New less Zelda like trees! And tutorial on how I did them. news - Adventure Craft

The trees in Adventure Craft are similar to the trees in the Zelda game "The Minish Cap". Before I started working on the art for Adventure Craft I looked at a lot of top down RPG's and I found that the art for The Minish Cap was quite simple and beautiful and I was inspired by that.

Since I have been working so much on the game's environment I decided that today would be a good day to take what I have learned about pixel art so far and redo the tree that I had originally drawn.

Here is the new version of the Adventure Craft standard tree next to the old art asset.

Here is the process that I went through drawing the new trees.

The first thing I do is lay down some flat color shapes before I start adding any detail. I do this a lot when drawing pixel art to get a good silhouette before I get into adding details. This method works very well also when drawing characters. Also I wanted to make sure that the tree had the correct aspect as The Minish cap is much more "top down" than Adventure Craft.

Once I was satisfied with the shape of the new tree, the next thing I did was set up some simple shading for the tree to be a foundation for the details.

I put this version of the tree into the game engine and decided to change the shading a little bit. Although this change looks very subtle the tree looked better against the grass of the biome that it exists in with the second set of color.

After settling on the colors of the shading I began carefully setting up the details. I used a dark color to start forming the shape of the leaves of the tree starting from the bottom and working my way up.

After getting the top of the tree separated into distinct leaves, I painted across the darker shading of the bottom of the tree with some lighter leaves and began adding highlights to give them some more volume and make them look less flat.

I them added even more highlights and increased the darkness of some of the pixels to really make the leaves feel fluffy and bright. I typically use a color range of about 5 to 6 colors for the base of an object this size and then use a very bright light and a very dark dark for contrast.

Once I was happy with the leaves of the tree I decided that I wanted to change the trunk a little bit. And adjust its base color.

After that I shaded the trunk and added a two pixel shadow so that it would look better sitting on the grass. And here is the final new tree!