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Isometric Pixel Art Guide Home

Isometric Pixel Art Guide

Chapter 4: Texturing

Texturing your objects and buildings make your pieces more interesting and pleasing to look at. Going for the plain coloured look can be good if you are giving it that cartoonish look, but usually it's a tad boring to look at. A building is usually made of bricks, so why not give it a nice brick texture on its walls. This can be achieved by following this small tutorial below.

Brick Wall

Draw evenly spaced horizontal (iso-horizontal) lines across the side of your wall from top to bottom, using a darker color than the base wall color.

Now you will draw the brick lines by drawing small vertical lines that are staggered evenly across rows. It takes practice before you know where your brick dividing lines should be, but if you're stuck you can zoom in on the example below. You now have a basic brick texture.

To make the texture more brick-like and solid-looking, we'll add highlights to the bricks to make them stand out more. Decide where your light source is, and highlight the part of each brick that the sun would be directly lighting with a lighter color.

Now it's a brick...house.

Grass

A simple method of texturing grass is to do it like the rest of traditional pixel art and painstakingly place each pixel. This will result in a simple texture that will pass casual inspection.

Take the area you'd like to tile with grass.

Begin applying random pixels in a darker green color around your plane. Be as random as you can and only use single pixels.

Directly above each pixel you just placed, place another pixel lighter than the base color, so you have two-tone pixel stacks scattered randomly on your plane. When zoomed out, these will resemble the shading of grass blades.

To further randomize the grass, you can place more mid-tone pixels randomly across the tile.

Glass

Glass is easy enough if you only see reflection or blue, as it's only a matter of a blue fill with a highlight, but the best way to get good-looking transparent glass is to use a graphics package that supports layers with transparency. Once your glass is drawn on its own layer and filled with blue, simply adjust the transparency of the glass layer to your taste.

Creating glass in Microsoft Paint is a bit more difficult, but we can still make it look good without having to make the glass opaque. In order to show items behind the glass, we will need a selection of blues in varying brightness. If you've already detailed the interior view through the window, you just need to draw over the outlines of the furniture and objects inside the window frame with a darker blue color. Once you've filled your objects, fill the rest of the window with a lighter blue, and a highlight can be added over the top. In the example images, you can see the blue palette used to fill the glass.

Dirt & More

The steps used to create a dirt texture is similar to the steps used to make grass, without drawing the highlights. You will just need random pixels of varying brightness of the base dirt color.

Other textures are created in similar ways. The best advice I can give you is to look at real-life textures, or search for images of textures using a search engine. Studying these photographs usually helps you decide what to draw and where your shading and highlights need to be.