2D art refers to images, drawings, and artwork created in the two dimensions of width and height.
In the modern era of gaming, which is mostly dominated by 3D games, 2D art is still the preferred art style for many developers.
2D art offers unique aesthetics and ease of creation, making it perfect for character design and background art in many games, such as platformers, puzzle games, 2D indie games, and mobile games.
In this post, we will explore the most common 2D art techniques for creating 2D games and how they help transform your game development skills!
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Overview of 2D Art
2D Art involves images of a flat screen with width and height, crafted using various art techniques. Despite 3D art dominance in the animation and gaming industry, 2D art techniques are still leading in platformers, puzzles, and indie games.
Games like Celeste and Stardew Valley showcase the charm of 2D drawing techniques and how digital art and traditional art blend to create visuals for such mobile and retro-style games.
In the following, we will explain some of the fundamental yet overlooked tips to harness this art form for modern games.
1. Sketching and Line Art: Building the Foundation of Game Visuals
Sketching and line art are critical 2D art creation techniques, laying the groundwork for game visuals.
Artists begin with loose concept art sketches to explore character design or background art ideas.
- Sketches capture proportions, poses, or environmental layouts, setting the game’s aesthetic tone. Iterative sketching allows artists to refine ideas, ensuring visuals match the game’s narrative.
- Line art refines these sketches with clean, precise lines, defining shapes and contours. Line thickness is essentially the main factor that conveys depth, with bold lines for foreground and thin lines for distant elements.
This stage aligns the fundamental art with game style, from gritty pixel art to smooth cartoonish digital art.
Tools like Adobe Photoshop or Procreate enhance accuracy in tablet drawing and offer pressure-sensitive strokes, helping artists be as detailed as they wish.
2. Shading, Lighting, and Coloring: Adding Depth and Mood
Shading and lighting transform flat 2D Art into dynamic visuals with 3D-like depth.
- Color theory techniques apply hues to evoke mood; for example, bright colors for lively scenes, darker shades for gloomy scenes.
Even character color palettes are chosen to ensure harmony, with contrast character features guiding player focus to different cues and key scenes. - Shading darkens areas to simulate light falloff, creating volume in character design or props. Techniques like cel-shading create bold, comic-like visuals, popular in games like Cuphead.
- Lighting effects, like highlights or rim lights, suggest light sources, enhancing background art. Artists test lighting under game conditions to maintain clarity across diverse environments.
Digital art tools like Procreate offer brush tools for soft gradients or sharp shadows.
3. Perspective and Composition: Crafting Immersive Game Worlds
Perspective drawing and composition drawing techniques create immersive visuals, vital for storytelling and navigation:
- Perspective drawing adds depth to 2D art, making game worlds feel expansive and believable. One-point or two-point perspective drawing aligns elements to vanishing points, creating realistic scenes.
Isometric perspectives, common in games like Stardew Valley, enhance depth in top-down views. - Composition directs player attention, balancing character design with background art. Techniques like the rule-of-thirds or leading lines emphasize focal points, such as a hero or exit.
Artists plan compositions to support gameplay, ensuring clear paths or interactive objects stand out. Dynamic compositions adapt to camera movements, maintaining coherence in side-scrollers or static scenes.
4. Vector vs. Raster: Selecting the Optimal Art Style
Choosing the right art style that aligns with the game’s tone allows you to extensively captivate audiences despite all the technical constraints.
Vector and raster art vary in some significant and impactful areas:
- Vector art uses resolution-independent shapes, scalable without quality loss, ideal for polished visuals. Whereas raster graphics, like pixel art, rely on pixels, perfect for retro aesthetics or detailed textures.
- Vector suits mobile games needing scalability. Raster excels in nostalgic or intricate digital art.
- Vector art, crafted in Adobe Illustrator, powers sleek games like Monument Valley with clean lines. Raster art, created in Adobe Photoshop, drives pixel-based games like Fez or Celeste.
- Artists consider file size and performance, as raster can be heavier but richer in detail.
Hybrid approaches blend both, using vectors for UI and raster for textured background art.
