Pixellogic pdf free download

Remember, that you need space to use these. Stylised dithering is a great way to get started and have fun with textures! This randomness is controlled, rather than loose. Gradients are the transition from light to dark. Textures are the feel of material. Stylised dithering can be a combination or both, or just regular gradients. Dithering can provide texture if you use it for patches, but not as gradients. On this screenshot alone there are many examples. There is no dithering and it holds up well.

Even with unlimited colours, dithering sometimes imitate soft shading. Think of this usage of dithering like a smudge brush. You can do the same technique, but just using a buffer-shade in your colour-ramps. Mixing colours Dithering can help you blend colours, especially on blurry displays.

Computer graphics after this point would have more colours and even transparent alpha layers, so this technique is extremely rare nowadays. However, older graphical displays such as the 4 colour CGA mode hugely benefited from having extra values by blending cyan, magenta, black and white! We briefly discussed this in chapter 3 page 25 where with 4 colours you can easily obtain more values! When dithering is time-consuming, there are ways to use dithering-brushes! Some of these programs use dither patterns or brushes that help you speed things up.

Pro Motion GraphicsGale Graf x2. More interestingly, game artist and game developer Dan Fessler DanFessler studies HD Index painting for Photoshop which makes dithering easier to manipulate. Article: danfessler. The Sega Genesis Mega Drive heavily relied on lined dithering.

The Super Nintendo, had dithering early in its lifecycle, but later games used proper alpha layers. Cross hatching is the oldest form of using patterns to show tone and value by using just 1 colour. It can be found in pencil drawings, printmaking, etching, woodblock etc. Pointillism also requires small distinct dots to create an image. Monochrome graphics, such as MacPaint can only show 2 colours: black and white.

Many pixel dithering patterns were used to show greyscale. Many pixel artists choose not to use dithering. It all comes down to preference. It can be quite time-consuming and tricky to get right.

You can choose to avoid it and stick to clean, solid shapes. Dithering is a powerful tool nonetheless. There are some marvellous things to create with each pattern. If you do choose to have dithering, use it with moderation. The further an object is, the smaller it looks. The closer it is, the bigger it looks. When creating pixel art illustrations, perspective is a necessary skill. In most 2D games, there is no real perspective or vanishing points.

As artists and designers, we need to think outside the box to make explorable worlds! Use a perspective that benefits your game-play. Make sure the visuals of your world and characters work with your game design. Plane A 2D flat surface that shows length and width. Axis A geometric line with a fixed direction. Axis Y is up and down, axis X is left and right, and axis Z goes back and forth.

Vanishing point Due to perspective, two parallel lines meet at a single point. Like a road that extends towards the horizon and disappears into a single dot.

Projection The way a 3D view is drawn in 2D. Think of it like how the world is shown on a map. Orthographic Flat views with no perspective. These are flat views with no perspective. These views lack depth, so you can use parallax scrolling to add perspective. Only 1 or 2 planes are visible with game-play being on a 2D plane. With only 2 planes visible, and no vanishing points, everything looks like a square grid. The geometry is just a guideline though.

You can draw things at any angle you want. This is the most common perspective for 2D games. Cross section Camera right in front, the world is like a slice. Oblique view Front side is flat, but the sides are slanted. These views are ideal for corridor-type levels. No matter the view, the line the character travels s along does not change. The grid is made up of squares tiles which makes creating worlds and environments a breeze. You can have different variations of top-down angles.

It depends on how high, or low you want the camera to be. Common angle. Easier for tilesets. Good for altitude. However some dungeon crawler games like 2D Zelda titles look into a room with a camera placed directly above. As a result, the room is in perspective while the objects are not. They appear in a top-down angle instead. Overworld example. Dungeon example.

Oddly enough, outside the dungeons, Zelda games adopt the traditional top-down view. This looks vastly different from the 1-point perspective used in dungeon rooms. Everything looks correct when sprites are near the north wall A. By flipping the screen upside down, we can see why the sprites in B look very wrong, yet the perspective stays the same. Some games include walls; others remove them to show more of the floor.

