The Beginners Guide to Aseprite

1. Aseprite Intro: I am Parker Pair. So a digital artist, we're gonna be going over a Sprite. So a spray is one of the programs used for picks A lot in animation. A lot of any developers use, and it's one of my personal favorites. So if you've ever wide to jump into the program, but you've been kind of afraid to start up, something new will be going over the tools, the colors, the animation timeline, all the drop down menus and just piece by piece by piece, going through a thing and kind of figuring out what it does together. It's really good software that I enjoyed quite a lot, so let's get started. 2. Overview: when you freshly open a sprite, you're gonna see this screen. Recent files is going to list all of your recent files, so it's gonna be blanket. First. You can set how many files you want it to stack in the settings we'll get to that later. Recent folders is going to show you the last folders you access for your files. The right side news is going to change from time to time as the developers update the program in the very top right, you'll notice he spray is up to date. Whenever a new version of a spray comes out, you're going to see that change to a button that's going to suggest that you update and top center recover Lost sprites is going to be whenever the program crashes. It gives you the opportunity to salvage anything you've lost. So let's make a new file. So for new Sprite with and height, they're going to be pretty self explanatory. RGB a is red, green, blue, Alfa Freescale is self explanatory. Indexed is when you use a limited palette that doesn't go through the entire range. Background is self explanatory as well, however, for those that are new to digital drawing programs. Transparency is represented with checkers. Advanced options you don't have to worry about right now. Double, wide and double high pixels are basically wreck tables and we just want to square pixels. So unless you have any specific reason, just let that be. So go ahead and put in whatever numbers you like for the width and height Doesn't matter for the sake of testing and go ahead and press OK now were brought to the main layer will be working in so very brief summary of everything in the screen. Left side over here is gonna be color related. Everything on the right side is gonna be tools. Everything on the top is going to be technical settings, and everything on the bottom panel is going to be animation related. And then center is gonna be your drawing space. So for the next few videos, I'm going to be tackling all the functions of the left, right top and bottom 3. Brush: Let's go over the tools and a sprite. 1st 1 being be for brush. Now I'm going to assume that you have a drawing tablet of some sort, although in pixel art it's not a requirement. You can get pretty articulate with mouse drawing if you need to, although I would recommend getting a drawing tablet of any sort to do pixel art because it's going to be faster and easier. So be for brush. That's a hot key. You can also find it over here. You have her over it. You'll see it shows the shortcut for the tool. And if you click and draw anywhere, pretty self explanatory, the setting for the brush tool are going to be in the top. Left closer to the palate, you'll see a one picks. You can click and drag Matt to make the brush bigger. You can also type in a number next to what you have a check box for pixel perfect pixel Perfect is good for clean line work. I'm going to control plus, to zoom in real quick. I'm gonna hold space to pan over. We're going over those tools layer, but I just thought I'd explain how I'm getting closer to the canvas. I'm pressed the delete button to clear it. So at a one pixel brush without pixel perfect on, I'm going to use black in the bottom left. You'll notice clumps of pixels in the line Work. But if you have pixel perfect on when you draw, you don't get lumps of pixels like this. So in general, I would suggest having pixel perfect on most cases. If you're filling in shapes, you may not want pixel perfect on. I'm gonna press delete again to clear off the canvas next to the one pixel area, you can click on the brush type you can have. You can have square rounded or line, and when you're working on a one pixel, it's not going to be very apparent. When you're working at higher brush sizes, it becomes more parent. You can also adjust the angle. All right, my clear This again. Generally speaking, you're probably gonna be working at a one pixel brush for most of what you're doing On the right side of the one pixel input area, you can choose different settings or have the brush behaves. 1st 1 being Alfa compositing so by default. It's going to be at 2 55 and that is your maximum capacity. It's at 100%. You can drop the numbers down when you dio. The pixels are going to be partially transparent. I'm going to delete going very quickly. Paint the background white so that the picks will show up better B for brush. So when the capacity is that 2 55 it's a pure black line when it's at roughly 50% or halfway down, the bar lines will appear to be gray. But if I drop over the same spot, it's really a partially transparent black. This may help you in sketching, but when you work on your final pixel art, generally speaking, you're gonna work at 100% capacity. Let's bring that back up to 55. So the next mode up is copy Alfa plus color, and this one's a bit technical because it involves the color side will be getting to that later. So bear with me. Not everything in this program is gonna be the most linear in learning. So instead of having a brush Alfa, you can assign Alfa two colors in your palette and what having the copy Alfa and color does is it gives you whatever Alfa palette, as if I drop the Alfa down on this black. It's going to be transparent, and it'll even override on top of other pixels and drop that to its partial transparency. Tweet. The lockout, uh, only allows you to draw into already existing pixels. If I go back up to Simple Inc and I make a shape real quick and then I go back down to lock Alfa, I'll make the brush a little smaller and I'll use something like black now, as you can see, even though I'm drawing everywhere in the picture, it's staying within the boundaries of the Alfa that exists. You go back up to Alfa Compositing, you can brush down something at a lower capacity than 100%. And then if you go back to the lock Alfa, anything I dry in there, it's still gonna lock to those pixels, but it's not going to suddenly be completely opaque. It's going to be just as transparent as the base. The last one is shading, and what shading does is it cycles through your palates? I will start by making a shape with ink when I go down the shading, and this will involve a bit of the color palette concepts, which will be getting into later. But just for the sake of showing what it does, going to very quickly draw so it shuffles through the pallets. And if I click and drag, you'll notice that it picked with next level up in the sequence and we can decide what that dark delight power is in our power editing, so we'll get back to this brush later. So just for the sake of being clear with the tools, that's what it does. 4. Selection tools: so the next tool we're gonna be talking about is actually the 1st 1 at the list. The reason why I didn't start off with it is that the brush is going to be the tool you will be using for the majority of your work. So even though it's not the top on the list, it's the one that I feel is the most important. The top list is the selection tool with a marquee tool. You hover over it. It gives you the shortcut, which is them that tells you with the left or right button. Dio will be a to reassign these hockey's later if we want. The marquee tool allows you to select and move parts of your drawing. I'm gonna press be for brush and I'm gonna draw a little something, and then we're gonna press and from our key or go up to the top right click and drag. Now we can move the box and everything inside of it. You could even partially select something. Move it out. And if we don't have anything selected, we're not gonna move anything on top of something else as long as you have the selection made you can click and move it around as many times without it re grabbing what's below it . So if we click again, there are multiple selection tools. All group together in this category. All these are going to be similar in what they do, but they're gonna have their own twists enough that they're their own tool. Let's go to the 2nd 1 and that is the elliptical marquee tool. Shift em, and I'm going to do a very quick hockey of control D, which is de select. That's generally a universal hockey for most art programs, and now we're going to click out, and now we have a selection that's simply circular instead of rectangular. If you want your selection to be perfectly circular instead of oval pulled shift while you're making the selection and that means no matter where I drag, it's going to retain it's circular shape. Although be careful that when you go farther towards the edges, it's going to kind of whip around the campus pretty wildly. It's a bit sensitive and once again controlled the for di Select. Where's your selection? You can also tap outside, although I avoid doing that because sometimes, when you try and tap to get rid of a selection. You make a teensy one like that or you end up storing a new selection that you didn't want . So for me personally controlled the for di Select keeps things leaner. Let's go over to the selection to again in the top, Right Scroll over. We have the lasso tool lasso tool by far is my favorite selection tool because you can draw whatever shape you want when you let go you have that shape So control a to select everything the delete button to clear it B for brush I'm going to make a quick little sketch going to draw a quick little apple. Now I'm gonna use the lasso tool to select a piece of it and move it that I'm going to control de to de select and I'm oppressed Be again for brush last the tools handy if you want to resize things like in this case, I wanted a very told apple I could just last so move and then redraw If I decide I don't want that apple to be so tall, I compress queue for last. So select chunk delete it used the last So again to grab the top, bring that down, controlled the to de select press, Be for brush. You're gonna be repeating the hot keys multiple times as I work through it. I'm repeating the hockey is not only to help you learn it for repetition, but also because hockey's air very important for keeping your speed and flow up. So even though I'm going over the tools on where they are in the user interface, ultimately you want tohave them down to a hot key in the future. Now we have a play. Gunnell Lasso Tool or Shift Q. Some of these tools you'll be using more often than others. Some of them are more important to memorize their Hakkies of high click and drag. This one takes a little bit of getting used to. You have to click and hold. If you want to make a new point in the polygon shape, assumes you tap, it completes the last set of selection, and then it behaves just like they are