Model Editting - Head - Shadow Urtheart

Welcome to the Model Editing Tutorial. This tutorial will show you how to manipulate an existing Pixel Art piece, add features from other Pixel Art pieces, and modify a piece to give it more of a unique style. Please Note that you should never edit a Pixel Art piece that has been created by another Artist, only use sprites and Pixel Art pieces from within commercially released games. This tutorial has been created by Shadow Urtheart and is copyright to him.

When working on editing an existing Pixel Art, you should always work on each body part separately. Grab the character you want to base your head on, and remove all other body parts. Also make sure that you remove or add a one pixel borderline around it to make it clearer to see the outline.

When editing, this tool will become your best friend, the "Select" tool. Go read the MS Paint Tool tutorial if you don't know what it does. More importantly is to make sure you choose the bottom option out of your two choices for this tool. This will allow you to move non box shaped objects around.

Another good tip when editing is to make sure you have a background colour that will make sure you can edit objects clearly. White is not a good colour to use because Sonic's eyes are also white. So I've chosen a colour I will never use on Sonic, Purple. Make sure that this is also your secondary colour (by either right clicking the colour in the bottom colour pallet or using your or once you have filled the background in, use the "Pick Color" tool and right click the colour. This will no allow you to move objects so that if when you select them with the same colour background as your secondary colour, it will be transparent and won't be picked up.

Let's start by just moving a characters feature; here I will move the eyes so that Sonic is looking forwards. First always, ALWAYS!! make a back up copy of the section you are going to edit. I can not stress how important this is in case you can't make it work and need to go back to your starting position.

Now we need to make the area ready to put new eyes onto, so clear out Sonic's eyes, use the Base colour of his eyes (in this case the lightest grey/white) to fill in the area that his currently occupy, but leave the shading around the edge because that will still be wanted when the eyes are put back in.

Next we want to get the pupils on their own. Make a copy of the set you have, and then get rid of everything except the pupils, and their shading. You can see the finished result.

Take each pupil individually and place it where you want. As you can see although one eye has fit in alright, the other hasn’t his far eye to be exact. We will need to fix that manually.

The reason Sonic's right eye hasn't worked is because before we moved it, you couldn't see the other side. You need to fix this by imitating the colouring style. Here I have just applied the same style as the other eye and put a black boarder around the edge of the green part of the pupil. Bear in mind that you will usually have to fine tweak almost all edits.

Once you are happy and have finalised your edit, you can delete your backup copy, just remember you can't go back after this. If in doubt keep all the spare parts until the end.

The next technique we are going to use is called Fusion and involves putting parts from another character onto your own. First we'll start with Amy, we want to chop her hair off and stick it on Sonic.

First, like with the eyes, we get rid of everything you don't need from Amy. Hopefully you copied the new character in (rather than cut and paste) so you should have a back up on another file. Also remember to get rid of any bold outlines.

Now if we just stuck that on Sonic, it would look weird, why would he have pink hair? So we are going to recolour it blue using Sonic's palette. Take the colours off of Sonic using the "Pick Color" tool and change them accordingly on your new part.

Now all that is left to do is to place the hair on to Sonic, suits him now. If you make a mistake placing the hair, always remember that the undo function (either in the edit menu or by pressing Ctrl+Z) is another trustworthy friend who can help you to go back one step.

Ok for the last part, I'm going to show you how to manipulate existing parts to customise them without the aid of another Pixel Art. In this case we are going to give Sonic a curvier bottom spike. First make backup copy.

Get rid of the stuff you don't need from the Pixel Art, we are going to build a little on top of it.

Now you can change things around. Here I have simply put Sonic's second spike as a base for the new spike, but it only works on one side, you need to construct the rest based on the shape of other spikes. This is a more advanced technique and requires much more practice.

After getting the basic shape right, you will need to colour the rest in to fit the style. This can be done by just following the colours round from the base of the spike.

Once you are happy and finished tweaking it, you can delete the backup. This takes time and practise to make it look correct, so don't be surprised if the first attempt comes out rather badly.

Continue to use all three methods of editing the character until you get the look that you want. Remember that practise is the only way to improve in these skills.