This is a sub category of top down views. This design choice is uncommon and only works for a particular set of game-play types. You can find real world examples of this style in geographic maps, blue prints and floor plans. This view is good for aerial views, but it lacks depth.

If you want to focus on height, the following views are better options: Top down, dimetric and planometric oblique. See p. This perspective shows 3 sides of an object, at all times. Isometric means that Dimetric means only Oblique means the all axes are equal. This is technically The unique aspect here is that the grid is made of diamond tiles, not squares. This makes it harder to fit into square grids and align them.

The area where the lines connect is clean. These tiles align perfectly and suited for game development and tile sets. Unfortunately the areas where lines cross each other are chunky double pixels and not so nice to look at. Use this method to avoid chunky cross sections! One diamond is spread across 2 square tiles. Every other adjacent diamond is spread across 4 tiles. Try making a checkerboard to practice! You will always need a grid to help guide you.

If you use free-form backgrounds for games, you will have to turn them into a playable map. It can look more unique, but can be a nightmare to program if you have to turn it into a map. Make sure whatever you draw can have proper collision. Within an isometric grid, you can build all sorts of items. Not everything has to be necessarily blocky. Cubes and cylinders can have a load of personality and come in all shapes and sizes. When you eyeball them, you: When you construct them, you: Visually estimate measurements.

Will be slower but way more precise. Can easily deconstruct objects Use guidelines and get the most into simple geometric shapes accurate results. With just a simple cube, you build all sorts of objects! A cylinder can be turned into a tree stump or a barrel.

A pyramid can be turned into a roof or a tent. A cone can be turned into a tree or a tower. A sphere can be turned into a mushroom or a bowl. Draw the medians. Oval around the square. Draw the circle within. Skew it in the direction the object or character is facing.

With the help of trigonometry, you can find out how to keep the diamond as it is. Most isometric fields have flat areas. Flat terrains are the easiest to program and draw. Not many 2D videogames have slopes. In grid based RPGs like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2, these slopes will only appear in 4 directions since the game-play only has 4 directions.

This is a very uncommon view. This view is sometimes considered oblique, because the top plane is orthographic. Other names include axonometric oblique, or plan oblique or even military oblique and commonly planometric oblique. The front planes are orthographic, so flat and without perspective. However, all other planes slant towards the side, and remain parallel.

L: No vanishing point, all equal size. R: True perspective with vanishing point. An object seen from a top down angle will also obey the normal rules of perspectives and has its shape skewed towards a vanishing point. No matter what viewpoint, the lines will be skewed. Games that have 3D environments with sprite textures can be manipulated to look like a traditional top-down view.

Original graphics. Orthographic version by user GuyPerfect. In game illustrations can easily imitate perspective. It usually takes too much time and energy to do this manually, so newer games use their engines to resize sprites automatically. You would have trouble telling it was the playable character Link. It was later revealed by Eiji Aonuma producer of the series that many objects in the game were set at an angle to improve visibility.

Satoru Iwata. The shape of this construction is quite peculiar. This is what the ship is meant to look like. The actual ship was never shown outside of the overworld and 1 battle screen on the deck. The ship is only visible from 1 angle the front. The easiest way to avoid any confusion is by simply flipping the ship vertically. With simple adjustments, it can no longer be mistaken for a tower. Remember to ask for feedback from others to avoid readability issues! When you build an isometric scene, use a grid and guide lines to aid you.

You can sketch it out in a different program first, or simply go directly into pixel art. Follow the outer Build a rough shape shape of the ovals… with just a few ovals.

If not, adjust the ovals a bit. Block shapes within the tree. Define details and shading. Add highlights and shadows. The point here is to deconstruct shapes and help them guide you.

