AGEING WITH PIXELS: FACES

I am certainly not a fantastic artist, especially when it comes to pixel work. If I can do this, I'm almost certain you can too.

This article is to explain how to turn a face graphic of a young character into a face graphic of that same character, but older. This can be helpful in long RPG's, where the character ages throughout gameplay.

The Software:
All you really need for this is a decent image editing program. Something along the lines of PhotoShop. I'm using a free program called gimp that works wonders.

Getting Started:
The first thing we want to do in this tutorial is pick a character. I'm going to choose a face from the RMVX RTP:

Let's take a look at some places in this graphic that could look older.

Eyes:
This is something you can take advantage of in almost any face. A key to making someone look older is the bags under the eyes. The darker, the older.

Hair:
Since this is a female face, facial hair will not be an option, but we can always add streaks of gray to age the hair.

Wrinkles:
Wrinkles can be added around the nose and cheekbones to provide an older looking face.

To begin adding these things, we first want to zoom in:

We will begin the aging process by adding those eyebags. The first thing you want is a good color. You'll notice that the face's skin color has a darker, redder shade, and a lighter shade. Take your eyedropper tool and select the darker color.
hexcode=e6a583
Now take your pencil tool, and make a small line under the eye:

It's okay if it's sloppy, because we are now going to use my favorite image editing tool ever, the smudge tool.
Take the smudge tool, set the rate to 50%, and smudge the dark line under the eye. It should look a little something like this:


Now for wrinkles. The first place we want to add them is around the nose. Start by taking that darker color and drawing a line:


After you smudge it, it'll look like this:

As you can see, I made the line a little to thick. That's fine, we're not shooting for perfect. Now, I'm going to use this same method to add some more wrinkles. Here is a zoomed out version of what we have so far:


Now we have to gray the hair. We will need a color to start with, I'm going to use this:
hexcode=c0cbda

Now we are getting into layers, so hold onto your hats! Begin by duplicating the layer that the face is on. (That should be the only layer)
Make sure the new layer is active, and is on top of the first layer.

On this new layer, take your pencil tool and draw blobs of gray everywhere:


Next, add streaks of the original hair color throughout the gray. Make sure these are thin, and follow the actual direction that the hair flows:


Now, without switching layers, take your smudge tool, and run it through the gray areas. For best results, blend it the same direction the hair flows.

After a lot of smudging, and adding a couple more streaks in the gray, I got this:

I know right now you're probably saying, wow, this is CRAP! Don't worry, we're not done yet.

Remember that you actually have two layers, one with the hair color(top layer), and one without? Well, that comes into play here. Take the top layer, and lower the opacity down to about 45%. Now zoom out.

If you don't like what you see, try experimenting with the amount of gray, the smudging, or the opacity level for different results. For now, I'm going to call this done.

Before:


After:


This is not all you can do to age your characters face. There are many more (complicated) techniques that I didn't mention in this tutorial. Maybe there will be a part II someday!