Latest Posts by ardouradvice - Page 3

I've had this little idea in my head for a while now, so I decided to sit down and plot it out.

Disclaimer: This isn't meant to be some sort of One-Worksheet-Fits-All situation. This is meant to be a visual representation of some type of story planning you could be doing in order to develop a plot!

Lay down groundwork! (Backstory integral to the beginning of your story.) Build hinges. (Events that hinge on other events and fall down like dominoes) Suspend structures. (Withhold just enough information to make the reader curious, and keep them guessing.)

And hey, is this helps... maybe sit down and write a story! :)

I want to start drawing landscape. Do you have any tips?

Took me a while to answer this (sorry anon)! Drawing landscapes for me are mostly just a matter of doing a few 'art studies' and a bit of imitating life. Here's a brief rundown of my process. I find that I learn best when I see a picture or a reference that really tickles my fancy, like these ones! First image for it's colors, and the second for it's composition.

And then I pull up the dreaded white canvas on start on a rough idea or just start dribbling out the basics: composition, a bit of color, general shapes, etc. If you have a hard time doing general landscapes, don't worry! Imagine breaking it down like this: You layer on some general colors and shapes; don't be afraid to make mistakes, you can always go back to it! Be loose and organic with it at first, we're not striving for detail yet, and just let that brush move freely. And once you got the shapes down, you can go back and forth in the canvas to start detailing. I find that it's best if you really look into how some things are "made". Like for example, how that patch of grass in your reference is made: 'is it layered? does it have some shiny bits in it that I wanna highlight? are the blades of grass sharp enough to individually detail or more clumped up together to just put in a sorta grassy blob?'. Also, don't be afraid to experiment a bit. Try putting some highlights around the edges to make it pop out more, or try putting small changes in the color you're working with; something that's close but still different, so that it compliments each other! Then it's just a matter of going forward with it; see what you like and what you wanna keep and imitate, see what you want to change or maybe just leave out on. Keep on detailing and going until you're happy with it!

This is a really brief rundown and explanation of a process that can be entire unique to each and everyone of us, and takes a bit of time and practice to pull off. But I believe in you! We all start from somewhere, sometime down the line; and that can start right now if you want it to! Goodluck to any artists out there who wanna try out landscapes. It's a fun and comforting process of organic and loose art that breathes in a lot of life in some people, especially me. Twitter | Prints | Ko-Fi | Patreon

Do you have any tips for recreating the Deltarune sprite style?

Hmm... I'm not entirely sure if I've got any 100% full proof tips for the style (nor will I pretend I'm an expert on the style), but I'll give what I can for ya! So, first up, for any given color on a sprite, I'd suggest only using two colors. One brighter highlight, and one darker base/tone. the shading in DR doesn't tend to get super complex, so most of the time having only two tones for a part should work super well. Bonus points if one or both of the colors are then reincorporated into other parts too, like using one section's highlight as a shade for another, or using the same shade for multiple colors.

Second, a few in-between pixels can help give depth to sprites. You ever see those one or two pixels in-between an outline and the base color, and it uses the same color as the shade? Well, those are in-betweens, and while UT and Lightworld style sprites don't tend to use them, the Darkworld sprite tends to have way more of them, and they help distinguish Darkworld sprites. Third, don't be afraid to use a different color than outright black for your character outlines. There are a lot of sprites that use pure black like Lightworld sprites or sprites for Darkners, but if you're making a darkworld sprite for a Lightner, than get a little creative. Use a very dark tint of whatever their main color is, and that'll help them feel like more of a lightner. It's not a hard-n-fast rule (Berdly uses a black outline despite being a lightner), but it's a tool that can be used.

