How to Make Pixel Art

Posted on May 24th, 2009 by Marck

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Avatars, profile pictures, and other images in many social networking and personal sites are now made with pixel art. From animated characters to landscapes, pixel artworks are simple yet attractive ways to enhance your profile page or blog site. If you want to make your own pixel art, here are ways that can help you out.

Tools

Here are some of the tools you need to make your own pixel art:

Drawing tablet. A drawing tablet is a USB device that allows you to make sketches that you can then edit from your computer. For artists and graphics designers, a drawing tablet is a very convenient tool for making everything from rough sketches to full artworks created through a computer. Drawing tablets can be bought from a computer supplies store for an affordable price.
Pencil, paper, and a flatbed scanner. If you don’t have a drawing tablet, a simple sketch drawn on a piece of clean paper can be used for line art and pixel art. You can then convert the physical sketch into a computer file by scanning it with a flatbed scanner, set on the maximum resolution.
Photo-editing software. Although you can use something like Photoshop at this point, you really don’t need powerful and complicated tools to create pixel art. Other freeware like Graphics Gale, or even something like Microsoft Paint, can be used to create simple pixel artworks.

Tips

Here are some helpful tips and steps that you should keep in mind when creating pixel art:

Preparing the Sketch

Whether you scan the sketch or draw it on a drawing tablet, the first thing you should do is to prepare the sketch for coloring and for rendering into pixels.

Keep it simple. Complicated images with many lines, curves, and strokes are difficult to prepare, clean up, and render. When drawing the sketches for pixel art, try to keep the lines as simple as possible.
Clean the lines. One way to make line art simpler is to edit and render your lines so that they’re all 1 px thick. If you’re using a drawing tablet, set the brush size to 1 px thickness. If you’re scanning a sketch, you need to edit the lines of the drawing. It can be time-consuming, but you’ll end up with a set of lines and curves that are easier to work with.

Color and Line Work

After you have prepared your sketch, it’s time to give it color and character. Here’s where pixel art becomes tricky, because coloring and line work can greatly affect the quality of the finished rendered image.

Use simple colors. Gradients, shading, and other effects may look cool on a large image, but they won’t display the same effect on a pixel art image. Try to use vivid, striking colors when making your line art image. You can also experiment with color values instead of using standard colors available from the color palette.
Always consider lighting. When coloring pixel art, you need to strike a balance between light and dark colors to achieve the desired lighting and illumination effects. Use the “Preview” function of the program to determine the shade and color of pixels and their overall effect on the image.
Soften outlines. Instead of drawing hard outlines to determine the limits of an image, you can use a darker shade of the inner color to keep the pixel art looking natural.
Anti-alias inside lines. Anti-aliasing is a method where the lines are smooth and the color of the line is made lighter. Anti-aliasing is optional, although it is best to perform anti-aliasing on the inside lines, and leave the outside lines as they are.

Saving Pixel Art

When saving pixel art, you should save them either in .PNG or .GIF. The file formats keep the pixel art from showing smudges, unnecessary pixellation, or lossy compression. File sizes are also kept small, which are very useful if you’re compiling the images for use in a game or a website.

Pixel art gives your graphics projects a whole new and fun take. With these tips, you can use pixel art for just about all your small graphics needs.