#Gary Lucken

[km-2dpixelart]

Researching pixel art

Army of Trolls -

Website created under the influence (and is the portfolio) of artist Gary J Lucken.

This is a website that is made up of a few sections:

Gary, (G) has worked on many games such as Kynseed, which released in 2022, doing the character/creature designs and animations.

Octavi Navarro (arts and games) -

Indie studio that makes games and art.

As you can see, its art section is made up of 'scenes' and there are 61 scenes.

9 games have been made/are in progress of being made.

Derek Yu -

Site that helps people learn pixel art.

It has three tutorials for making pixel art:

Helps teach how to shade sprites, use anti aliasing etc. Shows examples of reworked pixel art before and afters.

Johan Vinet -

Pixel artist that learned it on an Atari 1040STF (with 16 colors). Also a game developer and founder.

Has worked on the 2013 game 'Adventure Time: Explore the Dungeon Because I DON'T KNOW!' as an animator.

[bg2dplatformer]

Research on Artsits

Week 1:

Army Of Trolls:

Armt of trolls is the portfolio of london born, videogame obsessed artist Gary J Lucken. Working from his Studio in Poole, Dorset, UK, surrounded by Japanese toys and piles of old 2D videogames.

There is a lot going on in their work and it is very crowded they use shadows and gradient to make the photo look 3D and they don't use black outlines

They also use an isometric view point for their work.

Octavi Navarro / Pixels huh:

They develop approachable, narrative video games crafted with tons of love

Octavi Navarro is a pixel artist and developer who worked on games like Thimbleweed Park and Photographs.

Susanna Granell takes care of the studio's business side, social media, and writing. She loves coffee.

Their most distinctive feature is our unique visual style, combined with original and risky narrative stories that resonate with players.

Octavi uses layering, shadows and gradient to give a perspective of looking underneath the ground or a race track. They also use no black outlines on their work

Derek Yu-Spelunky:

Yu has designed and co-designed several award-winning games, most famously Spelunky, Aquaria, and Eternal Daughter.He is also notable as a blogger and custodian of the influential TIGSource blog/community about independent video games.

Speluncky is a 2008 2D platform game The player has to explore and dodge traps as they progress.

Most of these games are from the 90s and early 2000s. 3d graphics were still crude and before indie game developers truly picked up the mantle.

Derek uses some black outlines however not everything is outlined in black and instead is a gradient of what the colour of the object is

Batman (Famicom/NES). Sunsoft, 1990.

Johan Vinet:

They worked on game Animations for Adventure time and Flinthook.

They learned pixel art on an Atari 1040STF with 16 colors.

Castaway is a family friendly, short and charming action-adventure game.

"Embark on an action-packed adventure in Castaway, diving players into a pixelated and retro universe. Assume the role of Martin, whose spaceship crash-landed on an uncharted island where his faithful pet was taken by hostile creatures. Retrieve your weapons and venture out to rescue your kidnapped companion in this endearing and unexpectedly dynamic world. Beat the 3 bosses in the concise and delightful "Story Mode" to unlock the thrilling and addictive "Survivor Mode." Ascend a 50-floor tower, with each level presenting increasingly challenging trials!"

Johan uses black outlines on all their objects and characters, they use power ups and their game cast away is like an escape and fight game.

Week 2:

Michael Myers:

They use low resolution canvases to construct his characters and objects and shows that they are still recognizable without a black outline.

He also makes it seem easy to create something on 8 bit when he still is able to make it look great.

Don Bluth:

Don uses a sketch to begin with and then once he is happy with his design he then goes over it in thicker pencil. He also uses a lot of curves and not a lot of straight lines.

don uses lines to begin working on his character to make sure it is aligned.

Mary Blair:

Mary uses plain colours and adds to them as she creates her character. she worked on many films like peter pan and cinderella and would create the shape and colour design for them.

Mary created children's books with her art work. she used a lot of different colours and used them to make her characters and the area around them more vibrant and stand out.

