Perihelion
Sponsor
Peri's Tree Walkthrough
Let me say one thing first: this isn't a tutorial. The aim of this walkthrough isn't to teach you how to draw trees exactly like meâ€â€it's to give you some insight into how I do pixel art. I often find it useful to look at how other artists approach their work, and plus it's interesting, so to that end, I've compiled some screenshots of a WIP and briefly explained what I do at each step. I strongly encourage you not to try to mimic what I do exactly but rather to get whatever it is you can from this and make it your own. So with that in mind, this isn't really geared towards total beginners, but of course I'll be happy if you find it helpful.
Basically, I blob stuff on and poke at it till it works right. Unless it's something tiny like a sprite or I'm working from a template, I can't do art by drawing perfect outlines and then filling them in. I tend to do this instead:
A More Detailed Explanation
Sketched out the skeleton of the tree. You'll notice it's not very clean; I just scribbled it on with the mouse. I find that my art turns out best when I first rough in the structure of the object I'm trying to portray, and I tend to do this with everything. My avatar, for example, started as a stick person. It's easier to fix things like proportions when you're working with a scribble instead of a beautifully shaded work of art or whatever. In fact, this is actually more detailed than my initial sketches generally are, and I also refined it a little bit from the initial scribble. I didn't save an image of that, though, so oh well.
Just colored it in, not too exciting. This is a medium-dark shade in the wood palette I'm using.
Blobbed in the basic shapes of the leaf clusters. I tried to concentrate around the branches and get a good distribution while still leaving some room for the trunk to show through.
Blobbed in the basic shape of the leaves on the other side of the tree, because of course you aren't going to have huge holes in the foliage like that.
Started defining the major highlight areas I intend going to work with. I'm not too worried about getting it perfect at this point; I just want to figure out the approximate shapes of the leaf clusters and also determine what main base colors I'm going to use where. I decided the tree should be lighter towards the top, so the bright color is concentrated up there.
Started refining the shapes of the leaf clusters. At this point, it's still pretty random; I'm just making them make more random, natural shapes. My eventual goal is to have small, uneven bubble-type things to mimic bunches of leaves.
Kept refining and added some highlights. This is still rough, but I'm starting to pay more attention to the shapes of the leaves and the details I want to end up with. I also stuck a bit of shadow on the trunk while I was at it.
This is the poking until it looks right part. I kept refining the leaves until I had more or less what I wanted to end up with, adding more highlights and shadows and drawing a few small leaf clusters between the big ones. It's just more of what I was doing beforeâ€â€splitting the big highlights up into smaller clusters and highlighting the clusters. One point to note is that I have bright highlights in areas I'd originally designated as dark, but that's okay because they're a lot sparser than they are in the bright areas; having a few speckles of highlight around makes it look more three-dimensional. I also added some dark purple shading around the trunk and under the leaf clusters.
Tweaked the leaves a bit more and shaded the trunk. Basically I went over everything again and made sure all the pixels were more or less in the right place, smoothing stuff out and tweaking lighting and details where necessary.
I just noticed that the top of the tree is cut off in most of those images, but I'm too lazy/busy to fix it now, so maybe later.