Editor-in-Chief at GameDeveloper.com, Berklee College of Music game design lecturer, BJJ Purple Belt 🤼‍♀️, hobbyist game dev, beginner pixel artist, sometimes screenwriter, fitness dork, volunteer EMT. She/her.


Hello, friends who do pixel art (or any art, really) -- I'm working on my Scream Jam 2022+1 project and I don't hate most of what I've got so far! However, I'd love a little technique help on getting these books/games/whatever in the TV stand shelf to look like they are actually... books/movies/games whatever sitting inside a shelf. I want to convey a bit of depth here.

The light in the room is coming from the lamp in the top left corner of the room, which they'd be mostly shielded from.

Trying to work with a limited palette (the painting on the left wall notwithstanding, but I tried for a limited palette there too, just a different one, for actual reasons! Sort of!)

Any thoughts/help would be appreciated! Thanks!


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in reply to @danielleri's post:

So for the shelf depth you’ll want to pick three shades to work with, a full lit, half lit/shadow, and full dark. The bottom of the shelf should get full lit, and then the back and sides get half and full shadow. For more “correct” lighting the inner side should be fully dark but whichever looks good.

First thing I'd recommend is working on the depth of the shelf interior, thinking about the planes of the surfaces and how direct the light is to each one, what shadows are cast, etc. Most of it is likely to be less well lit than the exterior.

For the items in the shelf, look up a bit of reference to see how people organize their stuff. It's unlikely that everything would be a uniform size and all perfectly aligned. And make some observations on format packaging. A VHS sleeve is going to be full color all around, but most game/dvd/bluray cases are going to have full color on the spine and faces, then largely uniform plastic on the rest. Of course, there's going to be different packaging and box sets and stuff to add variety. Some abstract color blotches to hint at designs will help bring things to life. You might want to play with not giving every box its own thick black outline and think of groups of them as a single larger object so you can use the technique you've got going where the lines facing the player are lighter.

There's probably going to be some kind of playback device down there too, or something else to do with the person's life and use of that room.

Something I've taken away only since I started learning 3D art, but definitely also applies to pixel art: Digital tools make it much easier to draw a perfect, uniform, symmetric version of an object or scene. The next step is to add detail, which necessarily breaks those rules. Imperfection, unevenness, asymmetry, and so on are additive qualities, not subtractive.

The shelf needs a sense of dimension, space, and depth. Right now it's just kind of a void where the items seem to be floating. Adjust your shadows to show where the inside and back walls are. The items would also get slightly clipped/hidden by that top shelf, and that will help them look like they are "inside" the space and have more depth than what we can see from this angle.

Here's a real quick and dirty adjustment: https://imgur.com/a/xBh4xCd

Also as someone else has said, you could also add a little more variety of shape to the items, unless it's important to the narrative that they're all Bluray cases or Xbox games or whatever.

Thank you for this! I ended Up adding some shading to the shelf -- but definitely still need to add variety to the games/books -- really appreciate your comments and the time you took to sketch a solution!