Here is the finished game sprite of the marvel villain Dr. Octopus from the Spider-Man series. I’ve kept the style of design loosely based on the Capcom games.

The body of the character was created first with the shading kept fairly optimal and then the tentacles were incorporated at a later stage.

The most difficult part I’ve found was getting the right contour shape on the tentacles but after getting it right it was fairly straight forward.

Tags: Photoshop, Pixel, Sprite.

Here is another character sprite that I’ve just done, It’s the super cheerleader Claire Bennet from the TV show Heroes.

As you can see from the workflow picture, I’ve followed the same process as I did on the previous character.

I’ve noticed half way through that the character was looking slightly masculine so I’ve narrowed some of the anatomy in by 1 pixel to get a more defined feminine shape. More time was spent on the facial features to get it looking convincingly like the character in the show.

I’m rather pleased with the end result, I’ve kept it pretty simple and I think I’ve got the general appearance about right.

Tags: Photoshop, Pixel, Sprite.

Here’s my attempt at creating a game sprite character for a classic beat ’em up style game. I’ve always been a fan of Capcom games especially the Marvel vs Capcom series as I’m also a fan of comics.

I thought it would be cool to create the Rorschach character from the Watchmen comics as he’s quite different and unique looking compared to other comic characters.

I gathered some reference images of the character and decided to have him posed in the general fighting stance that you would see at the beginning of the round.

From what I’ve gathered based on the movie, his fighting style is quite ruthless but intellectual thug-like, so I’d imagine the character hunched forward a little with shoulders high and knees bent. waiting to counter-attack the opponent’s move.

As you can see in the workflow picture, I’ve initially sketched the character in quite roughly (fig.1). I wasn’t happy with the stance so I lowered one of his arm and kept tweaking the lines to get him looking right (fig.2-5).

I didn’t use any reference image for his posture, so there were a few trial and errors until I got something that I was happy with (fig.6). I’d then started cleaning up the outline by making it into single pixel line (fig.7)

Being satisfied with the general outline (fig.8) I’ve began filling in the base colours (fig.9) and after deciding where the light source would be (top left), the shadows were shaded in (fig.10).

Soft shadow were added in to blend the shadow with the base colour to give a much natural transition (fig.11) and then highlights were shaded in to finish it off the lighting (fig.12).

The extra details were added in at a later stage (fig.13-14) such as the ink blot on the mask and all the extra parts on the trench coat, the reason behind this was that it made the first initial stages more clearer and didn’t clutter my focus on the general outline of the character.

I’ve replaced the black outline with a selective outline colour closer to the sprite (fig.15) and then altered the brightness of the outline based on the light source (fig.16). There were some last minute fine tweaking of the general appearance and I’d almost forgot to include the back bottom of the trench coat which I nearly missed out. With an extra touch of detail, I added the stripes on the trousers to finish the character off.

I am really satisfied with the end result, considering this was my first attempt at game character sprite. Improvement that could be made would be more consideration on how it would be animated at the start of the project if it was going to be put in a game, as I may have overdone on the fine details, making it harder to animate later on.

Tags: Photoshop, Pixel, Sprite.

Lately I’ve been inspired by some people’s pixel artwork and felt like making some of my own pixel art.

I decided to create the New Zealand Consulate Building that is featured in the comedy TV show Flight of the Conchords which I’ve recently enjoyed watching.

The artwork was created in Photoshop using the 1px pencil tool. I used a few keyboard shortcuts that helped speed the process such as holding down ALT to alternate from pencil tool to colour picker and since there were a few mirroring involved I decided to assign a shortcut for the Flip horizontal and Flip vertical command.

I’ve really enjoyed creating the image and adding all the little pixel details in. I like the retro look that pixel art achieves with its vibrant colours and bold lines.

Tags: Photoshop, Pixel.