selections to where you can move. You can control the to de select, and once you have a selection you can dilly. I personally don't use the polygon last so very much. I like the standard last so much more. And then, lastly, we have the magic one tool or W. So for this one, I'm going to very quickly make a shape and fill it. I'm using a tool that will be getting into a little bit later. It's a bucket fill, but now that we have shape of multiple colors, go back up to the wand and the wand lets you select colors. So if I just simply tap one of the other, you'll notice that it didn't select both the red and the black. It just selected the back, and it just selected the red. Now there are some settings in the top panel that help you specify how this wand operates. My favorite one is contiguous, basically means it will sample the entire image or a color to use in the selection instead of just one enclosed area. What does that mean? It means if I have this unchecked and I want to click the red when I tap on the red, it's gonna select. These are to read pieces. It's looking at the entire image or whatever color has selected control de una de select. If I have continuous checked, though, it means it's going to look at all of the nearby pixels or as much of that color to select as possible. So now when I click in here, it's gonna look at this entire red chunk, but it's gonna leave these two alone. This may seem super technical, but it's really handy whenever you want to re color a character very quickly, because sometimes you might have a character with a red hat and red boots and step selecting Hatton, changing the color and selecting the boots and changing the color. You just wanna have everything that's that color adjusted and so contiguous is very handy for that. When you see it in action, you'll appreciate it. A lot more tolerance is how far of a reach it will grab into its selection. So if I have a few different black, black and red colors, I'm going to very quickly to make a black the dark red. All right, so we go back to the wand. Tolerance of zero means that whatever color you pick, it's on. Lee gonna pick that color. No, nothing later, nothing darker. Nothing Mawr or less saturated. It's gonna be that color only, even if I have a color that's just Sly Lee off. Maybe it's like a little bit lighter. It practically looks the same, right? Zero tolerance means that if this is anything off, it's not gonna be part of the selection. If you move the tolerance up, though, you pick a range in which it will accept that color into the selection. So if I bumped up to 12 nothing quite yet. But if I bump it up to 34 well, I didn't just grab those two colors, but I grabbed a nearby colors by bumped the tolerance up higher my de select controlled deep. You'll notice that it picked up another one. I go up to her and 51 range is bigger under 96. If you get all the way up to 55 well, then it's literally just gonna pick everything. Go. 2 50 38 is still gonna pick up the majority of it. You notice that it's just the black in the white that haven't been picked up. This could be a handy depending on how many pallets you're working within your art. If you have many, many, many colors. You might want tolerance range to pick more than just one color, but a lot of pixel art has very flat, very strong, very limited other bases. So tolerance isn't always something you'll be working with, but it might be worth experimenting with from time to time. Let's go back up to the Brecht angular marquee tool again because there's some sittings in this top right that I'll go over going to delete everything real quick. B for brush. I'm gonna make a few squares because it's going to be easier for some demonstration purposes. Let's go back up to the rectangular marquee tool is a drop down menu of fast rotation and rot Sprite. These will simply affect how the rotation appears, and you'll notice that when I click through them, pixels are slightly different. These will affect the accuracy of how your pixel art rotates. You can display a pivot that means that I rotate this. It's going to rotate around where that is. You could move the pivot, and that lets you slide from a different spot. Easiest explanation for what this is would be putting a pin into a piece of cut out paper. And then, if you click on any of these buttons, it's going to reassign where that pivot is. You may find this to be handy, because if you pick a pivot in a corner, but yeah, eyeball it a bit, you might not land perfectly in that corner. Let's go back to the marquee tool, the rectangular marquee tool, and we're going to ignore the mask and the button next to it. Those air technicals that a beginner probably won't need Teoh deal with. We do have a plus and a minus on the selection, which by default we have replaced selection on, and that means any selection we make. If we click somewhere else, it updates to a new selection. If we go to the add to selection of the plus, every selection we make adds to the current selection. If you go over to the minus every selection, we make carves into what's currently there. This is useful for adjusting your selection, although I usually stick to the hot keys if we go back to the standard replace. So if I hold this shift before a click and drag, it's gonna turn it to the ad mode. And if I hold both shift Krefeld shift Ault, it goes the subtraction. Now there is a strange quirk to the hot keys, which, if you press Ault before you do shift, you're stuck in a different tool. So make sure it's shift cult, and if you click and drag and then press shift, it doesn't go to your add mode. It just goes to the perfectly square selection. The order of operations required for some of these hot keys can be a little bit confusing at times. Usually I don't add and subtract from a selection. I use things like lasso tool, although I do occasionally add and subtract from selections when I'm working. And that's the gist of the Marquis tools as faras. Any beginners going to need next up is the eraser tool 5. Eraser tool: eraser tool is pretty self explanatory. Key for it is going to be E ID by default is gonna be a one pixel brush, and you can race whatever exists there, you can increase the size the same way you were with the regular brush. You ever angle option in your past. The option even have pixel perfect as well as your brush type. So your eraser tool is simply the opposite of your brush tool. And the hot key, once again for his E and its user and face location is going to be third from the top, right? 6. Eyedropper tool: all right, So the next tool we're gonna be working with is the eyedropper or I. This tool isn't one that you're going to be directly going to and using. It's going to be mainly accessed through hot keys. You'll usually be using it when you're using your brush tool. So if you press beef brush because size, you may have several colors will be working with, and you'll want to very quickly access those colors instead of making guesswork or punching in numbers down on your colors. And so from your brush tool. If you hold Ault, it snaps to the eyedropper in the eyedropper, lets you click on a color and jump straight to it and then issues you let go. Vault. You're back to your brush tool. The eyedropper tool in action is gonna look like this. I drop broad Raja. I drop, draw, draw. I drop, draw, draw, draw and I'm just pressing and letting go of the Elke. The alternative is a bit slower. I could always press I to go the eyedropper and click on the color, but when I do, I'm directly with the eyedropper tool and had to go back to be for brush that's gonna look like brush brush. Brush high for eyedropper, click B for brush, brush, brush brush I fried dropper Click beef brush, brush, brush brush and that's just a little bit clumsier, so you're generally going to want to stick to the altar key for your eye drop. It's just easier, so the eyedropper tool has a few drop down menus in the top left. You can sample from all layers, current layer and first reference layer. But generally speaking, you're gonna be using all there's most of the time. The only time you're gonna be working with the different sample types is when you have effects that go across multiple layers so quickly jumped down and make a layer. I'll explain layers later, but if you have something with the transparency effect and you go to your eye dropper, you can pick current layer. You know us wherever I'm clicking. The color is still the same blue, even though this shade of blue on top of this red, it's a different blue than that shade on top of that red. If I go to all heirs, it's going to pick the combination color of the transparent blue on top of the red. So notice in the bottom left. When I'm doing this eyedropper on the all air section, it changes. But on the current layer section, it stays the same. And then, if I drop down to the red layer again, you'll notice that even when I click on the blue area, the color is not changing. But generally speaking, you're gonna be working with all layers. Keeping it on all heirs will generally work best for you. 7. Zoom and hand tool: so the next tool is the zoom to him, and that's gonna be fifth from the top on the right side. And if you click, you have zoom tool in the hand tool. They're both for navigation. So just like the eyedropper tool, you're usually not going to directly click to these tools to use them. You're gonna be using hot keys and shortcuts, but for the sake of explaining them, let's go through them manually to the zoom tool. You click and hold. Pretty self explanatory lets you zoom in and out some versions of the program that you use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. It tends to be easier to do that because it's stuck to the mouse. However, sometimes you might zoom in and out of control. It's a little bit hard to finesse it, so some people might like the zoom tool. I don't personally use it very much manually, but Z is the hot key. You can also use control plus and control minus. That tends to be the one that I use. And then if you click and hold on these m tool again, we have the hand which that you drag around the scene like it's Ah, it's a paper you're sliding and this is another tool that's pretty handy for navigating, but you're generally not going to move over to it and click on it. You're probably not gonna be pressing H, which is the hockey for it to get to it. You're going to be using space bar to well, then let go, because most times you're going to be using it from the brush tool. So if I'm drawing and I want to go over here, obviously if I go towards the corner, it schools a little bit for me. But sometimes that gets a little Wiley gets out of control. You'll notice that the lines kind of swivel off crazy when I did that. So the alternative is to hold space for the hand drag around manually. That way, when you're drawing and you get close and you want to do something farther off canvas, you don't accidentally go over way off screen. You could instead get ready, close and drag around, so you're generally gonna have one hand that you use for drawing, and the other hand's gonna be used for hockey's. And that's how you use the mantle 8. Move