PIXEL ART TUTORIAL 2

Here we will continue the chubby borb sprite and extend it to have a pretty cool-looking personalized background!

There might be a few mistakes I make, but don't worry, practice makes better.

Below is the same borb sprite from the first tutorial.

We'll start by making a new layer and drawing a tree under the chubby borb. Just design any tree-like shape for it (just something you personally like).

Next we'll make some leaves (Note I change the color of them later for more contrast between the borb and the leaves). Like the tree, just draw any leafy-looking shapes for it.

Now we can fill in the background, and pick any color you like (personally I like colors that compliment each other in my style). I did some diagonal streaks in my background for slightly more depth and detail.

Now we can add some leafy details and dither to the leaves. Don't mind the one pixel outside the tree, that's my cursor! I'm not an expert at leaves yet, but still practicing! Note I did a gradient shift for the leafy details. Pretty cool-looking in my opinion.

Next, we can do some tree details. I get my inspiration from van Gogh on how to shape the tree bark. Dither the outer part of the tree with a darker color and the inner bark of the tree with a slightly lighter color than the dither.

I also changed the leaves to a blue color for more contrast between the borb and the tree (just personal preference).

After, I added a hill with a waterfall for the midground. It adds some composition depth and is something I usually add to my miniature pixel paintings!

Now if you remember from the first tutorial, we added some gradient to the borb. Do the same thing to the leaves to add some detail and depth to the shape. I did the same for the midground too.

Now for a big chunk. I've added a diagonal Bayer Matrix 2x2 dither to the background using a darker color than the background itself. Change the bucket tool from No Dithering to Bayer Matrix 2x2 on the top right of Aseprite.

I also did another layer of gradient (Another Bayer Matrix 2x2) to the midground. I've also added some stars for later.

Next, the stars. I dithered the stars with an increasingly more transparent color than the base. I dithered them twice on the outside (where there are no currently drawn star pixels). It adds a nice "Steven Universe" star effect. You can change the transparency of the color by moving the slider on the bottom left (the one with the gray and dark gray pixels).

After, I used Bayer Matrix 2x2 to dithered the leafy shapes, the right of the tree, and the top of the midground. I made the dither on the leaves, tree, and midground's transparency/opacity lower to make it see-through for the details underneath.

We're almost done! Now draw a border using the box tool. I usually prefer to do 2 boxes with a single pixel's width/height apart for a border effect. I also colored one pink and the second one purple for the borb's color scheme.

Now we're basically done! I've changed the color (I used the hue slider in Edit -> Adjustments) of the stars to something else for experimentation and I think this turned out pretty well. I hope you've created something cool too. Thank you for reading my tutorial!

Adjustment 2 — Perfect!