However to show a sense of scale requires thinking outside the box. Why are there no low-angle shots and only in cutscenes? In 3D games you see low angle shots in Shadow of the Colossus PS2 , as the game is setting the mood and showing a sense of scale. You can distinguish views into 2 planes to give a sense of scale. You can use Mode 7 to scale up Remember that the player will look at this view of the world throughout the whole game.

With illustrations, feel free to draw in any perspective you want. You have more freedom but you still have to follow the basic rules of perspective!

Roughs Clean-Up Complete. If you are creating a video game, or simply making pixel art for leisure, you will most likely get feedback on your work.

This may come in the form of tips or advice on how to fix certain things. It is important you also self assess your work, in addition to others evaluating it. You will grow more as an artist as a result! Introduction Anti-Aliasing Colour Readability. From rough to clean Some video games leave unfinished graphics in their data to use as place-holders.

The method used here seems like a mix of line work and shapes. Body parts have been moved around and the head has been shrunk. In this example, the image has been redrawn once or twice at different sizes. The pixel art also underwent a few colour changes. The line-art here is sculpted and then refined at the end. Sprite by Michafrar, By guest artist: Yaa character by Nintendo. These sprites were very rough in their early stages.

They are in-between frames of an animation. This game like most other Capcom games creates its graphics by digitizing paper drawings. The final version is simply shaded. There were quite some more changes made in the line- art stage. Some changes were subtle, others Early version Final version were completely different. The final result can look completely different from the first line-art.

Both their heads have been greatly cleaned up during the shading phase. You can always make improvements in the same art-style. In the Mega man X games on Super Nintendo, the protagonist has no changes made to his default sprite.

However, the character Zero is given brighter colours, improved stance, silhouette and cleaner shapes. Art is subjective. Everyone has their own favourites. Not all changes are necessarily improvements to all of your audience. As you probably know, design changes are also made to suit tastes. There are more than just these aspects beyond this book. The bigger skull size allows more space for details and The sword is more 3D and subpixels for the eyes and makes the silhouette more mouth.

Same goes for the cloth around his pelvis. They have more personality. With only 1 pixel difference the A new dark line outlines the pupil looks smaller. They now stand white pixel is quite a change. A darker shadow outlines the mouth. The colours are more vibrant. The face got a complete re-do. The smile is wider and is more closer to his model sheet. The jaw now has His legs and arms stand out anti-aliasing and a smoother outline. The hands are smaller and more readable.

The shapes of similarly coloured pixels are The sprite includes details that are cleaner too. Much more simplified. Not just the stance but also hair, and collar. Between these versions, the only big difference is seen in the right portrait.

The left and middle ones only have differences in highlights and hair shape. The middle one used in the final game has a shiny reflection in its eye. The eye is much sharper too. Remember that 1 pixel can make a difference. For some reason, the Sonic 2 sprite of Knuckles has red dithering around his mouth. Using different lighting makes the object appear more 3-D. The outline is shaded too. The edges are rounded as well. In the new one, you can see the platform cast a shadow onto the red piece.

This is where shape language comes into place. Pixels of the same colour clump together into shapes. We will call them shapes. Others call them clusters, clumps,chunks, blocks, etc.

Puyo-Puyo Super Famicom. This happens when puyos of the same colour are next to each other. Maybe try seeing them as Rock Climbing chunks. Vector art is very similar in this regard to pixel art. Vector art is made of geometric shapes that can be scaled infinitely. The shapes have no blur and can all be edited freely. When these shapes are clean and well crafted, they will make your sprite a bit more readable!

It focuses on juxtaposing silhouettes or shapes. Some elements of Notan imagery occur in woodblock prints. These prints use carved blocks of wood to print silhouettes. These look a lot like stencils you would see in graffiti. When you layer several shapes over each-other, you obtain a fully coloured picture. This art-form is popular world wide, but is especially prolific in Japanese and Asian Arts. Seymour Road Studios, UK. Walt Stanchfield. Cleaner shapes convey the most information and will often look better.

