Week 352 | My Splinterlands Art Contest Entry | Anyu Huntswoman

My attempt at the Anyu Huntswoman in pixel art animation.

Hi everyone!

I've been meaning to get back into pixel art for a while... I have so many ideas of pixel art scenes I want to create... but there is so much for me to learn (colour theory, body movement, biology, animation, etc etc) that it often feels way too overwhelming to start.

Like so many people... I just want to be good(ish) immediately.

I know that I need to learn to enjoy the learning process... but I'm nowhere near that point yet. I know I need to put in maybe hundreds of hours before I can create something fun just by doodling.

I'm going to try and play with the Splinterlands art contests as a way to motivate myself to create something each week.

My initial thought is that I wanted to create a pixel art animation of Blazebeard Merc charging into battle with flames ablazing...

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Unfortunately, it got really hard really quickly. I can imagine it in my head, similar to the red viking from The Lost Vikings but I got very overwhelmed by the running animation... so many one day.

https://oldgameshelf.com/_next/image?url=%2Froms%2Fsega-genesis%2FThe%20Lost%20Vikings%2Fimages%2FTechno%20level.webp&w=256&q=75

Instead I had to learn how to animate a pixel art character running... to which I found this tutorial from Slynyrd:

It took me so long... but I basically copied, pixel by pixel this running guy. Here is my version:

Weirdly... I think my version is one pixel shorter than the tutorial, and I cannot figure out where.... but I think my version looks good enough, you can tell it's a guy running and I'm happy with how smooth the animation is.

To get a smooth running animation for Splinterlands, I basically wanted to go over the top of this tutorial character, putting the limbs in the same place.

I wanted to do a Conclave Arcana character... but honestly, there aren't that many humans...

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Of these, I could see Anyu Huntswoman's sprinting into battle with her long spear...

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It's legitimately not a card I play with that often, I tend to bring in the Silverblade Fighter for that extra protection...

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But anyway, the Silverblade Fighter is old news, I wanted to animate a Conclave Arcana character... get out of here elf!

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I honestly love that the Splinterlands team included the full art of each character in the Lore tab... here is the Anyu Huntswoman in all her glory...

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The running animation tutorial is pretty low resolution, so I couldn't really get the features I wanted in... I intend to do a bigger version of this to add a bit more character in. The actually running animation looks more like a jog than a charge into battle... so there's a lot I'd like to work on in the future.

For the moment though, I basically picked the first image in the 8 frame run cycle and adapted the character.

I'm using Aseprite.

I added in a legend of the colours I wanted to use in the top right hand corner, and some guidelines similar to the tutorial... they helped a lot.

In the animation process, I found it super important to keep the arms and legs a slightly different colour (ie, the limbs further away from the eye are slightly darker) so that we can keep track of the movement.

Once I was happy with the first image, I basically copied the colours and trim of the first image over all the frames.

I had separated the individual limbs onto separate layers, which really helped a lot when I copied and pasted from previous frames.

The finished product is okay...

But obviously very tiny...
I think once I establish my style I'd like to create a whole animated Splinterlands battle scene.

Here it is at 400%:

This honestly took so long, but I'm happy with the outcome. I think the next version will be much harder to animate as I try to make it a little bigger. I'll then have to really keep track of how each limb should look in each frame.

Thanks for reading!