5. Layering and Brush Tools: Streamlining Digital Art Workflows
- Layering organizes 2D Art elements by separating foreground, midground, and background art. The parallax effect leverages layering through moving distant layers more slowly for a 3D-like depth illusion.
Layers allow artists to tweak elements without altering the whole image, creating a safe medium for non-destructive edits. Advanced layering supports animation, with separate layers for moving parts like limbs or effects.
Artists optimize layer counts to reduce file size, ensuring performance in game engines. - Brush tools in Procreate or Adobe Photoshop mimic traditional art, like watercolor or charcoal. Custom brushes add unique textures, like grass or rust, enhancing character development in video games.
2D art techniques using brushes streamline workflows, enabling rapid iteration and polish.
6. Pixel Art as a 2D Art Technique
Pixel art refers to a 2D art creation technique that involves drawing art by coloring individual pixels in different colors one by one or in batches to create shapes and characters.
Pixel art is an inexpensive and relatively easy technique for creating game art. That is why it is still featured in many indie 2D games. Fez, Celeste, Super Mario, and Stardew Valley are examples of pixel art games.
Artists used programs like Deluxe Paint and devices like Koala Pad to draw pixel art directly inside computer programs. With the introduction of better 2D art software such as Photoshop in the 1990s, this type of art became even more popular.
7. Hand-Drawn Animation and Frame-by-Frame Techniques
Hand-drawn traditional animation involves drawing separate images for different frames in an animated shot.
Hand-drawn animation is a much more challenging and difficult way to create art for 2D games. It is mostly used for animating characters and effects in 2D games.
Consider character animations in a 2D platformer game. This type of animation is often seen in video games that emphasize storytelling.
Cuphead has a similar style to animations created in the golden age of American animation by companies like Walt Disney.
Tools and Software for Creating 2D Game Art
2D game art can be created using a variety of tools and software. Let’s explore the most commonly used tools in a typical 2D art pipeline.
Graphics Tablets
In this digital era of art creation, graphic tablets are one of the most popular tools among 2D artists. These tablets connect to computers and allow artists to draw directly inside computer programs. Wacom is a well-known graphics tablet producer and its products are usually found in all art studios around the world.
Adobe Photoshop
Photoshop is the primary software used in a 2D game art pipeline. It can be used for drawing, editing and painting 2D art. Photoshop is mostly used for hand-drawn or pixel art creation. It is probably the most known graphics tool of all time.
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics software that is used widely in 2D art creation. It is a design program that allows artists to use specialized vector tools such as pens and contour editors to create vector graphics easily.
Toon Boom Harmony
Toon Boom Harmony is a powerful animation tool that allows artists to create complicated 2D vector art. Toon Boom has an advanced node-based rigging system that makes it possible to create feature-quality 2D animation. Toon Boom is mainly used by large game art studios and has been used to create popular TV shows such as Rick and Morty and Final Space. Toon Boom Harmony also has specialized tools for creating hand-drawn frame-by-frame animation.
Aseprite
Aseprite is a popular pixel art and sprite animation tool that is used widely among game developers. Aseprite is a unique tool for pixel artists, as it provides them with advanced features such as onion skinning, layer organization, playback modes, pixel-perfect strokes, shading mode, tiled mode, and many more tools catered specifically to pixel art creation and animation. Aesprite also allows exporting animated GIFs, sprite sheets and texture atlases that are very useful in a pixel art game.
Krita
Krita is a free and open-source 2D painting and animation program used widely for creating 2D game art. Its extensive features like multiple brush types, drawing assistants, stabilizers, texture packs and vector libraries along with being free of charge have made it a popular choice among 2D artists.
Closing Words
2D games have been a popular form of entertainment for the past 40 years.
The nostalgic and retro feel that comes with 2D art takes players to the early days of video games in the 80s and 90s, in spite of the fact that they might not have lived in that era.
Today, 2D artists use more efficient tools and software to create art, enabling them to create high-quality 2D art that bridges the past and modern game eras.
It seems that no matter how advanced or realistic 3D graphics become, 2D games continue to remain a popular and fascinating form of entertainment among gamers all around the world.
