This is my entry for the Pixel Art Weekly contest by 
Voting starts tomorrow night! :D
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.
Animating the Fireflies
This step was more trial and error for me. I moved each firefly at around 1 to 2 pixel increments and started moving them back into the beginning position at the 6th frame (middle frame of the animation)
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Tomorrow starts voting! -
Let me know if you would like to see more posts about pixel art and animation!
Edit: For those interested in learning and want more tutorials, check this guy out!
Thank you for reading!