Charlotte synthwave skyline pixel city hero banner

Overview

Let’s create a vibrant, retro aesthetic landscape using two of my favorite styles: synthwave and pixel art. This guide will walk through the process of using Illustrator to reduce any photo or reference into an intricate pixel piece, with all the glowing goodness a child of the 80’s would love.

1. Find a photo

Grab a reference photo you want to work with—almost anything will do. Working from a photo will provide a helpful visual reference when creating pixel art (or any art really), especially for large complex scenes and subjects. Illustrator will help simplify the key shapes, details, and colors that need to be translated into pixel form.

Any subject will generally work, but since we’re doing the synthwave thing, this project will use a dark city skyline and convert it into a nighttime synthwave-inspired pixel graphic. Here’s a photo of Charlotte from Unsplash I’m using as a reference:

What a gorgeous shot of the city at night! To start visualizing this as a retro-futuristic skyline, let’s grab some colors that are synonymous with synthwave. We’ll use these to recolor this city image into what we see in our mind’s eye.

2. Synthwave Color Palette

A quick search for synthwave will return a huge assortment of 80’s inspired sunsets, dreamy grids, futuristic landscapes, and lots of blue/purple/yellow colors. Build out a collection of 10 or so colors that might work well for your piece.

Here’s the palette I’ll be using for the skyline. As always, make sure these swatches are set as global colors in Illustrator to allow fast and easy editing later. This is helpful no matter if you’re using the generative recolor or manually adjusting, or a bit of both.

I typically draw each color as a big box on the canvas and make adjustments until they feel like a family. Select them all and hit the New Color Group icon in the Swatches panel. This adds them all as a folder/group. Keeping them together in that folder grouping will help with the upcoming recolor artwork steps.

3. Image Trace

Next, the image will be vectorized and broken down into a limited set of colors. After selecting the image open the Image Trace panel, select Mode: Color, and choose an amount of colors the same or slightly less than your synthwave palette. In this case I chose 9 colors even though I have an 11 color palette. If you use too few colors, the image simply won’t have enough definition.

As far as details go—paths, corners, noise, anchors, and whatnot—go with whatever maintains the essence of the photo. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but don’t over simplify it. My settings for this particular photo are below.

4. Recolor the Image

Once you’re satisfied with the details of the traced image, select it and expand using Object > Expand… This will convert the skyline into a large group of vectors.

To make the finished synthwave color scheme easier to visualize, recolor the artwork to better match your vision of the future. Use Edit > Edit Colors > Recolor Artwork or use the convenient Recolor button in the properties panel to open the Recolor Artwork panel, then choose Advanced Options…

You’ll see the Current Colors palette assigned on the left, and your Color Groups palette in a list on the right. Select your group of colors and they will be applied to the artwork (in the same order, left to right, top to bottom).

Once applied, manipulate the current colors by dragging the large color bars to new positions and see how it changes the artwork. The smaller swatch list titled New can also be moved and swapped with other positions. The little drop arrow next to these swatches controls how the colors are matched. For our purposes, change it to Exact (instead of Preserve Tints or Scale Tints).

My final arrangement of colors looks like the following. I made sure to keep the darkest colors matched with dark purples, and the lighter colors like streetlights and windows matched with the bright yellows, blues, and greens.

5. Resize to Grid

Now that the colors are mostly set, move on to the grid. There are several ways to do grid work in Illustrator. Begin by turning the grid on with View > Show Grid (Ctrl+’ or ⌘+’).

Consider the smallest ‘unit’ in the image—a window, door, car, or whatever—and scale the vector image so that unit generally fits into a single grid square. It helps to be in outline mode View > Outline (Ctrl+y or ⌘+y).

Alternatively, adjust the grid measurements in Illustrator’s settings to something that suits your needs, say, gridlines every 1 inch (or cm) with 10 subdivisions. Or even zoom in past 600% and Illustrator will display an actual pixel grid for the tiniest pixel art (though you cannot scale your artwork smaller than this). Keep in mind Illustrator is vector based and can freely scale your pixel art up to any dimension without losing quality, so the method really doesn’t matter too much.

Here is the rough Charlotte skyline scaled to fit the various skyscraper windows into their own grid squares:

This absolutely does not need to be perfect, it’s simply a reliable way to measure form and relationships between elements. It’s like basic art school; drawing a grid and using it to translate or enlarge an image onto another sheet of paper 😀.

6. Draw structures using the grid

Once the image is sized to the grid, toggle back to preview mode (Ctrl+y or ⌘+y). Enable grid snapping with View > Snap to Grid (Shift+Ctrl+’ or Shift+⌘+’). This ensures everything drawn manually will align perfectly for that precise pixel look.

Using the image-traced photo as a color reference, begin blocking in the basic structures. Designer’s choice here if it’s easier for you to work off to the side (using the grid reference concept from basic art school), or put the reference image on its own layer and fade it out, onion-skin style (what I usually do). There’s no wrong way.

Refine the larger areas by adding more details, tackling it one building at a time. Continue making progress by adding smaller blocks, rows, and individual colored pixels to match windows and other highlights. As you progress, you’ll develop a feel for the spacing of elements, dark and light regions, vertical columns, balconies, and the occasional angular roof line. Here’s a mostly complete portion of the greater Charlotte skyline:

Since we reduced the original image down to 9 colors instead of the 11 defined in our palette, I used the extra two colors as highlights and other misc. In the example above I added some light green and a light blue, both of which didn’t make the initial cut when recoloring the image.

7. Finishing Touches and Gradients

Add the darkest synthwave color as the background and create tall gradients over several buildings to accent the city scene at night. Make these by adding large rectangles of smooth, synthwave-swatch gradients up into the night sky, and set them as various blending modes like screen, overlay, soft light, hard light… experiment to find a combination that speaks to you.

And finally, no synthwave piece would be complete without a huge, totally 80’s, segmented cyber sun. Splash some stars in that sky, and a bit more glow and you’re ready to journey into the retro future.

Synthwave pixel art charlotte city skyline

To take it even a step further, add some futuristic grid lines, glowing vector polygon characters, obligatory chrome lettering, and a healthy dose of chromatic aberration with scanlines (Photoshop finishing touches), and you’ve got yourself a poster!

Thanks for reading!

Synthwave Pixel Art Skyline