Mary even created the colour scheme for the new attraction "its a small world" .

Super Meat Boy:

I like the use of the caves in the hell stage and the design of all the levels, the designers for this game used black outlines for their characters and their characters were very similar and didn't contain too much detail.

most of their characters would be solid block colours and still look very good, as the levels where built around the characters design, the levels worked well.

Castle Crashers:

The game designers designed the characters to look like knights to fit the theme of knights fighting enemies. I like the character design as its not too detailed but it used more than one main colour.

This game uses a black outline for their characters as well as using a coloured outline after the black outline.

Minit:

The game uses only two colours for the background and all the characters all the characters use a pallet of light grey and white to give them definition. I like how the character designers use just white and black as it shows a good game can be created without using loads of different colours

The game also uses in game dialogue to show the story of the game to the player.

[em2dplatformer]

Pixel Art: The Basics

By playing pixel art games, I can get a better idea of what type of styles can be achieved and what styles I want to use for my game.

Castlevania: Vampire's Kiss

3-D WorldRunner

A Boy and His Blob

We can also get a better idea of how to make pixel sprites by researching other pixel artists.

Army Of Trolls:

Army Of Trolls is the site of Gary J Lucken's portfolio where his designs for games, YouTube and festival banners and commissions. His work features very bright and bold colours and focuses on 2D settings such as his London Games Fest art and his GDC 2018 brochure art. Specifically, his settings our done in the isometric pixel art style.

Octavi Navarro:

Octavi Navarro Art & Games is a studio based in Barcelona. Octavi Navarro himself is a pixel artist and game developer who creates narrative driven games. A lot of his colour palettes are more muted and he uses a lot of clean angles in the settings of his art pieces. His art also has a strong use of dynamic lighting with the use of spotlights and smaller light sources that blend nicely in the environment. These unique light sources also create strong shadows across some of his pieces.

Derek Yu:

Derek Yu is the creator of many popular games such as Spelunky, and Aquaria. He has a site called 'Make Games With Derek' where he has tutorials on how to do pixel art as well as examples of his own and other's work.

Both Spelunky and Aquaria have pixel artstyles, making them good examples to look at.

Spelunky is mostly underground and so has a limited colour palette. This, however, does not stop the game from being colourful. From gold ore scattered about to brightly coloured enemies and characters, Spelunky is made visually engaging by its use of colour.

Aquaria is a lot less pixel-based. It takes place underwater, meaning its much more visually cluttered than Spelunky. The colours are still bright, but a more dynamic use of lighting makes the colours have more depth.

Johan Vinet:

Johan Vinet is a pixel artist who recently released a mini-game called Castaway. Castaway is a pixel game with bright graphics, smooth animation and a fun mixture of puzzles and action.

After testing out some pixel art games and doing my own research on other pixel artists, I moved onto making my own character in pixel art form.

64x64:

I personally really like the level of detail that 64x64 allows me to put into the sprite. This, however, comes at the cost of time which means 64x64 will likely be unsustainable for this project (1 1/2 roughly).

32x32:

I first did not like 32x32 but as I kept at drawing my character I began to prefer this to the 64x64 version. The 32x32 both is detailed enough to keep my character distinguishable but also can be done a lot quicker than the 64x64 version (15 minutes).

16x16:

16x16 is too small for my character. Because of her limited colour palette and her requiring an outline to be distinguishable, this option is not viable. The time save was also not worth it (5 minutes).

8x8:

Definitely not using 8x8. My character is requires some form of gradient as well as enough room for an outline to be distinguishable. Animating this would also be a very difficult task. (45 seconds max).

4x4:

4x4 becomes a colour palette rather than a sprite. 4x4 is mostly used just to find the main key colours of a character. This doesn't effect my character particularly as, due to her limited colour palette, all of her colours (even the gradient and outlines) fit cohesively on the 4x4 canvas. (15 seconds).