and slice tools: all right. The next tool up is the move tool shortcut for is V move Tool is similar to the hand tool, but instead of clicking and moving around as if you're sliding a piece of paper, you are moving whatever is on the layer around, as if it's a I guess, kind of a piece of plastic on top of a canvas, going like like a move. The moves. This could be used in combination with selection tools. So if we go back up to the box election, when you have a selection and you click and move, it moves everything in this election. However, if I have a selection and I still want to move everything as a whole and I have a move tool when it moves, it also moves the selections location as well. This could be a handy, um, another tool that I don't use as often, but I can see where it would be helpful. And then we have the slice tool. Sliced tool is generally not going to be used by beginners. It's more for technical things, but you can make a box and you can go over to the box properties and from here, you can assign where the divisions are. That's punch in some numbers and see how that looks. You'll notice that there are some transparent divisions. Nine. Slice is a tool that you use for scaling. It's often used in mobile APS and what not if you have a window and you have some pretty borders on it, and you want to reuse that window for several different boxes if you want one. That's toll when that's wide, when that square, when that's really big. But you don't want to have to make a new version of that same window for every single one of those nine slices a tool or scaling portions of a piece of art differently. So nine slice is more of a technical thing for exporting. And as beginner, you won't have to worry about using this tool. 9. Paint bucket: next tool up is going to be the paint bucket tool, and the great Ian Tool paint bucket tool is pretty old school. It's pretty simple. A lot of people that worked in various our programs are going to know what it is. But just to be thorough about it, you press G, the paint bucket and any enclosed space you click, and it's gonna feel it. So if I make another shape, G feels it. If I make a shape inside of a shape G, well said, Now you can use continuous to select all pixels of a certain color or transparency and have that bucket fill apply across the entire thing. So if I make several regular filled shapes and I decided that I don't like that color, I can manually go back and fill each one of them. But that's gonna take four clicks. And if you have like an elaborate piece of art with many, many, many pieces of a certain color, that's just gonna take a long time. So if you turn continuous off, you can click once, and it will fill all of them. You also have a tolerance, which picks a larger range of colors that are closest to the one you're selecting. So I'm going to make a quick bar of colors to show how that works. B for brush. So we've got a selection of grays from dark to light, my pressure g Ferg radiant, and I'm going to pick red. So with the tolerance of zero, any color that I click on you will feel exactly what that color is and nothing else. If I have the tolerance up a little bit, notice how When I filled one color, this white was close enough to this light grey that it was within the tolerance range, so it filled in both of them. And then, if I drag it up higher and I click, he grabs more colors. So tolerance lets you bucket fill larger areas of color. And this is important because if you have a color that looks really close, but it isn't so. If I pick a color and I drop it down, just one, it's going to look pretty much the same. However, when I use bucket filled with no tolerance, it's not gonna pick up both colors, so tolerance is good for when Claire's Air so close to each other that you can't visibly tell just by looking at it. You can use a small amount of tolerance to get all those colors in one bucket. Fill so we have some drop down next to continuous. That allows you to change how the bucket fill behaves, stopping a grid, refer only to your active layer or refer to visible layers. And as a beginner, you're probably not gonna be messing with these much. So for the ink options, Simple Inc is going to be your basic coloring. Alpha compositing allows you to paint bucket a certain percentage so 2 55 is going to be maximum 100%. So when I color anything, it's gonna be peer red. If I drop that down. However, to about halfway, it takes a few more clicks to get that color up to what you actually have selected. This is handy for color mixing because you can slightly blend different colors with each other, and you may be using it for animation. If you want something to glow or flicker, you can use a partial coloring with the paint bucket tool. We'll get to the animation part later so the copy Alfa and color picks the Alfa range from the color on your palate, so this goes into something will be covering in more detail later. But if I have a designated color that has a low rapacity, when I feel notice that these colors that were solid are now transparent, the ones that had a lower alfa matched the alfa of the color I'm working with. This is an advanced tool that beginners generally won't be working with, so you won't have to worry too much about it. Lock Alfa means whatever the transparency currently is of a color, it will not add or subtract from that. So if I have a color that is 100% I have a color that is have a color that is partially transparent. I want to fill it with the new color on lock Alfa. It's going to be solid on the solid color. It's gonna be transparent on the transparent color. This is another advance to user bucket feel tool. You're going to want to stick with Simple Inc for most of what you dio. I'm gonna clear this and I am going to I'm going to make another quick palette of grays. So the last option for the bucket tool is going to be shading. So shading lets you click and drag over by your palate. Pick which colors you want it to go to next. And so if you have a dark to light range, we use the top four cause they almost look like they could be a light to dark range. So for this to work, I have to have a color start in the chain. I mean, I have to have color. Start with a corresponding color in the range and what this does. Every time I click, it goes one color up your shade, Jane. So if I have something like this, bring goes up like that, I can lighten it up like that. And this is another advanced to user tool you won't need to worry about. But it is there, and that's going to generally cover the paint bucket tool 10. Gradient tool: so the next tool up is going to be the Grady in tool or Shift G. The Grady, until is pretty fun. It's also an advanced user tool is not gonna be used as frequently as the bucket tool, but it still has its uses. So I'm going to make a very quick fate, my press shifty. So by default it's going to have no dithering. And it's going to use your foreground in your background color, being the two cultures in your bottom left. And when I click and drag, it's going to fill this solid shape with radiant and you can let go to make it a very sharp or very gradual transition. And the same thing with the bucket tool. There is a tolerance. So if I put the tolerance up higher instead of being, you know I'm going toe only use care black. It's going to slowly go up the range and whatever dark reds air closest to that pure black , it's going to add them into the range of the radiant. The drop down menu has different types of dithering, which I find to be quite enjoyable. So instead of actually having multiple colors in the Grady INT. It uses, uh, patterns to simulate transitional colors, and there are different types of dithering here. If I wanted to make some water, for example, I'd pick two different blues. And with your left click, you can pick the foreground color, and with the right click, you can pick the background color. Let's take a quick look at this, and that's about it for the Grady until you also have continuous. You have opacity and you have the same selections as the bucket tool as well as a tolerance . So that's the similarities. 11. line and curve tools: the next tool up the line tool shortcut is out, and it's really good for straight lines. Sometimes manually. Drawing in shapes could be a little daunting. Line tools Very good for mechanical hard edge perspective sort of things, and you have your thickness options in the top left, and you have your same options for Alfa and color, all that sort of thing and you have your eye dropper Ault available. I can pick between different line colors, and then it bounces right back. Control A to select everything and delete and then over here on the line to a free click. We can get the curve tool or shift L but when I let go, it makes a bend, and I can click a second time to had that curve. So always, really, you have to click and hold and let g O that 1st 1 There are two Ben's per line. If you only want to bend once you just dealt with that. Technically speaking, you can even make closed shapes with it. So if you click one small line, but I got pretty far on your second click, you can make clothes shapes this way. It's not the most practical, but it is a thing that you can dio and you have the same thickness and the same thinking options here, too. And that's the, uh have to. 12. Rectangle and elipses tool: next tool up is going to be the rectangle tool or V. Are you actually click and drag. Make rectangles. You can change your thicknesses. You can make the brush edge hard. We're curved. This is probably a pretty handy tool if you're doing tile sets because you can click on one of these grid squares, get something very tidy very quickly. You also have the same inking tools up here. And then if you click and hold on the rectangle tool you have, you have the filled square tool, which is same tool, same options. It's just obviously not line it fills itself in. You also have the lips tool, which operates in a similar manner as the rectangle tool. But instead of having sharp corners, it's going to obviously give you circles and ovals. You can hold shift while you have a selection made if you want it to be a completely spherical circle, and you could do that same thing with the rectangle to click and hold. And just like the filled rectangle, the filled lips is gonna do the same thing. So these four are clumped together in the same section because they're more or less the same tool, just slightly different nuances to them. And then they are you and you and shift you and shift you so that you can cycle through them very quickly. If I press, you depress you again. Press you trust you again. You can very quickly go between those same thing with shift. You shift you again if you if you again. I don't think there's going to be a time where you'll need to rapidly shift between these two tools over and over again. But, you know, hockey's their time saver, so you may, uh, use it from time to time. And those are the shape tools. 