00:00Welcome! In this lesson I will show you how to use Piskal. Piskal is a free online
00:06tool available for pixel art specifically. It's really nice you can
00:11even download it as a desktop version it will work on Windows, OS X and Linux so
00:17it will work pretty much everywhere. It can also be used in the
00:22browser itself so if you have like a Chrome you can just go in and create
00:27whatever you want. You can even sign in with your Google account if you want a
00:33if you want to have an account over here but it's not necessary if you want to
00:38just practice. Let me show you how you can start. Well simply click create sprite and
00:43here we go. First I will go over these tools. First one is the pen tool which
00:49is self-explanatory. You use it to create our pixel art. This is the main one that
00:54you will be using. Next one on the list is our mirror pen. Whenever we draw
01:00something it mirrors it on the other side of the image. We have the paint bucket
01:06tool which fills in a closed area so if I have closed area like so and I want to
01:13paint only the inside or the outside I can certainly do so. We have the paint all
01:20pixels of the same color. This means when you draw different colors on canvas and
01:28if we have few different ones or even one it doesn't matter and if we use this tool
01:33we can easily replace a color on the entire canvas just like so. Very easy, very
01:39quick and very very useful for switching color palettes on big images. Next one is
01:45the eraser tool. Quite easy, it erases stuff. Next one is the stroke tool. This is
01:52like a straight line tool so if you hold your mouse button you can create a
01:57straight line from point A to point B. Very nice. Next is the rectangle tool. Now if
02:05you are interested in any shortcuts to any of these tools just hover over them and
02:10you will be also given an extra option when it comes to using that tool. For
02:16example if I hover over my rectangle tool I can create rectangles but if I
02:23hold shift you can see it will keep one to one ratio meaning it will create a
02:27square always. Very nice. Same thing applies to circle tool. This is ellipse tool
02:34but if you hold shift it will always create a rounded circle. Next we have the
02:41move tool. Move tool is used well to move things so you can move your well image
02:50around or the part of the image. Next one is the shape selection. Very useful
02:55because you can select a certain part of your image. Allow me to give you an
03:03example. So if I paint everything completely in black like so and I
03:19create a certain shape with our pen tool like this one. I can use this shape
03:26selection to select this entire piece. Click ctrl c to copy. I can go over on a
03:36new frame and you can already see this shape is ready to be pasted in and just
03:40like that we have our object over here. Now each frame you can see it
03:46automatically replicates it. I will get to animation in just a few moments. Moving on
03:52we have the rectangle selection. Again this is used for selecting certain parts of
03:58the image. So you can see this light blue tone which indicates what is the
04:04selection part. And again it's quite nice if you want to copy pastings onto another
04:10layer like so. Really really useful. Next one is the lasso selection tool. It does the
04:17same thing but you can create custom shapes as you can see for the selection. We
04:23have the lighten tool which we use to lighten up colors if you can see how it
04:29works. I highly suggest you to evade this one. Don't use it. Really really not need
04:36it. If you want to lighten colors use your color palette to do so. Deterring tool
04:41again this one paints only like if you can see only the second pixel. If I actually use
04:51another color you can see it only paints every other pixel. This is 50 by 50 ratio. It's quite
05:00nice but again not something that you should overuse. And we have the color picker which we
05:06use to pick a certain color on our canvas very easily and very quickly. As you can
05:14see over here we have our color tool. Once you click it you can have the hue wheel on
05:19the side and you have the saturation and values over here. Very very nice. Now when it
05:29comes to creating animations you can probably see that over here we have frames.
05:36Each and every frame is a new animation. So let me go over to the default one and I
05:42will use my pen tool to create a straight line. You can look over here and zoom in
05:52if you want to to our animation. Each and every new frame we get another effect as you
06:02can see. If I add another frame I can move in more and each and every frame you can see
06:08that we can very easily make an animation. So each and every frame over here is an
06:14animation overall. You can decrease and increase the speed in which our animation
06:20is going. You can usually keep it to 12 frames per second. You might want to
06:25decrease it up to 4 frames per second. It all depends. To the maximum 24. 24 frames
06:31per seconds are used in traditional 2d animation so it's probably not something
06:36that you should be using for pixel art unless you are going for extremely high
06:40resolution. Here you can see the palettes and it automatically finds colors on your
06:47canvas and you can see it adds them. If I add a blue to my canvas it will
06:53automatically add blue over here. Which is again quite useful and you can create
06:58new palettes by going over here. So what do we have? Well if I want to add a new
07:06color I can simply click plus and if I want to edit certain color I can click on
07:11it and change it like so. I can save it and now you can see I have my new color
07:17palette. Let's create palette new color palette very easily. You can even import
07:23one if you already have your own or you want to use like 8 bit color palettes and
07:29whatnot. So I can create a few different colors. I can create blue, I can create
07:35light blue, I might even go a bit lighter. We can go over to the green and then for the
07:44last one you can go even to the yellow. And if I click save we have our color
07:49palette ready to be used. Really awesome. Okay what are the other tools we have over
07:56here? Well we have the transform tool and we have the layers. These are very
08:02important because layers are essentially well you can use them to create to stack
08:08things on top of each other. So if we have two layers for example you can see
08:16the bottom one and as soon as we click on the top one the bottom one becomes a bit
08:20transparent so we can essentially draw on top of it but you can see in our
08:27animation let me slow it down that it still appears over here because the current
08:36layer that you are working on has the full transparency and any below it are
08:40in lower transparency. Very useful for animating because when you have both layers
08:46and frames on separate files you can animate really easily. For example in
08:51Photoshop even though it is expensive software you don't have this option.
08:57Alright what do we have else? Well we have the transform tool which is flip
09:02vertically or horizontally if you hold alt. Extremely useful when you are creating
09:10characters so you can make sure their proportions are correct. You have the
09:17rotation tool again really really useful. You can clone the current layer to all
09:23frames so if you want to clone this layer too so this blue part to our all layers
09:30you can see it already apply them. If I undo it you can see it only appears on one
09:36and then we have aligned image to center meaning this layer will be aligned to the
09:41center of this image. Those are the basics of how to actually use Piscale. If you
09:47want to save your work you can click over here save. You can resize the
09:52drawing area if 32 by 32 pixels is not enough or any starting point you can
09:58simply go and resize it so you can increase and decrease the canvas if it
10:02needs be and you can export it as a sprite sheet GIF or GIF or even as an image.
10:07You can even import existing image or GIF or any Piscale other file. So if you
10:13save this file by default you can always reopen it later on. Okay what are the pros
10:20of this software? Well first of all it's free. Second you can access it from pretty
10:26much anywhere because it is browser based as well. Third it's especially made for
10:32pixel art. You also have layers and frames for animation available. Those three are
10:39the main ones. What is the cons? Well the cons are you don't have a tiling system
10:45like pixel edit has and you don't have the advanced options like pixel perfect that
10:51you have in a sprite but overall if you are picking a free software Piscale will
10:57be more than enough really for let's say if you want the pen tool to be bigger you
11:03can simply increase this size really if you want free software Piscale is the
11:10one to go that's all I have to say about it. This is it for this lesson I will see
11:15you in the next one.
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