Learning pixel art? I have no Idea what I'm doing

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3 comments, last by Tom Sloper 1 year, 5 months ago

I have no clue when it comes to art. I don't understand how to get the drawing mainly the formation of objects and characters on the screen. Is there a resource for absolute hopeless people like myself. I bought a few tutorials and ASEPRITE is my tool of choice. I want to go for 32 but aesthetic .

Edit: I have been programming and making music for years so I got that covered.

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I come from the same exact background as you (software engineering and composition, now creating a game). I needed to learn pixel art for my city builder game but didn't have the skills.

First thing you need to do is steal your color palette. You can paste in any image to Asperite and create a color palette from it (it will pull every distinct color in the image). Alternatively, if you want fewer colors from the image, download paint.net and color-quantize the image. This will limit the color palette/colors used in the image to what ever number of colors you set it to. Another option is https://lospec.com/palette-list.​ I stole the color palette from Roller Coaster Tycoon for my game, since I love their colors.

Next step is steal pixel art, sort of. Zoom in on the pixels and copy the patterns / pixel placement, then modify (move the pattern elsewhere, adjust for different look, etc).

Now you're an artist.

Edit: And another tip, cut out parts of a scene to get the color palette specific to the object (e.g. a tree). Will help you organize larger color palettes (like RCTs, which is around 256)

Well during summer holidays last year ago I went for straight 100 days of making pixel art. I've always been shit with art, but consistency helped a lot. I'm not an expert and didn't do Pixel Art for a while now. I do think about returning to it and to work on some tilesets to use in future as free qiuck to use assets. In short, I think I got good basics down, I'm not god knows who though! So take some of it with a pinch of salt

1.I'd recommend for you to start with 16x16 first. This is gonna help you understand how much information does a single pixel represent. Go for different objects, maybe some you saw pixel art of before (like keys, coins etc) and try to make your own thing. If you gonna go with 32x32 it will be harder, and you might be discouraged. If you really wanna go with 32x32 you can. It's just gonna be a little bit harder imo.
2.Limiting your color palette is important as well. I think that when you do start with 16x16 you do get to understand the fact that more colors, shades or highlights is usually worse
3.Don't spend too much time on each sprite. I'd recommend to not go above 1hour of working on 16x16. Try to stick to 1,5h with 32x32.

Over time you'll get better and faster with your art and maybe you'll post in here and there among friends or on some discord servers of whatever for feedback and you know… to feel goooooood
Don't get discouraged esp with 32x32 it's very hard to start with it imo. All sort of vegetation might be hard to do at first too. Hell even I still do have some problems with it! Pixel art doesn't take this much time to do, if you restrict yourself to maybe 40min and do that for a month you'll see wonderful improvement! Good luck on the path! <3

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-- Tom Sloper -- sloperama.com

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