13. contour and polygon tools: the next tool is contour or D. This one's pretty fun. It's if you're working in a shape based art style more so than lines, you may be using this tool a lot. It basically closes and fills any shape you make when you let go of it, and then you can pick a different color, so it's very easy to they're together. Something like chicken hockey for that once again is deep, and you do have a pixel perfect option on it does that same thing where it keeps the edges very tidy. However, if you are working in shape based instead of perfect lines, you may not find pixel perfect as vital for the shape tool. But it's there if you want it. And you also have your thinking in your sighs stuff here as well, and you can change your brush. Type two. There are a lot of tools that share similar options, so the more you get familiar with one tool, the more you'll generally know what to expect in the settings of other tools. Next up under the same category is the polygon tool. This one's a little bit trickier, takes some getting used to So when you click, you let go, you have to click and hold again. Make the new line because if you just tap, it fills it in. So if you want to make particular shape, always remember to click an old. And then when you're done, tap ones. There's all the same settings, the contour tool. So if you know one of the tools, you generally will know the other. 14. blur and jumble tools: and the last two tools in the bottom of the right side row are the blur in the jumble, so the blur tool will make a quick shape, and then we will use the hockey. Are it? Pretty much does you'd expect blurs things, and you can change the blur, size, change how much of blurs and you have your pixel perfect. You may not want to use this one, though, because every time you blur a shape, you make a new color. And a lot of pixel art styles rely on keeping your color selection to a limited amount. And that is where the jumble tool comes in as a good alternative from a control Z back to the original solid shape in the hot Kiefer jumble is going to be our. So if you press our second time, Jumbo just scrambles the placement of the pixels themselves, and you get a transition that's a little more old school. So a practical example of how you would use both of these tools make an orange make a blue because a little bigger, so blur Tool is going to make a bunch of different colors. That transition between these two shapes. Jumbo is going to scramble the transition between them. Whichever tool you use is going to depend on what your goal is. But other than that, they have all the same settings you'd expect from all of the other brush tools. And that's Ah, that's all the tools you're gonna be working with on the right side. 15. Color settings : Let's talk about the color tools on the left side of the screen. So even though you probably know a little bit about the color, since we have do some of it for the tools, I'm going to cover everything anyways. So by default you're going to have a sense of power swatches over here, and you will have a color picker in the bottom left. And so you can pick how light something is how dark something is. You can pick how saturated it is and how d saturated it is now. Anything that is light is going to have a high value range. Anything that is dark is gonna have a dark value range. Anything in the middle is gonna have a medium value range. Value is the term for how light and dark something is, and that's all across the board. In any artistic job, it's a shared terminology, not necessarily exclusive. Two picks alert and anything that is very saturated and has a vibrant color to it is going to have a high chroma. Although people generally just say saturated anything that is pretty great out is going to be de saturated or have a low chroma and whatever color you pick, whether it is yellow or green or blue or anything across the spectrum, that is the hue that you choose. And one thing you notice. As I'm picking all of these colors, it is not having any effect on these colors up here to actually change these colors and have it stay, you need Teoh. Click on the edit color button or the lock. That means when I click on one of these does index zero in the bottom left. You click on that. It brings up the sliders that you can manually pick any color and you want you notice as I am sliding this right here. It's changing this color up here Now. I can use the sliders by clicking on this, or I can use the big square right here. You notice it updates here, and then. If I click over to a new color, I can update that one, too, and I can click on the rain, and that lets me reorganize colors. If I want to bring this one front you have to do is make sure that the move tool diamond and your cursor appears, and you can get that by speaking on the border edge of this watch and any car you have selected with the and a color on you can press delete, and that will get rid of the color from your, uh, how it you can also click and drag out in that will add new swatches for you to edit. We're all gonna be black by default, and then you can go to presets on this third button and there are many to choose from. A lot of them are very classic. So whichever color preset you picked, press the little button and it will replace with the current palate is with the new one that you have selected. And then you can just click away and it will hide that window. There is also an open folder button which will open the full there of the preset you have selected. And you notice in here that there are a number off GPL files, which are the files for the pallets. That doesn't mean you can make your own custom pallets and load them into the program. You can keep him forever. You can do that under the save palette option here. Okay, so I'm going to go back up and pick one of the larger pallets. That's a good one to work with. So the fourth button you can adjust the pallet size, the number of colors you want. So instead of dragging out and adding new colors or dragging inward to get rid of them, you can pick however men you want, and it will update for you. You can also adjust how big the swatches appear by default. That's gonna be medium. You can change the square down here if you want different ways of picking your color and change from color spectrum, too. An RGB well normal map is going to be something that you will not need unless you are working with textures and what not. There are some really cool tricks that people like to make textures to give free dimensional lighting effects on their pixel art. Kind of like how they'll make texture maps for three D models. Inpex alert your generally not going to be working with double maps, so I would suggest having one of these other other wheels selected. So if you decide after you make a piece of art that you like the colors, and you want to keep them your palate. There is a button to do that well, very quickly. Brought something in so I can show an example. But go down to that button, A pellet from current sprite. I could replace the current pallet where I could make a new one, and it takes the six colors that I have and also has a bunch of blanks filled in here. I could get rid of those. And then now that I have your new palette, I can save this as the default where I could just save it as a palate called apple. All right, so down by your color selection next to the you wheel for bar. Whichever setting you have there is also one are below it that lets you pick how how much Alfa is in the color or transparency. And then these two down below are your main color in your background color. So the second button next to the edit color is how you organize. You can reverse the colors. You sort them by radiant sort them by Hugh Saturation Rightness Bloomin! It's sort by read only by green by Alfa sending in descending, and that about covers everything you'll need to know for the left side 16. Time line and animation: Let's talk about the animation timeline, which is going to be at the very bottom of the screen. If you have a file that you've chosen to have a white background, the layer you have is just going to be called background with an underline. If you make a new file and you use transparent, you noticed that it says layer one and it doesn't have that underline. So for the sake of going through the timeline, we're going to stick on white. The difference between this background in a different background is this. One is always going to be solid. So if I I make a new layer and then I delete the background layer, it's gonna be transparent. But if I'm just working on the background layer, I can't erase whatever that background color is. That's more or less the difference between the underlying So The way that I made a new layer very quickly was shift n. So right now we only have one frame in the timeline. If we want to add another frame, there's a plus button that says new frame, and it's in the bottom right click that a few times, and if you want to make a new layer interest that we have the same number of frames outward , but there are blank backgrounds going to duplicate itself. You can tell if there's something on a frame or not by that big black dot and if you want to go Ford and back on the frames, these two keys are what let you move left and right. I can drama I can or the right go to the right. Go there. Right Once you have a few frames in when pressed the play button just to see how it looks, you also have the go the next frame or go to the previous frame manually with these two buttons and then these two are the go to the very beginning and go to the very end most the time you'll be using these two keys. Navigate your timeline, though, and also type in which frame you want to be down in the bottom. Right, but type in three met three on any one of these frames you compress delete. It will clear whatever is on this frames, but go into the background trying press delete it deletes I use that term loosely. Everything on the layer by defaulting it back to your background color. So you notice in the very bottom left. My background color is pure white. But if I change with the right click the background color, I use the race tool. It's erasing the white into the new background color, which happens to be read now. If I press delete, I'm clearing everything to the background color. Which again, is that in the red? So once again, this is something that you only have to deal with. If you set up your initial sprite file. You have a solid background and not a transparent background at any time, and you can right click on the layer you can delete. It can't technically delete all there. So if you want to delete the background, you have to make a new layer in order to replace it. Down here we have a preview, the 1 to 1 this is going to be our play button. So if I draw something out for the quick, so I click the play button up in the preview and I can see what it looks like but still retain the static pause on the main screen this rectangle button will snap your drawing back inside the bounds. Fact, I think it drags things to center. Yep. Drags the center, so I'm gonna clear all of these. So I want to manually make new layer. You go to the layer dropped in menu making the layer, and it shows you the hot key shift. And right here, any one of these layers I can double click, and I can change its name. So we'll call this one