I wanna do Pixel Art

[dracos369]

I have decided I want to take up pixel art, and knowing about people here who do tiles for DCSS, decided to look for some noob advice.
Which programs/tools do you use?
Any tutorials you can reccomend?
Also, any other wisdom regarding the subject would be appreciated.
I already looked up these online, but I think DCSS tiles are amazing and I'm interested in what people who made them have to say. (Also, maybe I even make some tiles myself )

[Shard1697]

paint.net is a good simple program to start with that should contain basically everything you need. GIMP is also good and contains some functionality paint.net does not have, although it is unintuitive for newcomers.

If you are looking to do spritework for stuff that is not DCSS, including stuff that is actually animated instead of almost exclusively still images, graphicsgale is a good choice that I've seen multiple game artists use. However, some features are locked behind the paid version. Free version is still quite good though and the paid version is at least not nearly as expensive as many art programs.

There are many many pixel art tutorials out there you can find with some quick googling, I'd recommend looking up some stuff and then just diving in. Don't worry if your first stuff looks messy or weird, practice is the only way to really improve. Just start making some simple stuff(guy with sword. dog. fireball.) and see what happens.

[duvessa]

How to make GIMP's interface 60% more intuitive: check Windows -> Single-Window Mode

[savageorange]

GrafX2. It's free, opensource, scriptable, designed for pixel art, and IMO the only better application for pixel art is Pro Motion ($70 and has an IMO very annoying interface). Only criticism I would really make of GrafX2 is that it doesn't handle multiple layers per frame in animations (so I do those using GIMP + GIMP-GAP, when needed).

You should really head over to Pixelation forums for any more involved advice -- there is a lot of expertise there.

[CanOfWorms]

you don't really need anything more advanced than mspaint, anything else exists to streamline the process. there's not really any point in getting bogged down in advanced concepts like layers, palette indexing, hotkey remapping, index painting/color quantizing etc. until you're comfortable with the basics

with that said gimp is not a great tool for actually creating pixel art because it's designed primarily for non-pixel art work so you have a bunch of features that are essentially useless unless you are using a technique like index painting/resizing to make your pixel art

also there are two common pitfalls newcomers at pixel art tend to fall in:

-no hue ramps: this is pretty much what any beginner with no art background does (because if you have an art background you have some concept of a hue ramp). basically it's when an artist creates a ramp of shades by brightening/darkening a colour; this looks bad because it lacks depth and looks lifeless and dull. an example of no hue shifting vs hue shifting:


source
the top ramp is just one colour with various lightning values, the bottom one is a ramp where the colour moves towards a different colour (the green becomes slightly more blue as it becomes darker and more yellow as it becomes lighter.) hue shifting tends to add a lot of "pop". if you look at old tiles, the really old tiles tend to have no hue shifting when the newer ones (especially made by me or ontoclasm) have hue shifts everywhere.

-pillow shading: another pitfall one that people without art backgrounds tend to fall in: this is just improper understanding of shading. the easiest way to explain this is with a picture:

source (same as above)
the left skull has no actual shading, the colour just gets brighter the further you are from a boundary. the right skull has actual shading. basically you need to learn proper shading

if you want good resources you can check:
http://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299
http://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=5692
http://www.vg-resource.com/thread-25474.html
http://makegames.tumblr.com/post/426486 ... t-tutorial
they're not perfect, some of the stuff is pixel art culture that not all pixel artists agree on but it's a good starting point. learning a bit about colour theory (how to pick colours, the concept of hot/cold colours, complementary colours and why they matter) is also good

afterwards you should rummage through the pixelation forum and checki their WIPs section since it's populated with progress snapshots of work and there tends to be a lot of art breakdowns by the more experienced users

[Arrhythmia]

hey speaking of tiles can someone please fix the terrible "summon horrible things" tile bloax shat out years ago.

like jesus those three pixels of tentacle peaking over the boundary look so god damned bad it's unbelievable

[CanOfWorms]

you're going to have to be specific about which tentacle

[Arrhythmia]

you're going to have to be specific about which tentacle

all of them

[savageorange]

if you look at old tiles, the really old tiles tend to have no hue shifting when the newer ones (especially made by me or ontoclasm) have hue shifts everywhere.

I don't disagree with hue shifts, but it definitely needs to be noted that they are best as unified as possible (eg it looks damn weird to have shadows go towards blue on some objects and towards red or purple on others.), and also that different materials can get away with different amounts of hue shifting before they look wrong. So real light physics needs to be kept in mind.