Pixel Ref - Blog Posts

Pixel Art Tutorial

Note: This tutorial was created in 2007 for my personal website. Some small tweaks have been made since then, but nothing too significant. In this 10-step tutorial, I’ll teach you how to create a “sprite”, which is a stand-alone two-dimensional character or object. The term comes from video games, of course.

Creating pixel art is a skill I picked up because I needed graphics for my games. After a lot of practice, I became kinda handy with it, and started to see it more as actual art rather than just a tool. These days, pixel art is quite popular in game development and illustration.

This pixel tutorial was created many years ago to teach people the basic concepts behind pixel art, but I’ve streamlined it a lot since its first incarnation. There are other pixel tutorials around, but I find them to be overly-complicated and too wordy. Pixel art is not a science. You should never have to calculate a vector when doing pixel art.

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CLOSING THOUGHTS

- Start small. - Make mistakes and try new things.  - Practice as much as possible. - Share your work with others and get feedback. - Study the work of the artists whom you admire. - If you don’t have a tablet, get one. Small ones are cheap and easy to carry around. - Have fun!

Piskel - free tool to create pixel art and animated sprites

(additional pixel art tools and tutorials can be found on pixelartus)