To no one’s surprise, I really like pixel art. Even after working as a pixel artist for over eight years, I still find it refreshing. And after having placed maybe hundreds of thousands of pixels, I have a lot to say about it! |  |
I decided to create this article as a guide for people who are new to the medium and to give them a jump start in creating their own pixel art. I'll be focusing on the things that make pixel art unique as an art form, and the most common practices and techniques used by pixel artists.
▶ Table of Contents:
▶ Why Pixel art?
There’s something that I find endlessly entertaining about the puzzle of creating an image out of small pieces, where your only choices are placement and colour. It puts the focus on your ability to make good shapes, and it challenges you to create things that are inherently interesting to look at. Unlike other mediums where your attention is divided by having to learn manual skills, like brush technique and mixing colours in traditional painting or line quality in digital art.
Pixel art is a medium where the result depends almost entirely on your knowledge, since all you are doing is choosing where to place each pixel, and how to arrange all the shapes together. This is also why pixel art is a great medium for getting into art for game development, since it allows you to create game-ready assets just using a mouse, free software, and your brain.
I find pixel art especially satisfying to learn and improve, because the main difference between your current and your old art is just how well you've arranged the pixels.
▶ How Pixel art works
Pixel art is more than just images made out of pixels. Even if we can see the pixels of an image, like in a downscaled photograph, it doesn’t mean It’s pixel art. For an image to be pixel art, there has to be an attempt at making it clear and readable, which can only be achieved by placing the pixels manually.
Trying to place pixels manually has a lot of interesting nuances that make it difficult, and there are a lot of unique concepts in pixel art that aren't shared with other art forms. However, I think there are only a couple of key things you need to understand as a beginner:
1 - Pixel art is noisy by nature.
If we compare a simple line in pixel art against the same shape in high resolution, the pixel art version looks more “noisy”, jagged, and complicated. Pixel art lines will always be less smooth than traditional lines because they are made out of a collection of 90-degree angles.
This noisiness has huge consequences and is the main driving force behind most of the pixel art fundamentals you will read about, because it makes it a challenge to create something pleasing to look at without making the image overly noisy.
This is why It's so common to use small colour palettes and a limited number of shapes in pixel art. By simplifying colours and shapes, we balance the medium's natural complexity. While it's not impossible to make clean pixel art with a lot of colours and detail, it requires careful placement and practice.
Keeping the total number of unique colours and shapes as small as possible will allow you to avoid most of the early obstacles of pixel art. It’s also a great way to learn if you are a beginner, because you only have to worry about a few elements at a time, instead of trying to balance a complicated piece.
2 - Every pixel matters.
Especially at low resolutions, changing just a few pixels can have drastic effects. This doesn't mean that you are expected to place every single pixel of the image by hand: Fill tools, line tools, and stamp tools that place pixels in bulk are used all the time. But it does mean that an unfortunately placed pixel can ruin a piece, so it's important to be intentional about where we choose to place them.
▶ Where to start
Before we get too deep into pixel art theory, many of you are probably wondering where to even start.
To make pixel art you need two things: some basic hardware (a computer with a mouse or a drawing tablet, or even a phone if you are brave enough) and some pixel art software.
Nowadays, there are lots of pixel art software options out there, and I'm planning to write a guide comparing them at some point. But any of the popular choices should have the basic features that you need to get started.
My software of choice is Aseprite, but here are some common alternatives:
Alright, but how do you actually.. make the pixel art? What is the process?
This varies a lot from person to person. Some people like to draw the line art and then fill it in, like in digital art. However, in pixel art, the far more common approach seems to be blocking out shapes and polishing them in stages.
I like to think of the first few steps as the “sketch” stage, where I make most of the choices about how I want the artwork to look without worrying too much about details. The rest of the process is the “polish” stage, where I build on top of that sketch and try to solve the puzzle of making the artwork actually look good.
The sketch stage defines the piece, and it’s where your artistic skills come into play the most. Things like anatomy, perspective, construction, light, and volume.
The polish stage is the one that takes the longest time, especially when the resolution of the artwork is large, and it’s where your pixel art knowledge matters the most.
▶ The Limitations of Pixel Art
The fundamental challenge of pixel art is readability. You can choose anything to draw, but your pixel art knowledge will determine how clear and readable you can make it. This puzzle becomes harder with less space available, as it becomes harder to squeeze in features and details with fewer pixels.
This might give the impression that at lower resolutions there are only a few "correct solutions" to draw some things, which would make pixel art a little samey. But I've found that even despite all of these limitations, there are still countless different styles that can be developed. This is because as soon as you change any of the rules that you've set for a piece (like the type of outlines or the number of colours), the puzzle changes completely.
Another thing to keep an eye on is visual artifacts. These are shapes and patterns that appear very often at low resolutions, which make your artwork harder to read.
You don't have to memorize each of these when you are starting out, but they are the usual culprits when something doesn't look right in your pixel art.
1 - Line Intersections
Lines don't really exist in pixel art. We just place pixels in a sequence hoping they will read as a contiguous line, which can cause unintended patterns to appear, especially when multiple lines intersect. In this example (red) a big square appears in the middle where the two lines meet. We can avoid this by changing the placement of the lines (green).
2 - Pillow Shading
Lots of weird visual artifacts can appear if we try to make gradients in pixel art, particularly if we try to use gradients for shading. The way to avoid this is to always think three-dimensionally, and shade objects imagining them being hit by a light source.
3 - Difficult angles
Some line inclinations are very difficult to get right in pixel art. My favourite example of this are stars, which are surprisingly tricky to make at low resolutions because of the weird angles of the points.