main. And I will well, in each one of these and on the new layer to dry, and it's the moving dot I'm gonna close the preview window. So I click play, and then the eyeball lets you hide layers or hide everything. If I want, I can hide the background there and just see the top layer, or I can high the top layer and it just has a bottom layer lock is it locks layers. I'm gonna go back to these four frames one to three, or and then if I used the link tool or links setting, I do both end to make new frames. You notice when I scroll through in this timeline, everything from frame three to frame 10 is still showing this number three. And then when it gets to the next frame, it's for this is handy for whenever you want to reuse or recycle animation frame without having to manually cut and paste it over and over and over again. It's also more of an advanced tool that a lot of people will completely skip and not use. And any time you can click and drag over number frames, press delete and then you're back to where you are. Make sure if you don't want that effect happen, that you click back to the regular dots and then we have settings on here or onion skin related in top left. You have the left, right and bottom, and that allows you to move the timeline around. I personally always keep it on bottom. It's just easier for me to manage. Thumbnails, turns your dots into small images of what's on there. I tend Teoh keep thumbnails off. I tend to think that this is a lot cleaner, more tidy because you're gonna be seeing what your rock on up here. A lot of people will have their preview window in the side instead of having thumbnails or the timeline, it's all a matter of preference back to the settings and change. Your first frame doesn't arrange the order. It just changes the number that it starts with. And then you have your onion skin, which we will be going over now. Before I got on the settings of the Indian skin. Let's just turn it on. So this button next to it, too little transparent boxes. That's you see a ghost image of the frames before and after, although, since I have ah, Doc red background, it's a bit hard to see. So if we go back over to the settings again and change the tent to red and blue, you get up the A passage e on the step, put in front of the spray or behind it, and this is used for animation purposes. So if I wanted to use the veto to move, scooped things around, see where they go, the ghost image of the frame before and after is gonna tell me the spacing. As I'm moving, there is an envelope showing how far the onion skin displays. I press off N to make some new frames and then I were those out and draw in new drawings. I've 67 heat. I can drag out the envelope to show more steps of the onion skin. I will have to adjust the opacity to. I will have to adjust the opacity to have the other frames show up. But it's not too difficult, and all those settings could be found under here. Some people don't like the red and blue tint, and they want it to just be a fake image of all the colors of what the frames are. I personally like the red and blue, though, so you can click and drag any of the top numbers, and it will select all layers of that frame number, and you can actually click on the border and screw them around. So now first free miss 51234 skips five but six and seven, So you can click and move around frames inside each animation timeline layer and override different frames. But you can also click and move groups of them as a whole. And then down here you have another version of zoom available, but not everyone uses it. One other thing I need to mention is that layers have blending modes. We're all set to normal by default and generally speaking, unless you have a reason you're gonna be keeping it normal. But if you've ever messed around with photo shop or sigh or clip or gim for any of those other Softwares with layers, you might be familiar with any of these blending modes. But if not, let's go through them real quick and keep things simple and delete the extra layers. Gonna bring the background layer toe a right. I'm on delete everything in this layer the top. So I'm just going to draw a middle gray red. Now we're gonna mess around with bun modes. So the dark and blending mode says that whatever you're drawing, if it is darker than the color it's on top of it will apply itself. So if I have a light color, you have a darker color. This thought that I made, which is on layer to it, shows up on top of lighter colors, but it does not show up on top of darker colors. This black is on the main layer. It's below it. And yet, because of the dark and blending loud doesn't show up. Multiply is similar, but it just has a darkening effect on everything it's on top of. So if I have a light color medium a dark, I take this piece that I drew darkens a light color darkens the medium darkens the dark. It it multiplies the effect other burn is similar. You have to have something underneath for it to apply, though, because you cannot burn pure light. Not sure all of the, uh, logic behind it. I just know that it will not apply to pure white. But all three of these modes are darkening. So they're group together in one category lightened screen color dodge in addition to the same sort of thing. But they do it towards lightning, obviously. So you can't lighten anything letter than white, so it's not gonna do anything when it's up there, you can lighten dark colors. And I'm assuming that this was not getting any brighter because the color we're working with is already darker than that. If I were to pick something like this, you can I tell a normal that this color is lighter than that? So if we go to lighten this color is lighter than both this one and that one. And so as an actual effect on it, this one is on Lee lighter in the start color not later than this one. So it disappears. Screen is like, um, multiply, but in reverse, so it just has a holistic adding to the lightness on any layer that you're on color dodges similar, it seems to have more of a saturated effect. In addition, is similar as well. A lot of these layers have their own nuances to them that you could do a quick Google search if you really want to know the differences between them. But it's not necessarily a vital thing. A lot of people will just tinker with different blending modes until something looks right . Since a lot of art is intuitive and not super scientific, overlay has different effects on both light and dark colors. So if I pick dark, red, medium and a light, let's pick a super light and a super dark, this tohave an example. So if we go down to the overlay, obviously it's not gonna have any effect on the white because this is white. My movies over on this see how it differs from normal overlay normal. Our light and soft light Pair that to normal. I definitely encourage you to tinker around with a lot of these. There is a general. The old at each one of these could give difference pretty much takes the opposite exclusion . We'll pull whatever color you have out of the total. So if we go to the RGB on this so this has RGB of 48 00 And obviously weight's gonna be Max . So to 55 55 to 55 if we go to the exclusion notice how that 48? Well, it was 48. Yep, it took 48 out of the 2 55 So that's what exclusion does Whatever color you're using in your layer, it's going to subtract that from whatever it's on top of subtract seems to have the same effect. If I that's a new one. What does divide dio interesting even for veteran artists? We don't all use every single layer for every single thing. There are a lot of them that unless you have a specific goal, you know exactly what they do. You probably won't ever use them even if you've been doing art for decades, so don't ever feel like you have to know every single one of these to be a complete artist . Que who? Saturation takes whatever the saturation is of your color and it matches it. So look down here looking at the colors in the bottom left. I'm comparing them. Maturation. Interesting. It must have a huge shift as well. Other mode is going to apply whatever color you have. If your top image is de saturated, it's going Teoh de saturate. When it's on top of luminosity. A lot of these blending modes will actually be different between different programs. They're not all cookie cutter carbon copy duplicates, so be sure to test out each one of them for your own art whenever you get the chance. But they're there if you need them. Generally speaking, picks alert. You're not gonna be working environments. If you want something like fires glowed cause nearby things to be read, you might. But even then, most picks alert. You tend to just manually pick your colors, but the blending modes are there. If you need them, that's gonna be everything you'll need to know for the timeline. So let's go talk about the drop down menus of the top 17. File Drop Down Menu: All right. So last thing we're gonna dio he is go through all of these. Drop down this in the top left and just see what each thing does. The file is gonna have everything laid to files. New is pretty self explanatory. Make a new thing the news pretty self explanatory. You make a new file, obviously pick all the same stuff you could pick it to start. You make a new file. If you really haven't open, it's just going to add another tab here. You know his ex that out. If you've ever drawn anything on before you exit out when you dio, it's gonna ask if you want to save or not from here, you can Yes, no. Or cancel open, pretty self explanatory Open recent You can set in your, uh, settings under I think it's under preferences yet open recent. Ours is just blank to keep things pretty clear for us, But anything that you've recently opened, you will see over here. You can turn that off in your preferences, which we'll get to in a little bit, save and save as or pretty universal export lets you make PNG sequences and it gives you the settings that you'd need to export things correctly. You may want to only export, for example, the top layer. You don't want the weight to be exported with it. So in your export settings you can export only a certain layer like layer to you can choose the frames that you want. You could make it play for a reverse ping pong. Ping Pong is as assumes that goes forward and it finishes. It plays in reverse, still gets the beginning again, and then it plays normally. That's what Ping Pong is. Clothes and clothes all are pretty self explanatory. All right, so picking back up on the sprite sheets. If you export a spreadsheet, you can choose how you want each frame to be exported on the single image. Spreadsheets take every single frame of your animation. Instead of rendering out nine different images, it renders out one image with all nine frames on it. I simply made the background alternate between a gray and white so that when I exported you'll be able to see more clearly how it's organized, and I haven't numbered one through nine for obvious reasons. So let's go to the export and I'm going to Dubai three rows. I'm not putting on any tremor patting that's gonna put pixels between each frame and that makes it 100 to import and stuff. Sometimes you may forget how many pixels you