Hello guys! I hope you're all well ^^ Today I have another old post that I really enjoyed making last year. Once per week I pick one of my old posts to share again, as most of my current followers didn't know me back then :)
Personally I find the 7 day post limit quite demotivating, but I understand the reasons behind it.
Last week I skipped the post, but I plan to continue this series of posts.
I actually do a lot of pixelart, but for Steemit I make more traditional and high res digital art. I miss the Pixelart weekly contests by @jonny-clearwater. The art in this post was one of my first entries for the contest. I loved the specific weekly themes and this one was particularly challenging: 4 color limit.
I met 
Setting the Mood 
The overall mood is crucial for a color challenge. I used hue/saturation adjustment to find the distinct mood.
I was going to do 9 unique frames, but decided to work with the middle frame (the 3rd try). I loved it as soon I finished the sketch. Generally when filling the frames I don't worry about the order or layers.
The Steps
I decided to work with very simple and limited details, and let the animation be the main focus of the work.
Tips: pixel art looks sharper when working with png files instead of jpg. Aslo when scaling up pixel art use nearest-neighbor scaling for sharp edges.
Expanding the Scene
I decided to make a short parallax animation. So I expanded from 150 pixels wide to 178 pixels. All of the colors are on separate layers; however, in the first step I do everything on 1 layer and separate it after picking a scene.
Animation
I decided to try out a pixel art program I bought a few days ago- Aseprite ( because of a Steam sale). I decided to import the 178 pixels (expanded) layers and to crop the scene into 150 pixels, at the end to get the final result.
I achieved the parallax movement by moving the closest,( darkest layer) by 2 pixels and the further trees (middle layer) by only 1 pixel in the same direction. After 3 frames I copy pasted the frames in reverse order and did the same thing in the other direction. I didn't move fireflies to simplify the task.
My original post from last year: https://steemit.com/art/@kristyglas/pixel-art-weekly-contest-entry-magical-forest
Copyright 
Thank you for reading!
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : http://www.kristyglas.com/2018/08/19/a-magical-forest-pixel-art/