Spriting Guide: Scratches
Written by Silverwing.
Yes... that's right, you are now at the most advanced level of sprites. You will not be editting sprites anymore; instead, you will create your own. There's only so much that this guide can really teach you, since the rules of scratching are really loose and you can basically do anything you want since, after all, it is your own sprite you are going to create in the end. Your basically off on your own from here, but a live example of a scratch will definitely boost your moral, methinks.Scratching Rules
Like I said, there aren't really any concrete rules to scratching. Most of it is just common sense.As stated way back in the Introduction to Spriting page, never use the anti-aliasing tool when making your outlines. Auto anti-aliasing will disqualify you if you are in a compitition, since scratching is making an image "pixel by pixel". Either you ant-alias by hand or you don't do it at all. Paint doesn't have this tool so you don't need t worry about that.
Also, like the anti-aliasing rule, never use the airbrush/paint brush/anything that produces smooth shades. Again, it would be breaking the rules to pixel art. It'll also ruin the whole point of making scratches if you're going to act like it was a regular drawing anyway. Remember, the only thing that seperates pixel art from regular art is that you have to make everything one pixel at a time.
This is probably the most common mistake in amateur scratching: the whole outline is made by the curve tool. Using the curve tool (without anti-aliasing of course) is not really considered "breaking" the rules of pixel art, but it does make your sprite look rather horrendous. If your whole sprite is made by automatic tools like circle, squares, polygons it would look like a drawing, not a sprite. You'll see what I mean when you run into somebody that made this mistake, which is probably 100% guaranteed.
The bottom line is, ANYTHING (besides using the fill bucket tool) that isn't made one pixel at a time will most likely NOT be allowed.
Making Scratches
Okay, first thing's first: the outline. Needless to say, READ THE OUTLINING GUIDE BEFORE EVER ATTEMPTING THIS. I'll make a custom Dragonair sprite for our example. Get the basic outline done:
Now thin out the outline on the body and fix up all those unsmooth curves that we have. There's no "real" way to do this, just get rid of the pixel clusters and use your judgement to tell whether or not it looks right. So here's our outline so far:
Ah, much better, isn't it? Now that the main part is over, add the little details like Dragonair's horn and crystal balls attached to its neck and tail.
Okay, we got the hardest part of the scratch done. Now its time for the coloring. You should've learned all there is to shading in the Pixel Overs lesson, so this part shouldn't be hard. Just do exactly the same thing that you did with the pixel overs.
Done! ^-^ Anti-alias it if you want, but if you want to make your sprite look official, don't. As soon as you've made one scratch, you'll want to make another one, so good luck on that. After you've mastered scratches, you'd find out that making sprites isn't good enough and you'll eventually move on to scenes and pictures. Congratulations, you are now considered as an expert spriter. ^________^
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Custom brushes on the images downloaded from Brusheezy.
