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RayBeckham
Stuck in a Nintendo 64.

Age 39, Male

-Stuck in a Nintendo 64-

Joined on 10/9/14

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Still Making Pixel Art in Flash 8 (Sanguine 3)

Posted by RayBeckham - 4 days ago


I had the foresight to mash record several times while drawing some things for Sanguine 3. I was using Windows Game Bar (don't use this) and stitched together 30 second clips that didn't line up (don't do this) to create some time lapses, which i've uploaded on Youtube and will attempt to embed below.


I probably shouldn't be using Windows Game Bar to record stuff. I probably should learn and use different software to draw pixel art. Eh, what can ya do.



I had a lot of fun drawing the dragons. Or wyverns if you're a stickler for fantasy creature taxonomy. I draw the character shape using different colors to keep each part clearly separate. Then, for larger creatures, I use the lasso tool to grab clumps of squares and carve out the shape before adding lines, highlights and detailing. I didn't get any recording of redoing the wings... I went from something feathery to leathery.



The Iron Devil was a bit more vague. The shape keeps changing and I try different ideas out with the legs until I stumble upon the teeny tiny feet look. It's just a lot of experimentation until it looks right (and sometimes it never does). Once again, I didn't clip the final detailing so that's another "finish the owl" moment.



The Blood Fountain! Liquid animations are hard but I had made a liquid graphic in an my old Mario flash game where I had two of the same images on different layers and slightly offset their position, then used a masking element to make one layer appear while hiding the other, animating the mask to slide around, giving the illusion of refraction. And since this is a very small graphic, I just shift it around like so and add some shine on top... works well enough, I think.


Anyways, if there's software out there that's a bit more, ya know, supported for making pixel artwork, i'd like to hear about it. I really like(ed) Flash because of how easy it is to sketch in basic ideas and draw over them, reiterate using keyframes to sometimes revert to a previous version and how easily a head or an arm can be grouped together for easily moving things around.


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Comments

pixel art......in FLASH???? WOAH
also if you wanna know uhh, good program for pixel art?? there's aseprite!!

Thanks, i'll look into it.

I never knew that Pixel art in Flash was even possible.

How could You do that by the way?

I use the shape tool and create a square that's 2.1 by 2.1 pixels wide (2.0 by 2.0 would sometimes show gaps). Then I make sure that the position of those squares are always positioned in multiples of 2 with a +1 offset so it is properly aligned (x:1 y:1 should be aligned in the upper left corner). If I zoom in to 500% and use shift+arrow keys, the squares always move 2 points in any given direction so they stay aligned. If you export the image, make sure to turn off smoothing as it will often fuzzify the art.

Recently, and I have no idea why, but I can't export pixel art as PNGs anymore without getting some kind of error (pixels are sometimes 2x1 size or something). But if I export as a BMP and then convert it to a PNG they stay pixel perfect. If you're exporting a flash project, it's important to break down any shape groups because they ramp up performance cost and shouldn't matter if the art is finalized (which is why I always have a separate art file from my project files, in fact I had to break up my extra art FLAs because they were so big in file size they would crash). In my old flash games I used a mix of vector art and reimported PNGs as I believed that in complex art it might save performance.