have of padding, so I tend to not do that. I'll tell you how wide how high it is. You can choose if you want to just export one layer or, if you want all of them flatten down and then you can choose. You want all the frames or, if you want certain selected frames exported and then output file lets you pick where you want to put it. I'm going to put it in documents as test PNG. And then when I click export, I will end up with an image that looks like this. If I did just a simple export and did a gift, I get one gift fire with all the frames in it. And from here you can. She was how large you want to be. You want all the layers in how many frames you want. I want to play forward. Reverse ping pong. Applying pixel ratio is not something you need to worry about exporting for Twitter has to do with frame rates and whatnot that make it more friendly for Twitter posts. I will export a gift. Real quick test gift doesn't support layers. That just means that even though I have multiple layers on here, as soon as I turned it into a gift, it's going to flatten all that down to one layer. Basically well, not really a layer. Just one image, because it doesn't support layers. S E is the a sprite file format, and that preserves the layers. So it's just letting you know that when you turn it into a GIF, you can't reverse the process. We'll just click OK here, and then the gift file plays everything in one file, all friends or whatever frames you have selected. Then you can import Sprite sheets, so that test PNG that I exported is one image, but it's cut several times, So if I do buy Rose what the width in the height to match what each frame is. And when I do that, it cuts apart that single image, and it puts it into frames. 40. You notice, though, that I only have one layer now, so it's best to keep your files in the A Sprite s e file instead of working with Sprite sheets if you can, because you can preserve layers. This is kind of a an end game sort of thing when you're taking it out of a Sprite and into a different program to use for game an animation, the repeat last export tool is going to repeat whatever you previously exported. So if I go to export Sprint sheep and I'm going to people of my settings as they were and ran around a test to override it, yes, when I exported it makes another spreadsheet. However, instead going through all of those same check boxes and numbers and whatnot again, I can click on the repeat last export or control Shift X as the hockey next to it. It's just going to go straight to the Do you want over right, And this is for whenever you're making really small little tweaks and you'll want to keep going through all the technicals again, you could just very quickly do a re export 18. Edit Drop Down Menu: Let's take a look at the edit drop down menu, so undo and redo a pretty self explanatory control Z control. Why undo history is going to show you everything you've done in the past. Cut Copy both universal tools. I make a mark. Make a new layer. Make another mark Copy merged will let you copy everything flattened down into one image. Instead of just copying the piece of one layer, I were to do a regular copy and paste. All I'm doing is I'm copying the blue, since they're too, just has a blue on it. However, if I do cup emerged or control ship, see when I paste the pace, both of them together. This could be useful if you have a multi layer animation file and you want to move everything to a new frame and Steph copying a bunch of frames separately to a new location . Pasting delayed self explanatory bill is basically bucket filled. Stroke is going to add a border to whatever you have selected. So if I you stroke, I click away. That selection is now as a stroke around it. This could be really handy if you are making a selection with the wand tool, for example, so I can click on this spiral that could go toe layer to and it stroke. If I d select. Now there is a border around the shape, and since I have it on its own layer, it's easier to manage. Rotate is I'm going to delete that border control A to select everything and it road tape underlay degrees, and you have 90 degrees clockwise in 90 degrees counterclockwise. You also have flip horizontal vertical transform basically puts the box selection tool around the I'm the bare minimum selection, so it's not going to get any of the empty space around. It's going to get locked right to the maximum width and height, and from there you can, you know, do whatever transforms you need of a rotations you need. Rotation seems to be a little bit more picky, like it's easier toe scale. Up and down there's a small little window, or you can click to the rotation, so keep that in mind. Not that you'll be doing a large number of rotations in here, but you will, from time to time. Shift lets you move pixels. It takes a pixel from one side, and it puts it on the other. So if I keep doing the shift over and over again, you can see how it's taken this corner of the spiral. It's place it over here. The functionality for this tool is generally used in tiles because you might want to pull a piece of your image US screen and on to the other to see how seamlessly blends or to make fixes can also make new brushes from your selection. That just means wherever I draw, it's using that as the brush you do The aligned destination, which means wherever it click it begins there, as opposed to the aligned. A source, which means no matter where I dropped, it's still gonna be anchored to the same spot more you play with it, the more you'll see what I mean. Then you have paintbrush, which lets you slide the image around pixel for pixel. Generally speaking, you're not going to be working with something this big for brushes. I'll show you some of the practical sides of it works for the brush tool to you want, press back to get river brush, so I'm making a new layer with shift in. I'm going to zoom in, you know, color, make this one pixel. So I got two of these right here. Use the M to make a box election, and from there, and it new brush control B is the hockey. So if I go to align the source, I now have a dithering brush that's pretty handy. And no matter where I brush with this, it clicks and lines up perfectly. If I go to online to destination, though, I can pick a spot where it will allying to. So you'll notice that if I'm off by a pixel, makes a little clumps. And then if I do paintbrush, it just takes that image, and it slides it around every pixel that I move so you can have the same base shape operate in vastly different ways, just depending on the drop down you've chosen on any time you want to go back, press the back button and your back your default brushes, and you can make a lot of custom brushes this way by drawing something out. Making a selection control B is the hockey, and you can do it with different colors, too. I go over to here and then I make different colors. Control be you can very quickly make grass base. You want to have a little more texture to it. You know, the second drop down list lets you adjust the anchor point of where it repeats itself. Then, if you want strands like long blades of grass paintbrush, the new brush from selection is just a different version of the new brush. I use the one tool and select everything here you brush from selection, basically crops everything down, and that makes it pretty easy to saving off. So then there is a replaced color shift. Our that replaces the number, which is the green we have selected to light, and I can adjust that. And you also have tolerances here, and the RGB A is red, green, blue and alfa. So if you want to tweak certain aspects of it instead of doing literal, whole color transforms and you have the option is to mess with that as well. Generally speaking, I only do color swaps from one color to another color, but you know the options available if you need it so I can go up to edit invert inverts pretty self explanatory. It's just the reverse of whatever is there, but it gives you the option of reversing red, green and blue or any combination. If I have these two down, it's just inverting the red and the green indexes, referring to your pallets over there. All right, so now we're gonna talk about the adjustments. Under the Edit drop down menu, there is brightness and contrast. There's hue, saturation. There's color curve. Let's draw a few colors shapes just so that we can see the effects of those. So I'll go ahead and put down a couple medium graze. If you are not working in RGB and you're working in indexed colors, it's going to look over to your index or the most approximate color that you're picking down here instead of giving you literal color here. So just keep an eye out for that, and it adjustments, brightness and contrast. Rightness is pretty self explanatory. It just adjust how buying dark something is contrast affects how sharp difference as when I move it down. They're all very gray gray. When I move it up, they're all very black Mike. In the brightness and contrast, you can also set it to effect Red green, bloom or Alfa. Generally speaking, you're probably not gonna be working with any of these individual channels. But they are there If you need I turn off everything but green and change the brightness of the green. And if I take away all the green, it's going to go into purple contrast. This is probably a good tool if you want to make interesting color palettes. And if I dio green and blue well, you're gonna be affecting the scion with the red and the red and green You're gonna be affecting the yellow in the blue. Knowing how this is going to affect your colors has to do with how well you know, color theory and how light behaves. And there's tons and tons of science behind that sort of a thing. So for now, I'm just gonna let you know that this is here free to tinker with, but knowing how to properly use it will take some training and a lot of expertise on color and light under adjustments. We also have the hue and saturation. So since this is gray scale use, not really gonna have any effect that changes it from one grade to another. Great. If you are working in colors that are not gray scale, like we'll pick green and the yellow in an orange, and I go up to the adjustments and hue and saturation the chef Hugh. It can affect how saturated it is. Lightness Alfa. Then you can customize that. If you only want to work with Red Channel or the Green Channel with blue, we're Alfa. You have those options here, too. Then we have the effects. Convolution matrix. This is basically the equivalent of Photoshopped filters. You have the RGB a here as well, and you can click through and there's a preview so you can see what it does. Negative, obviously, what's it into? A negative. Blair will blur by pick by three pixels. They're hard. A lot of different blurs. Different sharpens. These are tools that you might never need to touch, but you might find certain motion blurs and what not to be pretty fun. It's one of many tools also has outlines, which be pretty handy. Then you have your insert text tool test. Select a fine. It will go through your computer and whatever fought you have installed is the one that you can use, and you can turn anti alias sing on or off. As you can see, it's place it down here, still moving around that is, with anti alias ing. Insert text in turn the anti leasing off. Now the same text. You notice that it has hard edges. Sometimes, once you make thes, you may want to go back and tailor them up. Exabyte, texel and then keyboard shortcuts and preferences. We will get back to in a little bit, since they're pretty big categories. 