Art post: Nakameguro in Spring

I've always struggled with scenery art and am still learning how to do pixel art, so working on my latest art project was a big learning experience. I thought it would be nice to show my work process in a blog post here, to show how the piece progressed to the final product.

I started off with using this photo I'd taken in Nakameguro (Tokyo) as a base:

Next up was to sketch the basic image in Photoshop. Since I took the original photo in winter, I had to use my imagination for how the tress would look when filled with sakura petals during Spring. I also started picking the colors I wanted to use for the color palate, picking some complementary and contrast colors for the pink, since it was the main color.

I then moved the art over to Aseprite (an art program specially for making pixel art) and recreated the sketch as pixel art.

I found I wasn't super happy with the perspective, and wanted it to be more centered, and also have more detail in the canal walls. So I went back into Photoshop and created a perspective grid to use as a reference for fixing that.

Going back into Aesprite, I used the grid as a reference to completely redo the canal walls with bricks. This was more work, but I'm super happy with the improvement and feel they were worth the extra effort!

Next up was to add some animals, to help make the piece feel more real and help give further perspective. I moved back into Photoshop to sketch out a few creatures and pick the colors I wanted to use for them.

Using the sketch as a reference, I added the animals in pixel art.

I thought I was done at this point, but looking it over, I wanted to add some greenery to the top of the walls to helps break it up from the buildings behind it, plus the original photo had some plants growing. I sketched up the plants in Photoshop and picked the colors to use for them.

Going back into Aesprite, I redrew the plants as pixel art, adding in some highlights and shadows (and tweaking the colors a little bit for nicer contrast). Finally done!

Overall, this took a fair amount of time to do, but I learned a lot and definitely feel like I leveled up my art skills a bit! This art will be a cover option for our Japan Sidequest books, and will be going out to our Ramen Tier patrons for our Spring postcard!

-Amanda