Real Artist Designs Pixel Art in Minecraft • Professionals Play

There’s our castle forest on a mountain it turned out way better than I thought it was going to hey everybody I’m Nick and I’m an animator and pixel art enthusiast so pixel art is the art of kind of like retro graphics the old 8-bit 16-bit graphics in Nintendo and

Super Nintendo pixel is literally a point of color that’s a box and a bunch of them make art and lately there’s been a huge resurgence in pixel arts it’s just a really cool aesthetic I grew up with Nintendo and Super Nintendo so I have like this like nostalgia with the

Pixel style I’m gonna do environment the little wood scene with maybe like a deer or something the big thing about pixel art is you always want to work really general to detail it’s really easy to get into the details super fast but it’s really important to start with like a

Base so making like a giant rectangle and again like when you’re building a Minecraft a lot of it is to me is just like finding the feeling of like which is what feels right I’m just gonna use like all sorts of blocks just to get different variations of color cuz really

In reality like when we’re done with this we’re gonna be like this far away and hopefully it’ll look like a cool something I’m thinking about a force so I’m thinking from dark to light kind of blocking out just some trees and then I’m also gonna think about using this

Darker green start thinking about like like the ground you want it to feel organic so you kind of go a little just kind of random you just kind of feel it out again like I’m sort of just going and feeling where I feel like the ground

Will be and grab some of this dark wood and start kind of putting where I think there’ll be some trees take more tree trunks So we’re just kind of making like a backdrop of trees and so I’m kind of thinking of this as like a canopy of trees and so you can see when I start coming back down you can start seeing how it starts feeling like a landscape with like some trees it’s actually

Looking better than I thought a lot of times I’ll think about first the outline of what I’m creating just kind of go and then I’ll fill it in later a lot of times if you’re just working here and you’re just going you’re just kind of doing something you’ll sue mout you’re

Like oh I made a giant block that’s great so now I wanna start thinking about sky so like I said I want to be kind of jar I don’t want to just be like a bright blue so we’ve got like plants and I’m just gonna have dirt all the way

Down here pixel art it’s whatever feels right I’m gonna use this as if it’s like just little pops of bushes like maybe this tree is growing into a bush little bush here like a cool bush it grew here and again like when you go far back you start seeing how it looks

I need a darker green we use this the wool when it doubt usable except in Minecraft it can catch on fire so watch out it’s kind of starting to feel sort of forced except for this dude right here this obviously could just keep getting elaborated on it’s like it this

Is like a really simple forest scene are you getting more detailed and start thinking about like lighting shading so I can start thinking about like maybe the lights coming down from the from the top down kind of towards the left here if I go back you kind of start seeing

How it looks like there’s light hitting the sides of the trees the nice thing about that then is you can kind of go in here too and you like there’s little bits of trees in here that are getting hit by light it’s kind of like a simple

Forest background if I was gonna spend like hours because a lot of times when I’m doing pixel art I’ll spend like anywhere from like five to ten hours making something really I’ll get detailed if I was doing the trunk of a tree you know like the trunk would

Probably be maybe even five pixels long you know I would haven’t even come out a little bit sometimes I really do think about variation of shape as I’m building this is where you start getting the natural feel of stuff as you’re going in pixel art like a tree trunk that’s sort

Of coming up to a point like it’s the end of a branch or something Yeah so this is kind of looking cool and actually to me it’s starting to look kind of like a mountain so I’m gonna merge it in with this piece here so now we’ve got like a forest it’s gonna go up to this mountaintop and maybe I’ll put

Like a castle up here we’ve got like a night sky I’m gonna use this to start kind of building out the foundation of a castle say like the castles kind of coming out here right now I’m just thinking about silhouette when you’re building a castle you want to think

About like what is your silhouette of the castle what is building it’ll look like so like I’m building this up I want to have a tower so it’s gonna be like one big Tower maybe give it like a roof here I kind of want to have like these

White highlights on it just like spoke thinking about where Windows could be I can highlight the window the idea of like doing this top out I like these half bricks that you can use a Minecraft because you can kind of like create really cool sort of like half type stuff

So you get like the look of a tower like that now I like this tower so now I’m kind of created sort of a visual look that I like so I’m gonna bring that into the rest of this so actually instead of wood here I make the stone slab so it

Just starts feeling it connected and this is like the entryway we’re just gonna kind of mess with the idea of I had like a staircase come down what would it look like I want to make like a cool window so I’m gonna start with doing this so making like a big

Kind of like a grand window I guess maybe for this castle that’s cool certain to get like a cool-looking castle I think it’d be cool to make this kind of like almost like it was a mass so he’s the glass here so I’m gonna do something kind of fun with it

Just to kind of like glass it’s kind of a cool window I think these stairs look a little more cool looking so I’m actually gonna just kind of have out saying I’m kind of giving the feeling of like just thinking about the decoration would look like probably gonna remove

This tree here it’s kind of getting them away I gotta fill this in this is the fun part what I really want to do is now that we’ve got kind of this castle there’s going to be this whole area here I actually want to flesh out and

You some more layers of trees so maybe I’ll do that right now a really really good trick when you’re building stuff out in pixel art is to squint your eyes when you squint your eyes it kind of merges everything together and you can kind of see like what it would look like

When you’re actually zooming out with trees and plants you’re looking for irregular patterns so I’m just kind of going for what feels kind of our regular here but when you zoom out you can see this kind of feeling very tree like put some more of this in just get a

Highlight over here on the edge now the big thing is just feeling mixing this with black I think the last thing I’m gonna do now is add some stars so like I’ve got like this cool castle fill in over here with some mountain all right so we got the mountain and then again I want to just add in real quick I just want to carve

Out of this mountain just kind of like the idea of some other mountains in here so I’m gonna bit of some shading or more than just like one giant shape here and then I’ll use this one to hit a couple highlights maybe yeah this feels a

Little more mountain II and then I want to do some stars so I’m gonna grab snow why not snow sounds perfect white and I’m just gonna go and just start randomly placing stars so see how that looks it might be too big it’s not that bad

Less is more when you’re doing this I’m just kind of randomly going around and I think it’d be kind of cool maybe to have the moon it’s looking pretty good there we go there’s our castle forest on a mountain it turned out way better than I thought it was going to

Especially this like I was just kind of going for it I was just building you know I had like a vague image in my head it really was coming down to me utilizing the idea of like start very broad get more concrete as you go like I

Think the trees turned out great like they look like trees the mountain looks great castles awesome a lot of fun to do pixel art so if you haven’t done it – I would say doing it – it’s it’s limiting in a way but also really kind of creatively satisfying and creating

Something that looks really simple but still has like complexity to it You