After choosing the type of resolution for my character, I decided to upgrade the sprite itself. I wanted to give my sprite a more dynamic pose that felt more alive than the previous one. I also wanted to add some darker colours to the parts of the character that were further back for more depth.

[tgablissortonn]

known as Army of Trolls, Gary Lucken a pixel artist known for his detailed promotional artworks for magazines, festivals, banners, games, maps and more. The colours are very bright and the shading is two dimensional which is similar to a lot of old pixel style games. He says in his about section of the armyoftrolls website what he takes inspiration from video games, japanese toys and pop culture which is evident in his work. He is also known for making voxel mock-up pieces. his work is very detailed and his canvas sizes are large and every area of the canvas is filled with detail and references to video games and pop culture. i really like that he creates detailed isometric rooms, i think they’re impressive and interesting and i might possibly take inspiration from his designs despite how bright they are in contrast to our topic. These pieces likely took hours upon hours due to their size and that they were made with pixel, i can’t speculate how he possibly could’ve sped up the process and still have the outcome look this professional.

[theblackbodyofmyworks]

Army of Trolls/Gary J. Lucken

Analysing his artwork through the Kynseed animations, I personally feel like the animations are very mixed with me, in some parts the cat and the Lion is...good, I wouldn't say it's great but it's serviceable, can't say the same for the butterflies, definitely needs some work.

As for the art itself, it's got some good lighting, a vibrant selection of colours, don't know the exact colour palette but I know most artists use those, keeps it all consistent, I'd argue that there's not much colour distinction between the flowers and the butterflies. I know it's hard to work with small pixels but the butterflies could do with a different colour, something like orange and red. Could make the cat a different colour too since it's too similar to the Lion in some regards. Lovely rock tetures and grass.

[catherinek-g]

Pixel Artists Research

Army of Trolls (Gary Lucken):

This artist work is usually full of characters and objects form verious pieces of media such as Mario, Pac-man and many others. Most of his art has a crowded feel to it which really come to light in his pixel depictions of cities, shopping centers and other social spaces which are filled with little details. Another key element in Lucken's style is the use of bright colours. I like that most of the colour palettes his uses in his artworks are balanced and help strengthen the overall feeling of the piece as being something fun.

Octavi Navarro:

Navarro's pixel artworks have a nice whimsical feeling about them as many depict scenes of lighthearted moments with the characters in them (unlike the scene above). Navarro has a unique way of drawing people and environments and mostly settles on a more muted colour palette when it comes to his pieces. This lack of bright colours helps to convey the mood of the piece as something somber or spooky. In the piece above I especially like how the dragon is positioned and how angular it has been drawn along with how its been shaded.

Derek Yu:

Yu is another pixel artists who makes tutorials that help beginners and highlight some common mistakes people make when doing pixel art (like Pedro Medieros). His tutorials are informative and walk you through each step of the process, accompanying the writing with illustrations of what you can expect for that exact step. His tutorials walk you through all sorts of things from choosing a colour palette and understanding form and volume to selective outlining and final touches. I think his tutorials are amazing and really help others easily understand to fundamentals of pixel art.

Johan Vinet:

Vinet works on illustrations and other art works for multiple different games and even has his own game out called "LUNARK" (image above is from the game). In the game, most of the art follows a similar colour scheme which I find quite interesting and it reminds me of a sunset. His shading in his works are simple yet effective as you can clearly tell which part of the body is in shadow and were the light source is coming form.

[rpgse7en]

Army Of Trolls, a collection of pixel-art based maps and content, by RPG-7.

Army of trolls;

It is a portfolio of a London-born digital artist named Gary J Lucken. Developed from a studio, which was his personal space, in Poole within Dorset.

Inspiration began as he took thoughts from the collection of Japanese toys and his piles of old 2D videogames.

Produces artwork based upon the use of vibrant colours, in a video-game style with heavy influence from pop culture, toys and videogames.

He is commissioned for Art Direction, 2D animations and artwork, 3D voxel work, Vector artistry and design work.

