Hey people, this is a tutorial I made on how to make simple easy trees in knytt stories, at most it might take you around 15 minutes. For this tutorial I use paint.net (it's a very useful program and I suggest that everyone use it when making tilesets).
REMEMBER - You don't have to follow any of these steps because they might take away from your creativity. I just made this tutorial for people who have never been able to make a tree before. Also remember that trees are very diverse so these steps will not apply to every tree.
Step 0 - Have a template (aka tileset).
Step 2 - Make a new layer to draw the tree on. The picture below shows two layers, Tileset and Tree. In this case your tileset will be on the Tileset layer and you will draw your tree on the Tree layer. When you finish drawing the tree you will just click on the background layer, delete the template blocks containing the tree, and then merge both layers.
Step 2 - Draw a trunk. If you don't make the trunk part of the tree look natural then you tree may look funny.
Step 3 - Draw the big branches. These branches are the ones that grow straight from the trunk so they will be very big.
Step 4 - Shape up the big branches so that they look natural.
Step 5 - Draw the small branches.
Step 6 - Shape up the small branches so that they look natural.
Step 7 - Draw leaves unto your tree using a 2x2 pixel block. For this step just start clicking with your mouse until the blocks are spaced evenly and randomly apart in the tree so that you have the type of shape you want for the leaf area of the tree.
Step 8 - Put little 1x1 pixels in between and around the 2x2 pixels to make your leaves look more natural and to fill in some of those empty spots in between the 2x2 pixels.
Step 9 - Unevenly dither the edges of the leaves. If you don'd know what dithering is look up "pixel art dithering" on Google Images. When I say unevenly dither the edges I mean make your dithering collide with itself so that it isn't always even and uniform around the tree's edges.
Step 10 - Shade the leaves. For my trees I have three colors of leaves: dark, medium, and light. The first color you used was the dark color and this color is the medium color. To make these colors I first choose my dark color and then raise the brightness by 10 for the medium color and 20 for the light color. When you shade the leaves you want to try and shade like shadows do on real trees. This means that when you have a light area of shading you put a dark area under it because the light area will cast a shadow on the dark area. If you need an example of shadows in tree leaves look up "tree" on Google Images. When you actually draw the shading you want to either lightly scribble or randomly place 1x1 pixels just as we have done before when we drew the leaves on the tree a few steps ago.
Step 11 - Shade the leaves again. This time you are going to shade the leaves with the light color while still using the techniques mentioned in step 10.
Step 12 - Shade the trunk and the branches. For this part of the tree I only use a dark and light color, not a medium one. After you shade the trunk you can shade the branches by looking through the leaves and finding the little brown pixels that are the branches. When you shade these pixels just shade according to the areas of the leaves that are either light or dark.
AND THAT'S IT!
If you didn't create a new layer to put the tree on then all you do is take the magic wand tool, turn the tolerance to zero, hold down shift, and click on the color you want to remove. The wand will immediately select all of that color and then you just click delete. If you put a gradient over the tiles (like I did) than this will not be so easy. Take note - You may want to grab all of the tiles that contain the tree and then move them unto another layer before using the magic wand tool because if you don't you may accidentally delete all of the blue block tiles that act as a grid in the tileset.
Any questions? Post 'em below.
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