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How to make semi-realistic pixel art style trees!


BlastWave

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Oh my goodness - I am really blown away with your latest uploads and this tutorial is very illuminating.  I'm gonna give it try asap :D.

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How I made Jennifer & Halle in Paint.net

My Gallery | My Deviant Art

"Rescuing one animal may not change the world, but for that animal their world is changed forever!" anon.

 
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Informative tutorial - thank you!
(and apologies for not commenting on your excellent gallery thread yet)

 

Some thoughts (not criticisms!)
1. Do use the reseed button in Dryad at stage 1 to get a tree of approximately the right shape. Reducing the deviation angles can also help with low hanging branches.
2. If you leave the tree as an 'object' (on a transparent background) you could use my Object Bevel plugin to help with the shading.
   If that shading is too abrupt, 'OverBlur' can soften it whilst retaining the object edges.
3. Personally I always avoid merging objects down onto opaque layers. Your shading technique should still work by selecting the transparent areas and inverting the selection.

 

... Just thoughts. Clearly written tutorial with great results as is!;)

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Red ochre Plugin pack.............. Diabolical Drawings ................Real Paintings

 

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Wow! Impressed = me.  Thank you for posting this tutorial BlastWave!

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7 hours ago, BlastWave said:

I usually do this process by hand in Microsoft Paint with the spray tool and use 1-3 shades

You can use my Brush Factory plugin for that and simplify the process a lot. I know the UI is poor, so I'll show everyone how.

 

bBaiiMz.png

1. Set brush color.

2. Reduce brush size for 1-pixel strokes.

3. These are the spray options. Maybe I should rename them horizontal spray, vertical spray.

4. "Min" reduces the greenness randomly and "Max" increases it randomly. If the color is set to pure green, min/max will increase and decrease the brightness per-stroke.
So you don't have to import it into paint anymore, and you can use other shapes / brush sizes as you please. :)

 

For Cleanup / Coloring

If all that noise is made on a separate layer, you can select the whitespace first and hit Ctrl + I to invert the selection instead.

Edited by Joshua Lamusga
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Most excellent tutorial. Talk about details. Followed you every step of the way and learned several new things about shading and using noise. Thank you for your effort in describing exactly how you accomplished your artwork. Now I understand your gifs a little more too. Looking forward to seeing another one if you have the time. And as always - a sample of what I came up with after several attempts. No enhancements on this one - but I did take some artistic creativity along the way.

 

tree.png

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Thank you very much @BlastWave for this tutorial, which is really informative and thanks for taking the time to do it B).  I too learned something new about using the selection tools like that. 

 

brDHQ9F.png

 

 

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30b8T8B.gif

How I made Jennifer & Halle in Paint.net

My Gallery | My Deviant Art

"Rescuing one animal may not change the world, but for that animal their world is changed forever!" anon.

 
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On 5/11/2017 at 2:03 PM, Pixey said:

Oh my goodness - I am really blown away with your latest uploads and this tutorial is very illuminating.  I'm gonna give it try asap :D.

 

On 5/11/2017 at 2:42 PM, Woodsy said:

Thank you so much for your well laid out tut! I'll definitely be using it in the future!

 

Thank you Pixey and Woodsy! I'm glad you guys like it. :)

 

On 5/11/2017 at 5:52 PM, Red ochre said:

Informative tutorial - thank you!
(and apologies for not commenting on your excellent gallery thread yet)

 

Some thoughts (not criticisms!)
1. Do use the reseed button in Dryad at stage 1 to get a tree of approximately the right shape. Reducing the deviation angles can also help with low hanging branches.
2. If you leave the tree as an 'object' (on a transparent background) you could use my Object Bevel plugin to help with the shading.
   If that shading is too abrupt, 'OverBlur' can soften it whilst retaining the object edges.
3. Personally I always avoid merging objects down onto opaque layers. Your shading technique should still work by selecting the transparent areas and inverting the selection.

 

... Just thoughts. Clearly written tutorial with great results as is!;)

 

Thank you for the thoughts, Red Ochre!

 

I'm going to test out your Object Bevel plugin for this and OverBlur, it'll probably work better.

 

On 5/11/2017 at 6:15 PM, Ego Eram Reputo said:

Wow! Impressed = me.  Thank you for posting this tutorial BlastWave!

 

Thanks Ego Eram! :)

 

On 5/11/2017 at 9:10 PM, Joshua Lamusga said:

You can use my Brush Factory plugin for that and simplify the process a lot. I know the UI is poor, so I'll show everyone how.

 

bBaiiMz.png

1. Set brush color.

2. Reduce brush size for 1-pixel strokes.

3. These are the spray options. Maybe I should rename them horizontal spray, vertical spray.

4. "Min" reduces the greenness randomly and "Max" increases it randomly. If the color is set to pure green, min/max will increase and decrease the brightness per-stroke.
So you don't have to import it into paint anymore, and you can use other shapes / brush sizes as you please. :)

 

For Cleanup / Coloring

If all that noise is made on a separate layer, you can select the whitespace first and hit Ctrl + I to invert the selection instead.

 

Ooh, I'm definitely going to try this! Thanks Joshua !

 

7 hours ago, AndrewDavid said:

Most excellent tutorial. Talk about details. Followed you every step of the way and learned several new things about shading and using noise. Thank you for your effort in describing exactly how you accomplished your artwork. Now I understand your gifs a little more too. Looking forward to seeing another one if you have the time. And as always - a sample of what I came up with after several attempts. No enhancements on this one - but I did take some artistic creativity along the way.

 

tree.png

 

Wow, beautiful tree Andrew! It looks great. :)

 

40 minutes ago, Pixey said:

Thank you very much @BlastWave for this tutorial, which is really informative and thanks for taking the time to do it B).  I too learned something new about using the selection tools like that. 

 

brDHQ9F.png

 

 

You're welcome Pixey! Excellent tree, I love the bird. :)

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