Welcome to my pixel tutorial section. This is where I keep all my rants and antics on techniques and methodologies explaining how I turn little picture elements into sprite, tile and background artwork. As it stands now, there is no real method to the madness concerning the order of which these are written, hopefully someday a munkee will jump through my window and bring order to all my scrambled digital files. Eventually, I wish to cover every element of pixel art that i know, ranging from 1-bit black n white tiles and sprites to full blown rendering using nothing but pixel pushing.

It seems that after years of technological advancements, and with 3d artistic methods are commonplace, there has been an ever increasing interest in gamers and developers concerning old school pixel art. Problem is, there are so few resources out on the internet related to pixel art that many indie artists dont know where to find help. The net needs more solid resources and that is what I hope to provide.

Thankfully, pixel art is coming back into demand with the coming of the GBA and other handheld devices (mobile phones, PDA's, etc), and more resource sites are starting to spring up from the masses. The ever popular tutorial written by Tsugumo found here is the best resource out there as of late. Pixel-Zone is also attracting a large user base of pixelers, and also hosts many tutorials on random aspects of pixel art. If you need a place to hang out with other pixelers, you can check out the pixel-zone link for their IRC channel, and check out #gameart on EFnet as well. Dont forget to post your latest sprites over at Pixelation for casual or in-depth critiques.

Ultimately, there is one rule to pixel art, Whatever makes your image looks correct and aesthetic is correct. There are many ways to reach the same result, and ultimately, a digital image comes down to pixels. Whether you place them there with the paint brush or flood fill or whatever other method you use to plot your pixels, if you think that your methodologies best illustrate your artwork, then that is perfectly fine. No tutorial can tell you 'the right way' of how to make your art; they simply exist to guide you to the end of the path. Have fun with your pixel art, and good luck!

SPRITES

The Basic Hero
Advanced Techniques for Detail (rpg characters)

Static Fighters (part 1: 'glob' method)
Static Fighters(part 2: conversion from scanned image)

BACKGROUNDS/TILES

Background Tutorial (Introductory) NEW