He has worked alongside the likes of the BBC (British Broadcasting Company of the UK), Disney (Major global distributor and creators of many famous films), Maker studios (a Disney subsidiary), Mojang (Game manufacturing studio responsible for the development of Minecraft), UsTwo (a London-based game studio), Sony (Major entertainment company), Edge magazine (magazine production company), Wired (Major tabloid), GQ (Major international tabloid), Dorling Kindersly (Book manufacturing company), Kano (Computer kit supplier) beyond many more.

Commissioned artwork for videogames for Nintendo WiiU, Sony PSP, PS4, PSVR and PC.

His work expands from video games, as he has a gallery of things from Youtube banners and artwork featured at the London Games Festival.

RPG-7

[acer-as]

Army of trolls.

Army of trolls is the portfolio of "Gary J Lucken". He has worked for  BBC, Disney, Mojang, Sony and many more. The website has a collection of pixel art on there.

Octavi Navarro.

This is a website run by "Octavi Navarro", a pixel artist who's worked on games such as "Thimbleweed Park and Photographs".

On their website they have different sections such as their art and games. There is an about me page which I have linked below.

Derek Yu - Pixel Art Gallery

On this website, there are multiple screenshots of retro games' pixel art, from the 90s and early 2000s.

It has screenshots from games like "Street Fighter III", "Batman", "Demon's Crest" and "Final Fantasy VI". It has a variety of different retro games with different styles.

Johan Vinet

Johan is a pixel artist who's worked on a variety of games such as "Halfway", "Adventure Time" and "Flinthook". You can purchase art from his shop too. He is still working on a few games, and posts teasers and updates in his blog. Recently he released his first game "Lunark".

[2d-platformer-dw]

Pixel Artists - 1 Army Of Trolls

"I'm not going to enjoy this am I"

Army Of Trolls is a Dorset-based digital artist Gary Lucken. He has worked in a professional capacity for Nintendo, Sony, Mojang and Disney amongst others.

Image 1] I like the small animation prior to the homepage with the toaster due to it's unique identity and smooth animation. Although the colour scheme is coherent, I don't particularly enjoy the saturation of the background as I prefer more muted or pastel colours.

Image 2] Although the hues and layout are very reminiscent of more retro games, albeit slightly less dated with higher environmental and character detail, I still don't particularly like the colours. Whilst they do highlight the playable area and stand out from the background, I still don't like oversaturated colours.

Image 3] With a wider range of [comparitively less saturated] colours, the visual style of 3 is far more preferable to 1 or 2. The shading here is extremely simplistic, using block shading according to the subjects forms which is aided by the isometric view. 3 also uses large flat textures with differing levels or texturing such as the wall or floor which are broken up and detailed by objects such as posters or toys rather than detailing the large panels. The main focal point of the image is a rainbow space invader on a TV screen. Despite the saturation levels of the space invader not being too far from those present in the rest of the scene, it being on a black background separates it from everything else and the contrast makes it seem brighter. This is something I rather like about the image alongside the copious amounts of Small Things [the best kind] in how it uses contrast to prevent the colour saturation being constant throughout the image and to break up certain areas

[gdadp1]

Pixel Artist research

Army of Trolls: Army of Trolls is the online portfolio of the artist Gary Lucken. He mainly seems to do commissioned art, like this promotional art he did for the London Games Fest.

He mostly seems to work isometrically when doing these commissioned artworks. While he has worked on games, mainly doing character art and design, most of it seems to be using a cartoonish style instead of a pixel art style. He also works in a 3D voxel art style, but none of these artworks seem to be commissions, only personal projects. Personally, I quite like his art style, I think that the isometric, map-like pixel artworks he does are very good, and quite entertaining to look at, however, I feel like his art style is too cartoony for the game I'm trying to create.

