Pixel Art in Illustrator | Illustrator Tutorial

Jumping jiminy jesus. Pixel art in Illustrator.

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Transcript

0:06 · Hello everybody and welcome back to Tip Tap. Now today we're looking at something I'm pretty excited about. It is pixel art within Illustrator. Now you might ask why we're doing pixel art in Illustrator and not Photoshop something like that. It's basically because if you want to do this for like testing what a character or piece of art would look like. It actually makes it completely scalable. You can use it online and stuff and scale it up without losing any quality.

0:29 · Whereas if you did it in a raster-based program like Photoshop, you get blurred pixels and things actually when you reshape it. So Illustrator is actually a really good tool for doing pixel art even though it's technically a vector-based program.

0:42 · So let's just dive right in. I'm going to just pop my witch over there to the side for a moment so I can still see.

0:47 · And I'm going to just quickly open up my swatches panel so I've got all the right colors that I need. So user-defined Tip Tap. There we go. And we'll pop those there just so I've got some colors to work with.

0:57 · Now the first step is to go over to here where your line tool is. And if you hover over the line tool, you can bring up your rectangular grid tool. And then what you want to do is just click simply. Now we've got a canvas here that's 500 pixels by 500 pixels.

bring up your rectangular grid tool

1:13 · Excuse me. So what you want to do is set the default width and height to be the same as the size of your canvas.

set the default width and height

1:22 · And that basically gives you a square that is the size of your canvas which is perfect way to start. And then you want to choose how many dividers you've got.

1:28 · Now if you wanted each one to be a physical pixel, you'd have to put 500 500. Now I think that's a bit too small to work with in this environment. So the way to get that the witch that I've got here is I've actually done 50 and 50 which technically means each box we create is going to be 10 pixels wide.

1:44 · But since it's vector-based, it doesn't really matter. It's just for your viewing ease basically.

use outside rectangle as frame

1:51 · So use outside rectangle as frame, yes, and just hit okay.

1:54 · Basically that gives you a grid. You can't see it because there's nothing applied. But, you want to just quickly hit your center buttons up there. If you can't see them, then you can open your align window and you can do it there under window and then align. Um and then you want to give, just for visibility's sake, if you want to, just give your um boxes here a stroke so that they you can see the externals of that. And then, simply what you want to do is select your grid and hit K on the keyboard, and that brings up the live paint tool. Um and if you just click your grid then, it turns it into a live paint.

select your grid

2:24 · You can see that each one of these boxes uh is now a pixel. And simply what you need to do is choose a color and click and draw where you want to go, and it'll paint in those pixels. Now, you may think that's the end of the tutorial, um but it's not. To actually extract this later on, you need to do a few different things. So, um don't leave just yet thinking that that's the end.

2:43 · Um it's not, it's just the beginning, unfortunately. Um so, say if we want to recreate this witch or do something um that's kind of like that. What you need to do is basically choose your color and make sure you're just painting with K, um which is the uh the live paint tool. And that way, it'll just automatically apply itself to each one of these pixel boxes. So, let's for example, say if we can just recreate this witch. So, we'll draw the hat, maybe.

3:08 · Um maybe coming off like this.

3:13 · Just going to do this bit quickly.

3:15 · Um like that.

3:18 · And then, how do they sort of comes along like this? Oops. Uh and here's the thing, I I don't want that pixel anymore. So, you need to do is select nothing uh in your um eyedropper, and then just click again and it'll remove that pixel. And then, if you want to, you can just go back to your palette and click things like that and collect it back up again. Now, I'm just going to quickly fast forward through this process because you don't need me to tell you how to do pixel art if you're here. You basically click, you draw. If it looks good, great. If it looks bad, too bad, basically.

3:47 · Um but yeah, I'll fast forward this and I'll see you on the other side.

4:17 · Okay, and welcome back. Now, this one's a bit sloppy, but it's cuz I'm rushed to do it. Um and then actually I think I shrunk this one down previously. As you can see, the pixels in here are actually a bit smaller than the others. So, I'll show you how to do that later as well.

4:28 · But say now you're happy with this uh design that you've done here, your little pixel art piece of whatever you're doing. Um the next step is to right-click and ungroup. Now, they'll look like that hasn't actually done anything, um but it has. Trust me. Uh you need to then go up to object um and live paint and then expand. Um and then once you've done that, it actually is like reduced those into the individual lines, if that makes sense. Then you just go to Pathfinder and hit divide. Um and you'll see that it sort of fills out these boxes away from the lines, okay?

5:02 · And the next step is just to grab your magic wand tool, select the boxes around, and hit delete. And that leaves you with just the pixel art, um which is still grouped together, which is great.

5:10 · So, then all you can do is just place it over your other piece and shrink it down. And there you go. You've got two bits of pixel art um of the same character in different states of existence, if that makes sense. Um now, that's pretty much it.

5:24 · That's all there is to the tutorial.

5:25 · It's fairly simple. It's pretty fun way to do it, actually.

5:28 · Um so, again, those last steps were just right-click, ungroup, object, live paint, expand, Pathfinder, divide, and then magic wand, delete. That's all there is to it. Um and then you've got some really great pixel art, which is completely scalable um inside Illustrator. So, you can have a super big witch next to super small witch. And this is works really well for sort of like character sheets, pose sheets, things like that, working out what you want your character to look like. And cool. So, I hope you learned something and enjoyed that. If you didn't, I'm sorry. If you did, then great, perfect.

6:01 · That's what I intended. I guess I'll see you next time then. Goodbye.

6:06 · Remember to subscribe for more tips, tricks, and tutorials. Thanks for watching.