Nov 11, 2024
with the uncertainty of social platforms sticking around in recent years, i would recommend artists to get PureRef and start saving their bookmarks & art references on their own curated PureRef boards instead!
try for free here!
seen from Türkiye
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
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seen from United States
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seen from Canada
seen from Türkiye
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Hungary
seen from China
seen from Russia
seen from China
seen from Australia
with the uncertainty of social platforms sticking around in recent years, i would recommend artists to get PureRef and start saving their bookmarks & art references on their own curated PureRef boards instead!
try for free here!
Psst, want a foliage palette?
The main file is in CSP fromat so it’s easier to post the PNG of it here so any program can open it up. Feel free to spread it around & use it in your own artworks. These are just some palettes I used over the years that I like. Don’t be afraid to mix and match, you can ever pluck colors from the trees & their trunks up there :D
My blog may be dead but my love of pixel art isn’t!
For Beginners!
a small introduction to pixel art
a good beginner's pixel art tutorial (pictured)
Derek Yu’s (creator of Splunkey) crash course on pixel art and his follow up tips on improving
easy steps to improving your sprite work
three more tips on improving your spritework:
a few more quick tips!
Collections
Studio Miniboss has a TON of tutorials and I highly suggest them - they’re the people behind Celeste & Towerfall!
LoSpec, a site that collects tutorials and pixel art palettes for anyone to use (pictured)
RHL experiments with colors a lot and gives some great tree and other scenery advice
MortMort's video tutorials - he’s been doing it for a while and has tons to look at
Pixel Pete’s Video Tutorials - cover the basics well
Brandon James Greer’s Youtube Tutorials - He does some really rad sprite analysis and Challenge Videos too
some water tile tutorials I found a while back
RPG Maker/Game Oriented
nice tutorial about making a character in the standard rpg/three-fourths perspective
a nice series of pixel art tutorials focused on top down/three forths perspective games like RPGs and 2D Zelda-likes (pictured)
my tips on spriting charactersets for RPG Maker 2003
a quick tip on character walk cycles
metatiles: what are they, and how to make them
More Advanced
tiny introduction to clusters
a great talk on banding, clusters, and dithering, and how to correct common mistakes
interesting way to create a palette
cyangmou's stuff is absolute gold and has a lot of analyses, check out his stuff on perspective! (pictured)
a deep look at pixel art in general
this guy's nice dense talk on pixel art, including deconstructing good rpg tilesets & varying your tiles for video games.
slynerd's stuff is rad and comprehensive
Good luck!
Pixel Logic - A Guide to Pixel Art
(Pixel Logic is an in-depth pixel art tutorial book) The full book (242 pages) as well as a free preview (37 pages) can be found on the related website: pixellogicbook.com
This book focuses on VISUAL learning and limits text as much as possible, unlike other tutorials. Images > Text.
The tutorials will cover pixel art from start to finish, by studying video-game graphics from the past 30 years; with topics ranging from creating initial line art, to fully animating sprites. These tutorials will not focus on my own personal methods; instead they will combining examples from the past with modern application!
CHAPTERS:
Ch.0 - Introduction
Ch.1 - Line art
Ch.2 - Anti-aliasing
Ch.3 - Colours
Ch.4 - Readability
Ch.5 - Dithering
Ch.6 - Game perspectives
Ch.7 - Clean-up
Ch.8 - Subpixeling
Ch.9 - Animation
Game maker (and co-founder of game studio MiniBoss) Pedro Medeiros knows pixel art, and he wants to teach you. Every Tuesday since September, he’s posted an animated GIF demonstrating an aspect of animation.
♦️ Article on Lifehacker about Pedro's pixel art tutorials! Check out!
I love your art so much!! It's inspiring me to get back into pixel art (I gave up quickly). A huge problem I had was I didn't know what size was best to set my canvas for specific projects. I always ended up overestimating and making it too big and then it looked less like pixel art and more like grainy digital art. Do you have a rough guide you stick to for landscapes/bedrooms/cities VS. things like animals and characters?
aw thank you i'm happy to hear that! i hope u stick with it ♥
with landscapes/bedrooms/cities i use 275x155. this provides a fair amount of detail while still keeping it pixely, plus it resizes to wallpaper size. for vertical i just reverse it at 155x275.
i've also recently started to use 215x215 (same amount of pixels as above) so that i can resize my art to easily fit both wallpapers, and mobile videos... since tiktok and instagram reels are everything nowadays 😒
for characters and animals, generally i will base the size of the canvas around how i stylize eyes.
so i'll draw the eyes first, then just draw everything else around that.
i also have a smaller resolution style with 2px dot eyes that i use for adding characters to landscapes, since my landscape resolution is too small for my regular style unless the character is close to the screen.
hope this helps!
Pixel Logic - Pixel Art Tutorial Book
> created by pixel artist Michafrar and many guest artists.
> 36 page free preview available (includes chapter 0 + chapter 1)
“Pixel Logic is an in-depth pixel art tutorial book currently at 200 pages!
This book focuses on VISUAL learning and limits text as much as possible, unlike other tutorials. Images > Text.
The tutorials will cover pixel art from start to finish, by studying video-game graphics from the past 30 years; with topics ranging from creating initial line art, to fully animating sprites. These tutorials will not focus on my own personal methods; instead they will combining examples from the past with modern application!
Current Chapters:
Ch.0 - Introduction
Ch.1 - Line art
Ch.2 - Anti-aliasing
Ch.3 - Colours
Ch.4 - Readability
Ch.5 - Dithering
Ch.6 - Game perspectives
Ch.7 - Clean Up
Ch.8 - Subpixeling
The very last chapter of the book (Animation) is half-way done and should be out in Autumn (Fall). We’re almost there! 1 more chapter and we’re DONE.”
Top 5 Basic Tips For Pixel Art (by Cyangmou)
Additional pixel art tools, tutorials, games etc. can be found on the PixelArtus overview page