B. Zedan

Pixel playin'

Posted by bzedan on Mar 27, 2023

I've got my March Labours illustration pretty close to done, so supporters keep an eye out for that. But what I've also been spending a lot of time on is pixel art. I found a pretty (free!) solid pixel brush pack for Procreate over at Bardot Brush that also comes with some canvases that are set up for working small, which was nice.

I'm picky about pixel stuff, I feel like using a limited palette is a fun and key part of it (for me), and I like working within limitations. I especially like dithered stuff, the two-colour-only.

A black and white pixel doodle page packed full of screentone pattern swatches, a Pikmin, swords, a scroll, an illuminated capital M, two skulls, and a Dragonquest slime, all above a dither-shaded mountain landscape and palm tree.

And it's been fun to play with animation as well. The problem is always they are small so I don't know how responsive layouts will butcher them.

A black and tan dithered-pixel gif of a view out a passenger-side window. A group of windmills turn as they pass by, and a water tower follows them. The gif does not loop.

A black and white looping dithered pixel gif of a sphere with a shadow moving across it.

A black and white looping pixel gif of a coffee cup with lines of steam rising from it.

Apologies if these are HUGE for some reason, if that's how it publishes I'll go back and fix it.

But I was super curious about imitating CRT look, like with scanlines. There were some guides out there but a lot felt kind of more complicated than I know to do. However! I found some bits of guides and sort of knocked together my own method. Which I like the results of, and have found to be repeatable.

A limited-pallete pixel illustration of a line of palm trees in front of a blue sky with thin clouds. The palm trees are grouped three to the left and two on the right. Between the gropus is a small moon. The image has a false CRT scanline look to it that smooths a lot of the rougher gradients on the clouds and trees, especially on the palm trunks.

What I'm really digging is how it can change the colours - maybe not in a real screen-accurate way, but nonetheless. It's neat stuff!

The original image:

A pixel illustration with a limited palette (that is shown with swatches on the right) of yellow sunflowers against a vibrant plain blue background. The darker shadows of the petals seem too dark and green.]

And after:

The same image as above, with a false CRT scanline look added. The too-green shadows now now have a warmer red tone and most of the shading and highlighting is smoothed and rounded out in a pleasing way.

Anyway, I wrote up a little guide on faking the CRT look using Photoshop over at my blog (partly so I can also remember how to do it). It's full of images so I've dropped it on my blog. I hope it is as fun/helpful for others as it was to figure out for me.

Crossposted with Patreon

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