19. Sprite Drop Down Menu: right Spread drop down menu Properties is going to show you your found name. Tape size. How many frames? We obviously only have one transparent and pixels. You don't want to keep this as is because Well, let's just see what happens. We make it to one or 12 You're pixels. Just turn. Directing was basically he's a brush tool. You notice that everything's wide and I gotta properties double high for things long. We're gonna want to keep things to square pixels. But generally speaking, you're not gonna be doing much in the property section color mode. Let's you switch between red, green, blue gray scale indexed indexed colors means that will stick only to the colors you have over here in the left. So if I I'll make a quick Grady in just to show you well, I have orange and kind of a green, and I will make ingredient that has many, many colors. That's why it's so soft. Lucky I go to grayscale cuts within the gray scale. If I go to indexed, it takes the closest colors from here that cuts everything to them. This can actually be handy if you want to take in images that have many colors, and you want to see how simplified it would be according to a pilot you have, you can do that. So if you change your palate to something different, like, let's go back to that game boy one. And then I go to Sprite Car mood indexed. You can see that everything in that Grady in was closest through this light rain before jumping to the dark green. Generally speaking, whatever color mode you have, you're gonna be doing most of your work in the same color mode without switching around. But it's there if you need it. Pulse of dithering options so people interpret your colors with better transitions you locate. That's a copy things into. A new file gives you new tab. Then you have crop, which anything that I have selected, it can crop to that selection. So that's useful for when you have a bunch of excess room. Say you've drawn a character and I don't take up nearly as much room as you made Initially , you might want to make the area of the foul smaller so you'll go to crop, however, that you may not want any excess space around here and maybe trying to box select to get a perfect crop is gonna be a really tedious for you. The alternative is trim. Trim will look for corner colors or corner transparency's detect the most highest, ah, crop that they can possibly get. And I use this quite a lot very handy tool, so make sure to keep that one in mind. 20. Layer Drop Down Menu: next up is the layer. Drop down menu properties is window that you get whenever you double click on a layer, so you know to places that you can get to it. Click here or properties here. Chickpeas, the hot key. So I draw something. You can hide the layer by going up to visible, although I never do it from there. I always do it from the eyeball. It just lot easier. Makes more sense, but there's a second spot available to use that. If you need, you can lock layers from up here, which is the same thing as pressing the lock down. The timeline down here. New layer The same thing as the shift in Chieftain is a hot Chiara used very frequently, but if you want to know how to do it manually, it's up by the layer. Menu groups are folder, so maybe you want to group together all of the facial features for ahead, or a piece of armor or a building anything like that. Any place that you would use groups in photo shop or illustrator or flash or any other program out there, you have the same tools down here in a Sprite. You can delete layers from here as well, although I tended just click on them and press delete body easier. But once again, two places do the same thing. Background from there converts your regular layer into a background, and you'll notice that it What's the underlying on? It gives it the name background you have duplicate, which duplicates this layer is empty them. So let's give it mark layer duplicate. They use the move tool. Two of them. I can merge down or flatten merge down. Now we have both thought someone layer we can do flatten what's everything on a one layer? 21. Frame Drop Down Menu: So if we go to the frame drop down menu, I'm gonna frame properties. And I'll tell you how many friends you have you obviously are going to start with. One duration in milliseconds is how long each frame holds. So if you make it 10 milliseconds, it's gonna be a lot shorter. Have you make it? 400 milliseconds can actually go in and customize how long each frame is held. Although generally speaking, I like to work in a constant frame rate where each frame has the same number of millisecond oration. Um, a lot of animators prefer to work that way, so it's worth messing around with. But just know it's not a required technique that you have to use it all times. So Properties is the opacity. So if I Rana mark once there's something in the frame I can adjust capacity from here, I make a new frame. I just capacity. It's only going to apply for that frame, so I make a new one. Amusing. All end, by the way, is the way to make new friends, which is the next one up new frame up in so I can draw here. So properties thing that wouldn't Lou. So it's keeping the opacity for each one of them. I'm going to delete those. Though you do new empty frame. I'll be. I tend to just do all in and delete. It's an extra key, but more often than not, I'm going to be duplicating the previous frame and making adjustments to it in animation. So help end or I'll be whichever one you prefer. You have duplicate cells, which, if I were to have three frames 123 I can select those frame duplicate cells. And now 45 and six have that exact same thing. 123 or 56 You can also duplicate linked cells, which going back Teoh the It's a long line I could go to Well and the com both of those frame duplicate linked cells. You notice that it keeps them all linked. Then you can delete frames without see I'll see or go to that. I generally just use the delete button so you have click on the seven and delete have three different ways of doing the same, uh, function once again find what works for you. Then you have tags. Tags are an interesting thing. Eventually, when you're doing animations, you might have a lot of turn that off. It's very easy to forget that's on. I'll be make a bunch of empty frames. You might have some animation that goes on for a good while, and once you get more than a few frames, you kind of forget which frames of what part. Maybe your character is doing a jumper, weapons swing or a role. Or, you know there's some anticipation before whatever is happening happens. So a good way to keep track of it is to select a range and go up to frame and make a tag. New tag. There we go, so you can name it, and I could just name it. Obviously, it's not jump, but giving it a jump name. You can color coordinate if you want it to be like a red tag, and you can even have it play forward backwards or ping pong. We'll just do far it for now. What that does is it selects this area and says That's jump, good way of marking where things are and when you click play notice that it's just playing within that area. If you stop and click anywhere outside of that tag, it's gonna play just like normal. You can right click on the tag and change the properties. From there, you can play it in reverse. You can click on it and do ping pong that just makes it go back and forth, and you can right click on it and delete it at any time. Or you could make additional ones. What if I? You had part of a jump, but maybe there's like a whole jump. Siri's to it, and maybe that goes on low longer. So you want to make sure that you've clicked outside of the tag in or to make a new one. Otherwise, you're gonna end up read, um, reusing or adjusting the Italian currently working with. Then any time you can go back and click on it and change the color where you can right click on them and delete them, and then you can jump to the drop down menu. Next, the tags first frame previous frame next and last, where you can go to a specific frame. And that's just the same as using the next buttons. The first and last and the frame number down here. Same tool, different spot. You could manually play the animation up here, but usually it's just easier to press the enter button. Constant frame rate is whenever you've adjusted the millisecond duration and you don't want to go back on every single frame, readjust them, do readjust them to something a consistent. You can just change it all right here. And if you select everything, you can reverse the frames, which since these air numbers and I've already scrambled it up, it's gonna be a little bit confusing. So I will go ahead and make a quick example. Show you what I mean, one to three. So when I click play 123 a bit fast, let's put it in, put it in another. You numbers bring it up to a four, not up to a five. So when I click, play shames that constant frame rate, too. 200 just that you can see it little better. 12345 So I can go down Teoh frame. Make sure things selected reverse frames. Now you notice that plays 54321 He's taking the order down here, and it's shuffle in reverse, and that's gonna be everything for the frame drop down menu 22. Select Drop Down Menu: So we have the select drop down menu. You can select all which is control a. Use this a lot, and I've used it when I've been explained a lot of different tools. So it's definitely a very common hot key. Um, if you want to know where you can do it manually, obviously it's gonna be under select. De Select is controlled the so control A control, the control, A control, the like, their thing de select collect everything. Do you select? Re select probably means it selects what you just got rid of. So let's test that real quick selection trolled be to de select re select. Yep, so few Mrs Selection or something like that, where you can get it right back in verse in verse is going to take the selection. And just like everything that it isn't so right now. And draw like that I go to in verse. I can draw everywhere except for their control shift. I is the hot key. I do use this frequently when I'm doing my work, so it's definitely worth practicing. You have color range, so let's make a Grady in real quick. This is similar to Bucket fills where you could have the color range on a bucket. No, within a certain area. But if you select a color range, you can bump up the tolerance and you can even see that change in real time. And you can select the color, which right now it's taking this color from my main color control de to de select delete clears and an M S K is mask. So if I have a particular selection that I want like Star and I just I don't want to lose that selection in particular, conceive it and then I can de select. And maybe I'm doing a bunch of stuff and I go up to