Lean's Graphics Gallery: Star Wars Model Kit Comps

[shadowgrin]

Purple drank Lean! OMG!

[Lean]

I. Was. Not. Aware.

[Lean]

So as posted on the steam thread, a former student of mine suddenly added me on his Facebook friends list to ask for another favor. This time a poster for a university-made movie:

Base photo (not stolen):



Final product:



Surprisingly I was able to do the color balancing-thing properly.

Anyway, as always -- this thing is not paid.

[shadowgrin]

man liner = emo or ghey or both?
Discuss!

[Jackal]

That bitch has some wet panties. That look...

[Lean]

I take it that you looked for that girl in some social networking site?

man liner = emo or ghey or both?
Discuss!

Both?

[Lean]

[deihatein]

Cool

[c0nr4d]

Nice, Leano...he looks so unsure of repping his country

[Lean]

Yep, that's exactly how I thought when I made that up. That is going to be part of a website of the company I'm in. Some sort of a graphical representation of myself.

[Lean]

Also, a Batman artwork I made up because there was no work last Monday:



I still don't know what to do with this, probably another comic book cover of sorts.

EDIT: It's a big-ass image.

[Lean]

Because I'm a sad man because of an impending shifting schedule here at work.

[theEGG]

any new works sir lean? and new tuts??

[Lean]

Oh, I did a pixel art tutorial but it was posted on Facebook. But I deactivated my Facebook.

[Lean]

So our team of designers decided to be a separate business unit to handle outsourced design work from the US and Australia, and our manager came up with the idea of having a portfolio website with sample works that aren't from any of our clients. She knows that a lot of us in the team (herself included) is very much into Japanese robots. I don't know either, there's something about Japan and their robots. So she suggested to make a mock Flash ad of one of Japan's most popular mech franchises Gundam, and I took over the task.

So after showing her the storyboard of the sample banner, she kinda didn't like it because of the logos I placed into it. But whatever, like other hobby sites use the logos from those Japan brands.

Here's what I placed into the storyboard:



Also, the animated banner I made exceeds the usual Google specs.

Here it is animated.

If ever this banner doesn't show up on the final website, at least it's up here.

[shadowgrin]

I deactivated my Facebook.

Where now will I get pictures of Lean for sexy time use?

[Lean]

You have ways, shadow. You have ways.

[Lean]

As part of the last stuff I posted, here's another mock banner:



And here it is animated.

[JBoom_LALALAND]

Cool. Is that GIF or Flash object?

[Lean]

Thanks.

Kinda cheated the sprite. The sprite is made from Photoshop, then I animated them in Flash.

[deihatein]

Damn, that's awesome. I wish I have the creativity and knowledge to do that. Except I'm stuck here doing stupid copy pasting programming.

I want that pixel art tutorial.

[Lean]

Thanks dei. I wish I could have done the sprites on Flash to preserve the vector format instead of Photoshop. On the other hand, I kinda miss programming.

I think I have to reactivate my Facebook account soon enough, to retrieve the pixel tutorial I did.

[[Q]]

I have to reactivate my Facebook account

blasphemy! the facebook gods will smite you

[Lean]

blasphemy! the facebook gods will smite you

Well I just did, retrieved the tutorial and deactivated it again.

So here is SHIT #4 as it appears on Facebook, December 2, 2011:

Greetings of mana and peace from the Philippines. I am back (after more than a year or so) for another mere Photoshop tutorial of doing pixel art.


My poor attempt on doing such.

While not 100% true to the SNES roots, pixel art is something I thought was an easy thing to do. Last year, I applied as a UI designer for Wii games on a gaming company... then they gave me a technical exam which did not test if I could design user interfaces for Wii games -- instead the exam contents were about creating sprites within the game itself.

So we are to do something similar to that. As per old video game console graphics, colors are literally limited. 16 colors were a big deal back in the day. So we do as such. We will use this guy as our poor specimen for this tutorial and turn him into an old video-game sprite:


Yusuke Urameshi, or Eugene for Pinoy diehards

Pinoy people who spent their elementary/high school days rushing back home on Wednesday nights to watch this show would definitely recognize this guy. Imagine plotting him onto a small-sized canvass with a limited pose. Let's say... standing.

Anyway, open Photoshop and create a new document, 100x100 pixels.

On your blank canvass, rename the very first layer "Layer 1" to "line" just for reference purposes.

Use the ever-reliable Pen Tool (shortcut key: P)

(succeeding photos are zoomed in)


The Pen tool is your friend.

...and draw a vector path.



Right-click your mouse and hit "Stroke Path..." and...



...select "Pencil" from the drop-down menu.



And your output should be something like this:



Using your grubby imagination, continue those steps until you come out with something in resemblance to your subject. The Pencil tool renders lines in pixel form. It is not a fine line but a line made of blocks. So anything curved will look like serrated pixels.

We are still working with one layer (the layer "line"), so...





Basically we have the head right here. We can manually brush in the eyes, but if you prefer sheer detail (no pun intended), use the Ellipse Tool.





On the Tool Settings above, follow these settings:



And we'll have something like this:



Continue drawing the rest of the body using vector paths (you may use the Pencil Tool manually without the paths, too) and we'll have something like this:


Here's the canvass zoomed in.


Here's the canvass at 100%.

Now we go on and color this guy. Create a new layer underneath the line layer (Layer > New > Layer...) (shortcut key CTRL + Shift + N) and name the layer "color".



By strict SNES cartridge limitations, we have a max of 16 colors to be used (of course I'm joking). Use the Eyedropper tool (shortcut key: I) and pick the colors from our base photo.

Remember to use the Pencil tool and "paint in" the colors on the "color" layer that should still be under the "line" layer.



Colored Yusuke's head and hands, which was modified to have his Rei Gun raised. His eyes are now also facing towards the front. I adjusted the lines using the Eraser tool (shortcut key: E) and have it set into "Block" and erase the lines. I then drew the new lines using the Pencil tool.

Continue on with the rest of the sprite. You may add shading as you please.


Added shadows and highlights with the colors based from the reference photo above.




The Yusuke sprite at 100%

Coincidentally, what I have for the finished product only has sixteen colors in it including black and white.



Give it a background, and we're all done.



...and there you have it. A pixel sprite that may not be true to the old console ways (there were 32x64 sprites back then) but the effect is something similar. Our canvass at 100x100 is something you can consider as HD.

Thanks for reading. Off to Skyrim we go.

*insert MIDI music here*

Note that most of the things I placed there are based on factual fiction

[deihatein]