Octavi Navarro Arts & Games: A small 2 person spanish indie games studio, they produce mainly short, story focused, pixel art sidescroller, horror games. As well as standalone pieces of pixel art, which they refer to as "scenes", which also seem to still try to tell a story, or at least they do to me. For example, this scene is called "waiting"

Their art is indescribably unique, and very detailed, despite the limitations of pixel art. They also seem to use either pastel colours or muted colours in most of their artworks. I really like the art style a lot. I think it's very detailed and unique, and I'd love to use it or something similar in my game.

Johan Vinet: While not as technically distinct as Octavi Navarro, or as detailed as Gary Lucken, I still think Johan Vinet's art is very good, largely in part to the colouring he uses and the effects.

I think, realistically, Johan Vinet's art is the style I'd probably be able to get the closest to, as it's pretty simple but relies a lot on colour and effects.

Derek Yu: I was not able to find an art gallery for Derek Yu.

[imthepaladin]

Research- Army of Trolls

Army of Trolls is the website portfolio of Gary J Lucken, a 2D artist.

One post that stuck out to was this one of toast in a factory setting, with some designs that could inspire my tile sets for my game, such as the yellow warning stripes on the walls and the circuitry on the floor.

[tga-ines-soares]

Army Of Trolls

Army of troll was created in London and its a portfolio. The artist that created it and he was called Gary J Lucken artist and he was obsessed with video-games. He works from his studio surround by Japanese toys and 2D video. He also produce a unique brand of colorful artwork. It was influenced by video games and toys and pop culture. He was also an art direction, 2D pixel artwork/animations and 3D voxel and vector art and design. He has been working with many clients including BBC, Disney, maker studios, Mojang, Ustwo, Sony, edge magazine, wired, GQ, Dorling Kindersly, Kano and many more. He also worked on video-games for Nintendo WilU, Sony PSP, PS4, PSVR and PC. And i think its quite impressive that someone can build a website there is lots of different pixels art and software.

[tgadanparish1]

Army of Trolls

description about army of trolls

army of trolls is the portfolio of London born, video game obsessed artist Gary J Lucken. Working from his Studio in Poole, Dorset, UK, surrounded by Japanese toys and piles of old 2D video games.

(G) produces a unique brand of colourful artwork heavily influenced by videogames, toys and pop culture. Available for Art Direction, 2D Pixel artwork/Animation, 3D Voxel artwork and Vector Art and Design.

I have worked for many clients including: BBC, Disney, Maker Studios, Mojang, UsTwo, Sony, Edge magazine, Wired, GQ, Dorling Kindersly, Kano and many more.

I have worked on Videogames for Nintendo WiiU, Sony PSP, PS4, PSVR and PC.

Available for Art Direction/Creation, and consultation.

I am told I am a pretty amiable chap! And am often found playing Monster Hunter or hanging out with our dogs.

[2022-2023]

Army of Trolls - Pixel Artist

Gary J Lucken is a man in Poole Dorset, he has worked for clients in several different areas (BBC, Mojang and GQ are just 3 of many) His work is heavily influenced by the games industry each one of his works are full of vibrant colours which makes them stand out.

[2dplatformergameconceptwsc]

Army of Trolls

Army of trolls is the portfolio of London born, videogame obsessed artist Gary J Lucken. Working from his Computer in Switzerland surrounded by Japanese toys and piles of old 2D videogames Gary produces a unique brand of colourful artwork heavily influenced by the videogames, toys and pop culture he loves so much.

Army of trolls even helped design the minecraft lego minifigures.

Here's the pixel art made for them.

[keyanot]

Paul Robertson

Paul Robertson is an Australian animator. Paul is known for his various pixel art and animations. His most notable work that he has helped design include the film ‘Pixels’, ‘my fare lady’ couch gag on The Simpsons, episodes of Gravity Falls, and many other shorts, as well as art for various video games, such as Scott Pilgrim vs the World: The Game.

Army of Trolls is the portfolio of artist Gary Lucken. Gary creates a unique style of pixel art, and you can see in his work that he is influenced by games, and pop culture. He has worked for many companies such as BBC, Sony, Mojang, and others, as well as creating a few games.