Fourth, use plenty of ref material. Take other DR sprites, compare them to your work, see what might be different, how you could fix it, and just try your best. And finally, remember that DR's stlye isn't perfect, has plenty of imperfections, and that it's ok to go for designs that aren't super consistent. It's part of the charm in my opinion, because even if it's definitely improved since UT, the spritework is still obviously no Metal Slug or anything, and I kinda love it for it. If you've got differences or flaws between your sprite and the official style, just remember that the official DR sprites are also pretty inconsistent, so your problems might not even register as looking wrong. Sometimes it's even fun to embrace a sprite's initial mistake and then turn it into something amazing/fun. And so uh... yeah, there's my tips. Not really sure if it helped all that much, but I hope they do! If I'm being totally honest here, my style's actually more closely based upon the style of the Undertale mod Bits and Pieces, as it's what I originally was mimicking, and it just so happened to be conveniently similar to DR's style. These are a few character sprites that I made in the style of the mod, with these all being the winners of a contest the community had to get NPCs into the mod (and the final two are mine).

I'd also made some sprites in past that were for a game project I was helping out with. It never saw fruition, though the styled was obviously influenced by the Undertale style, but they were different and they were also... well, a little rougher considering I made them when I was just getting into pixel art. I still like them and I don't think I did too bad for at the time, but it definitely doesn't match my current style (plus, the project's kinda dead in the water anyways)

⭐ Pixel Art Fundamentals - Hue Shifting

This technique is not uniquely specific to pixel art, but it's a very common term to hear when starting out watching those "dos and don'ts" videos. So what is hue shifting?

Hue shifting basically means to change the hue when making your shade darker or lighter. In this context, 'hue' = colour!

You may hear 'you need to hue shift more' when getting feedback on your art, but what does that mean really? Here are some examples:

We can see even with just a bit of hue shifting, we have quite a different vibe for each drawing. In warm / daylight settings, no hue shifting can sometimes look a bit muddy or grey.

If we swap the image to grayscale, you can see that they look much the same:

As long as the hue shifted colours have a brightness that makes sense, they usually will work. You can get quite wacky with it.

But is hue shifting always good? Not necessarily.

Below is some of my art where I intentionally didn't hue-shift at all. You can see it gives them an uncanny, digital, or photographic kind of look. As always, techniques are about your intention, or personal style.

I recommend trying different hue shifting methods! I especially love to use a cool blue or teal for the lighter shades.

Thanks for reading and I hope this helped a little! Have fun with it!!

⭐ Read my full pixel art guide here!

tutorial under cut!!

@greyedworlds​

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Keep reading

Hover Notes or ‘Floating Boxes’in Ao3

This is a fun option if you use, for example, phrases in other languages in your story. I often do, and this is a nice way to give translations without having to scroll to the end of the text, or putting them in the starting notes where people have to keep checking back – or where they spoiler the story!

HOWEVER. The drawback is that the floating boxes only work when a ‘mouse’ is ‘hovered’ over the marked text. They do NOT show up on tablet or phone screens, so you’ll still need to put a list of translations in the notes for readers using those devices.

Let’s have an example. 

“Qu’est ce que tu veux?”

Now if you speak French, you might know that means “What do you want?”

But not all of your readers will know that. So, you offer them a translation. And since the boxes don’t appear unless you hover directly above them, I usually add a Beginning Note to the chapter that reads something like this;

‘Hover over italicised foreign language text for translations! (Mobile and tablet users please see the Ending Notes)’

In HTML mode in Ao3, (if you try this in Rich Text mode you will get a horrible mess so don’t) the line with this example would appear as:

<p>“<em>Qu’est ce que tu veux?</em>”</p>

To add the floating box with the translation, you would select the words to be translated (that is, Qu’est ce que tu veux?) and paste in the following HTML.

<span title=“What do you want?”>Qu’est ce que tu veux?</span>

The whole line will now read:

<p>“<em> <span title=“What do you want?”>Qu’est ce que tu veux?</span> </em>”</p>

Review your work, hover over the part that requires translating, and you should see the following:

And you’re done!

I tend to set up a Word doc with all the <span> lines I want to use created in it, and then when the time comes, just copy/paste them into Ao3. Saves lots of time!