4 - Grain noise
If we try too fit too much detail into a small space or texture we can get a very jarring effect, where the image becomes completely unreadable. The solution to this is usually to step back and simplify.
▶ Making your art more readable
When you start looking into pixel art resources, you will come across a lot of weirdly named concepts and techniques, like “jaggies”, “dithering” or “anti-aliasing” and it’s easy to get overwhelmed or just start using them everywhere without thinking too much about them. In reality, all of these techniques are just meant to solve the same problem: making pixel art more readable.
Making your pixel art more readable is all about being intentional about the way you make it, and understanding why you are doing the things you do. The pixel art techniques that everyone talks about are just tools to help you achieve that.
But, at a more basic level, there are things you can do to avoid readability issues that will have a much greater impact:
1 - Thinking with Clusters.
All sprites are made out of a collection of shapes of a single colour each. We call these individual shapes “clusters”. In pixel art, it’s important to try to keep the total number of clusters relatively small, because it gets harder to keep our artworks clean and readable with too many.
2 - Keep your silhouettes clean.
Sometimes, the reason why an artwork doesn’t read right is not the amount of detail but the angle and position in which it is drawn. For characters, this means adjusting the poses to make their silhouettes easier to distinguish and avoid unfortunate overlaps. This also applies to objects; you can move things slightly in a scene to give them more room to breathe, or nudge the details inside a sprite just a few pixels to avoid confusion.
My favourite example of this is double outlines, which is something that happens when you place two shapes with outlines next to each other, creating a weird dark rectangle between them.
I generally try to remove double outlines any way I can because they can look strange or be distracting.
3 - Sometimes you just need more space.
If you have tried to simplify your sprite and move things around as much as possible but it still doesn’t read well, then you might have to consider making your canvas bigger.
For many projects this is difficult because the sprites have to be of a specific size, but I’ve found that it is often worthwhile to look for opportunities to justify bigger sprites whenever possible, because having more pixels to work with will almost always get you cleaner results.
But if you do find yourself in a situation where you have to make a complex sprite at a small size, It’s also possible to make only the problematic parts of the sprite bigger rather than the whole thing, like making the head of your character larger so you can include more details. But this kind of compromise should generally be left as a last resort, unless it works for the style of your project.
4 - Being intentional about your lines.
In pixel art, we call lines that have a broken pattern "jaggies", which appear when you are trying to draw a curve or a line.
But actually, jaggies are just a way to imply a different shape. If we were to always avoid jaggies, we'd be limited to very simple shapes.
Many times we will actually want a "broken" line, like when we are drawing something that isn’t smooth, or a complex shape that can’t be simplified into a single curve. Like in this bird, where I’ve used a jagged line on purpose to emphasise the shape of the wing.
Instead of treating jaggies like a mistake to avoid, be mindful of them and make intentional choices about each of your lines, and whether or not they should be smooth or jagged.
▶ Polishing Techniques
Once we've built the base for a sprite, there are a few things we need to know to be able to get the most out of it. These are what we call "polishing techniques", and the most well-known ones are anti-aliasing and dithering.
Something worth noting about these two is that they are optional, and somewhat of a stylistic choice. Dithering, in particular, is a very divisive technique that a lot of artists don't use at all.
1 - Anti-aliasing.
Anti-aliasing (AA) are intermediate pixels that we can place around lines to make them smoother.
There is actually a lot more to anti-aliasing than what it is given credit for: The reason why anti aliasing works is because our brain reads lighter pixels as being somehow thinner or smaller. And this can be exploited to squeeze in extra detail out of small sprites, by placing these lighter pixels in all the places where you want to imply something "smaller" than a pixel. It’s a great way to give an extra kick to our sprites.
The amount of anti-aliasing we use gets us different styles: A sprite with a lot of anti-aliasing will seem smoother and softer, while one without it will be sharper and more rough.
It’s also possible to use just a little bit of anti aliasing to improve readability (especially around curves), while leaving most of the sprite clean.
You should think of anti-aliasing as a spectrum that you can turn up or down in order to get different results.
2 - Dithering.
Dithering is a way of creating transitions between two colours when you don’t want to use a third colour, by drawing an interlaced pattern between them.
It's important to keep in mind that dithering comes at a huge cost: it adds noise and makes things less readable, which is really hard to balance, especially as a beginner. But when used properly, dithering can create a unique style that works really well for some artworks.
Dithering used to be very common in pixel art back when video game consoles had a small amount of unique colours they could display. It was the only way to create smooth transitions between colours that were too far apart, and the CRT screens helped a lot in softening it.
Nowadays, I don't personally recommend that new artists learn dithering (At least at the start). Dithering is really hard to control, and it's almost always a better idea to use extra colours if we need to soften a transition.
3 - Textures.
Texturing is the process of creating patterns to imply different materials. I could talk about creating textures in pixel art forever, and it warrants its own future article, but for now all you need to know is that the most important thing when making a texture is to have it adapt to the shape it is placed on. If we simply add a pattern on top of our character, it will look flat and break the illusion of volume.
In this case, the scales of the dragon follow the shapes of the body to keep it looking round. We can also adjust how much texture we use in different parts of the sprite to add interest, by having portions that are busier and portions that are more flat.
There is a lot more about pixel art that I want to talk about, but I think this is a decent start for now. Hopefully, I'll find the time to write more articles in the future, going deeper into some of these topics.
Thank you for reading,
-Reff Pixels (Pablo Rodriguez)
If you have any feedback or comments, shoot me an email at reffpixels@gmail.com
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✒️Last updated: July 2024 Please keep in mind that everything I say in this tutorial is just my best attempt at describing my own process for making pixel art, and it may be updated as time goes on. |