2D Game Art Creation
A Project of Two Dimensions
As always, the first things to do is compile reference material! Look at how other games and artists handle these projects. When it comes to hand painting sprites, here were a few of my favorite bookmarks
www.kennethfejer.comt
www.madpxl.com
www.itchstudios.com
Low end art has to pop while not distracting from the game play. Palette choices for intractable or navigable surfaces versus background environment is very useful. Palette for midtone, shadows and highlights for each material type presented for unique zones. For example, wood, stone, metal, etc. Now, some artists can pick colors and go to town. This next section isn't so much for them. Technique was designed so that a younger artist can create and learn their art direction through consistent production methods.
1. Laying Everything Out
Layout the environment in Silhouette form. This could be the entire area or a mock screenshot. The idea here is to get an exact on screen representation of what the user will see. These silhouettes should be a solid color to represent their midtone palette (as discussed above).
Besides presenting an accurate end results of your project, you'll have a visual reference of when reusing a stone, tree or building is ok without looking repetitive. Additionally, you can then break it all up into organized layers in photoshop of each asset. You now know everything you need in an area, and can begin the artistic assault on you area.
To keep things simple, I'll be creating a basic rock sprite with these steps.
2. Greyscale Painting
Paint everything in black and white. Make full use of the 0 to 100 brightness range. Helpful tools in ensuring this are Levels, Histogram window, Contrast, Equalize and so on. Working in this method will allow you to dodge and burn all you want, but I still prefer a paint brush switching between black and white.
The silhouettes are kept as base layer masks for ctrl+click to keep our painting clean. This is your all important MASK layer. Create a mask layer for any other material presented per sprite.
3. Palette
Assign a midtone, shadow and highlight color for every material Pure black is not a shadow color neither is white a highlight color. This is your opportunity to do very exciting things artistically with your work such as deep purple for shadows and highlights that reflect the sky color. As long as it's consistent all around around looks cool. You can make very exciting things with color choice alone.
4. Coloring with Gradient Map
Using a mask to select the area you want to color, go to Gradient Map. There are three color defaults gradient maps that are good to build off of. Select color palette of shadow, midtone and highlights for that material. Getting the placement on the sliders correct will take a bit of eye-balling. Once it looks right, SAVE your gradient! Now you can select all of your silhouette masks for everything of that material, and load the gradient map. I suggest going a bit more asset to asset at first to ensure consistency of your original black and white painting.
 
Gradient Maps are very powerful, and can allow you to smoothly transition between your palette or do something more like toon shading. They keep work clean, colorful and consistent. I've used technique to do full portable game environments speedy and efficiently as well as mass palette swap assets for elemental variations.
Here's a couple of hand painted texture examples using custom brushes, masks and gradient maps to create them from scratch.
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