder and said the file type as dot gif and click Okay, in the export file menu, click on resized file and then select % thousand, leave the rest of the settings as they are and click Export. Now we have exported our file as an animated GIF at 320 by 320 pixels. 6. Create your Avatar: I hope you enjoyed the course. Now it's time to make your own pixel art avatar. Once you're done, feel free to share it by uploading it to the project gallery. If you have any questions, join us in the discussion panel. Also check out our other Skillshare classes. Thanks for learning with us and we hope to see your cool pixel art avatar soon. Bye.