Expanding a Pixel House

Ok, in the previous tutorial in this series we made a basic 1 story home. Now this tutorial will expand that home to a large 2 story house with a garage and yard. Its all isometric (as it should be!),and I am assuming that you have an overall knowledge of isometric pixel building/drawing, but if you don't, don't worry, I will include help for you along the way.

Here is where we were last, remember?

Now cut the roof out with the polygonal lasso tool to get it as close as possible. We will cheat to save time instead of redrawing a roof again.

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Now use a bright color (I used yellow) to make guidelines for where the walls will go.

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Do the same on the left of the house to make a garage area.

Now convert your yellow lines to black, and fill in all the walls the red color. Paste the earlier copied roof above the garage, and position it in such a way that it doesn't screw with the edge of the house, but rather fits neatly.

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Now copy the windows from below and paste them higher for the higher story windows.

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It would look really bad to have the same obviously same windows pasted above each other. So to make it look good, add some shutters, with a color of your choice between the black lines going downward.

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Now for the garage door. Make a rectangle like mine into the wall. I suggest you draw on a separate layer for this and all other additions you do to the house, then just merge it later with a main layer (use ctrl-e to merge downwards).

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Draw lines for the wood paneling (or even metal, your choice) for the door. Feel free to experiment in different paneling styles, ie squares, circles, diamonds...

Choose a good fill color for the door and fill it all in. The bucket fill hotkey is ctrl-g. Get used to hotkey's, it saves tons of time.

Now for the highlights and shadows on the door. This is actually sort tricky. If you use too dark a color below the main color, it will appear too beveled and ugly. I tried out various shades and for the color i used, i decided its best to just use no dark color below my "main" door color. The highlight is there but it needs no dark highlight. If you used a different color for your door, then use what is best for you.

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Add garage windows on the side. Usually garage windows are different from house windows, so I made mine longer vertically and added some short shades at the top.

Put some half-windows on top. These are usually used for bathrooms as privacy windows. Add some half shutters too, or drapes.

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For the shadows, use the same principal as before. The light is coming in from the top left side, keep that in mind. Now i will admit i am not the best at shadowing :P but as long as it looks decent... try your best.

Just add some random items you would see on a house like a TV antenna, satellite dish, chimney, etc.

I wanted to put in a boxwood hedge, so i drew a outline then just filled it in as usual.

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Then just copy and paste the hedge image a few times until it covers part of the front perimeter. Erase the clutter lines!

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The fence is drawn with the same principle as a wall. Here too i only used a bright highlight, no dark.

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Copy and paste it to make it solid. 1px by 1px is a good wooden fence size.

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The pool is simple too. Make an outline for the water-filled area (not the border!). Fill that in with a nice blue. Then expand your pools width evenly outward until you have a good-sized border. Here the highlights and shadows change as it moves from sunny side to dark side, so remember that (I'm talking about the border). The pool itself should have a dark shadow all around it because the water is all below the edge of the pool.

Its looking good now!

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I added a mailbox and trash cans on the side.

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Now here's the hedges in view, it all looks pretty nice...

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I am aware there is still MUCH more to add to this drawing, but I will leave those to you. Detail is essential to pixel drawings and really makes a noteworthy difference. Here's some of the colors I used in this tutorial:

Grass: #598E3C
House: #942626
Roof: #82562A
Water: #0370F6

Or if you want a color I used just use the eyedropper tool :)