edit. And maybe I am changing Sprite size. Maybe I want to be bigger. I'm just doing a whole bunch of different stuff. I can go back over to the select like, unload the star mask, and that selection is going to be exactly where it was as big as it was in the exact same area, and so it can go back and use that wherever in de select. That's gonna be everything for the select drop down menu 23. View Drop Down Menu: All right, let's talk about the View menu. First option you're gonna have is a duplicate view that's going to open. Whatever you have a second time. Some people like to use this because you can have, uh, doing one thing and then you can add it in the other. So if I'm doing some nitty gritty stuff here, duplicate view is an alternative to the preview panel. I believe yes, and actually previews under the view. This is kind of a preference thing. Also, go over here, press play, and while it's playing, you can obviously your edits in another window and vice versa. You can click, play over here and on this one. Have everything paused. You can see in real time. Your effect is having on each frame then and close each one of them. And as long as you have one of them open, it's not gonna ask you if you want to save before you quit, because you still technically have your project open to the next one. Up is extras, and that is you make a selection. You see that moving edge. That's what it is. So and technically move pieces without seeing that outline, I would recommend having it on, though you can tell what you're doing a lot easier. We have a show later edges. That's pretty much the bounding box for out fire. Something goes out back to show created grid settings all right below the show. So if you want to go to their you can change wide. Something is, it's why coordinates will go ahead and punch in some numbers just so you can see what it does. X and Y well, obviously offset where it is. And then the width and height are I beg. The boxes are what things, too snap to the grid. You just have snap to the grid checked and you can unsnapped or shift s then goes back to the way it waas. And let's just set those grid sittings back to their default. 16 by 16 they're zero and let's go to show, and that's turned that grid off. Let's go to the view menu again. Show auto guides. You can uncheck that Allah guides dio they will show you never move it around. You can see these numbers here. This means that there's 57 pixels till you get to this side 115 to get to that side 41 tell you at the bottom and 54 from the top has you moving around. You can see this update. So we go back to view Joe Weaken, Turn those on and off Auto guides. Slices goes back to that tool. The slice tool. You can make these. And if you want to have those not show up and check slices, they will still be there. So make sure that you have them showing so you can delete them. Right? Click. Really Delete wheat. Go back up to view pixel grid. It just shows you every individual pixel so grid in here the show rush preview. This means that you won't see the outline on the breast that you have s o. I usually have it on you. Probable too. Back to grid. Already gone over that tiled mood. What? That does duplicates whatever you have left, right, that you can see how it connects back up with itself. So if I draw like this, then I go back to tab mode and turn off. You see that my squiggle carried over to the other side. This is really handy for making repeatable textures and related, and you can go to tiled mode and do it in the Y axis. They will behave the same. You can tell where the duplication begins because you have big rectangular bets. Actually, as I'm scribbling in right here, your notice it at the top two. Then I can also do tile them both axes. Take that off set loop Selection is going to add tags down in your timeline. If I press bullpen to give myself some new frames and then I very quickly make an animation , I click play. I can select an area. Then I can cope to the view that loop selection. I just mean that's going to play whatever is contained in that loop, and at any time I can move out of here like play, it's gonna snap back. I can delete the tag. Then we're back to what we had. Then I can select those frames and delete them. Show onion skin is the manual way of using the onion skin button down below, so I can the things around and you'll see the before image. You'll see the after image and that has whatever these down here are the range. You can stretch that out to see more of the after image and a quick reminder. While we're here, you click on this and you can change the settings of your onion skin from here. Then you can go back and toggle it on and off here. Or use that three. We're simply use the button down here. Timeline. It's just gonna hide her timeline Hockey for it is tab review that gives you small window. Then Aiken was that preview window while screen mode for your self explanatory Go back with control F Full screen preview. Same thing Home brings you back home. Refresh and reload skin. This has to do with any type of themes and styles that you want your a sprite to look differently instead of just having this default gray. But that's not vital for any beginner that's getting into a sprite. If you'd like to learn more about that, there's plenty of resource is online to Google, but you know it's right here, have five, and that covers view 24. Help Tool: all right. Help may use gonna be the most self explanatory it tends to be. You know what? You don't know what you're doing or where you're going. You always know that whatever you click on help menu is gonna help you. But just to be thorough, you have to read me, which is your default. I don't know. I'm doing. I will read the Read the document Introduction Copyright David Capello Issue Support Authors credits license. Opens it up in a new tab. You can close quick reference. Open up a Web page which will show you all of the hot keys, documentation, whatever you want to go and read through any section of the program. The documentation will be there for you. Tutorials, various tutorials from different places, a lot of them leaking to YouTube. If you want additional help or someone else's reinterpretation of how to do things, this is a good place to go. Released notes. Every time a spray updates, you can find out the new things have changed. Whether they be feature's bug fixes things like that, they're gonna be here. Twitter, find out what they're doing. Find out who's posting things. Example. Art everything you need. Donate brings you to a page where they're no longer accepting donations and the about that's gonna cover help section pretty simple. 25. Shortcuts and preferences: All right, we're going to head back to the edit drop down menu, and we're gonna cover keyboard shortcuts and preferences. So keyboard shortcuts are going to show you all the shortcuts for your tools. Do you have, um, you can find the ones that there's a tool that you want to know. There's a hot key for it. Then you can find it here, or if you want to assign one to it, then you can obviously change that. Here there is a whole lot of them. Some of the ones left blank just me that there haven't been anything assigned to it. And if you accidentally changed when these of something else and you're like, Oh, I did something, I changed and I don't know what each originally waas you could go back to reset Yes, and it'll pop everything back the way it was originally. And then import and export are where you can export out a set of hot keys that you like, and then you can import it. So it's a way of saving and preserving your Hakkies commands, like changing your brush, changing color, all sorts of different things. All five of these are a just way it's organized. You can more easily find the thing that you want to change the hockey for references. Let's go through preferences. General screen Scaling 9% by default seems like a good choice. You can have a slim mess with you. I stuff here the fall English. You can get different translations here. Home Tab span menu bar rhymes over mouse over automatically save recovered every two minutes. If you want to mess with your configuration file, you can click that button. It will bring up a window for you and then crash folder. Whenever the program takes a dive, you confined. Where has all the stuff you salvage files. So each one of these are basically just something that you want a quick through and just see what your options are. Most of them aren't going to be complicated. What kind of things you want to default export kind of thing. You want a default export for animation about spite sheeps. You can set others here. Recent items you can decide how many show up on your home list, so everything over here you can limit that down. Teoh put that zero and everything's gone Yeah. I don't believe that. Something you can un deal if you just want to clear, you can obviously use a clear button. Alerts Pretty self explanatory. They give you the option off when you see alerts and it air. So a lot of things in these preferences are going to be self explanatory. Like I could narrate preview straight line immediately on pencil tool. But you're obviously going to know what that check box does because you're going to read it . So if you see me skimming through a lot of these, it's because they pretty self explain what they are. Selection, timeline, They're serious. Background believe this is the checkers. Yeah, you can see these two colors are here. I make this Morro and orange. Yeah. There you go. Reset button brings everything back to normal. Apply. Read. Ice is how many undoes you want. You can have mega by a limit of how much it will but into its, uh, storage or you can not allowed the limit. Themes is where you will be able to download themes, pensions, experimental. So most of these things you're just gonna leave by default, as is when you are getting into the program. I haven't had to tinker with a lot of these when I've been doing most my work. But they're definitely there for you, too. Mess around with when you curious or would like to customize things more to your liking. That's gonna be preferences. 26. Aseprite Outro: thanks for watching this class on a Sprite. I hope it's been helpful. If you ever need Teoh, get a refresher on the tools and where everything is feel free to drop back these videos and a heads up that learning the tools is very important. However, in order to be good at pixel art and animation, you're going to have to work on your art fundamentals as well. So this video will definitely get you started. But it will not be the end all be all for exciting animation. You definitely want to supplemented with various classes and whatnot. So we went over the tools. Whenever the timeline we went over the pallets, we went over the bile at its Sprite layer frame. Select View helped drop down menus as well as your hot keys and preferences. And general, where everything is, we went over the tools that you will usually be using, as well as the tools that you might use for a special situation. And then we briefly mentioned and located some of the tools on Advanced user might want to do some digging on Thanks for watching