The PlayStation may have The graphics in Lemmings left are noisy more advanced graphics, but and the graphics in Castlevania right when reduced to 5 unique colours, these rocks will are clean cut. In fact, A-A can help improve your shapes slightly!

A-A will not be your saving grace, though. Castlevania X: Rondo of Blood TurboGrafx Dithered artwork is also made of shapes, with dithering blending the cell shading. Clean shading is important for both simple and detailed works. The left tree trunk has 4 main shades and looks more like cell shading. The right tree trunk has up to 8 shades in its colour ramp and is highly detailed. Getting the hang of this is just like regular drawing; it happens over time. In episode 4 Bucci highlights this theory within painting, but it can also translate to pixel art!

Fixing the shapes of your pixel art is also subjective as each artist has their own preferences and hypotheses. The final step can sometimes feel like a roundabout. You might have to walk around in circles before finding the right exit. By making multiple versions of the same sprite, you can pick your favourite version.

In Chapter 4, we discussed how a single pixel can make a difference. With little space, it can be tricky to pixel exactly what you want. Keep trying until you get a decent result. If nothing works, try to think outside the box and start fresh. Not too sure about the entire sprite? Try doing multiple sketches so you can get a feel for the posture or the mood. By guest artist: Shawn Martins.

This can save you a lot of time. If you draw or animate digitally, you must be already familiar with this tool. Make sure the lasso tool is aliased! Remember to tweak and fix things as you go. Both these sprites were made by the same artist Michafrar. Sub-pixeling has been brought up several times now. Even the tiniest changes can improve your sprites.

Look forward to it in Chapter 8. Looks quite messy! It looks like a lot of work, but you can totally clean it up. Use the resized mosaic as a base, and redraw important features and lines.

This is one of the best exercises to intuitively learn pixel art. Modifying shrunken sprites will make you think twice about pixel placement. Try doing it yourself! However, clean-up is more often used for rotated sprites. You might rotate body parts or backgrounds more often than resizing them. Sharpness is more than just how fuzzy or clear an image is. Colour, contrast and shapes also play an important role. So no filters. Here are some methods to keep your sprites sharp and readable, even from a far distance.

Hand 1 was be drawn with line-art, but it created unreadable splotches of colour. Higher contrast also makes it more readable! Without adjusting any pixels, you can change the contrast in colours.

You simply do this by recolouring every ramp of a colour palette or by using colour sliders and then manually fixing them. Keep in mind: Contrast can be mood, hue, saturation and values. This is the same principle seen in tutorials about comic books and storyboards. Tangent outlines can stand out. Touching up colours is usually not enough, you must also consider the following: lightsources, highlights, shadows, areas. You will have to play with shapes, light and shadows to make the necessary fixes.

Changes can also involve referencing character model sheets or how designs are constructed. With the selection tool or lasso tool , you can easily move parts around. Pixel art is easy to edit, so the proportions of a drawing can be fixed even at the very end! With this adjusted barrel sprite, you see more of the top lid, and less of the cylinder. To ensure the objects you draw are within the same perspective, simply place the sprites next to each other to spot any mistakes or differences.

For this sprite, I had to be time-efficient and decided to start from a drawn sketch. From there, I shrunk it to pixel art size. One sketch to get the personality and feel right, then another one to create cleaner line-art.

Instead of going straight to line-art, I will tackle this sprite area by area. Character by RiddicTH. No matter which method you use, the process is usually: Flat colours - Shading - Details. So just in case I keep the sketch on a layer. The hands are big enough, so it was possible to outline. Check back on the Multiple Versions section of this chapter! In these final stages I decided to tweak the colours within the line-art to give a better sense of contrast, while also adding detail to the bottom of the image.

With lighter line art at the bottom, it implies a sense of line weight that can be hard to see with a pure black outline. We look at this style of outline in Chapter 1! To make the outline pop out, I added darker pixels to make it sharper.

This ties into the Sharpness section of this chapter. Once the sketch is complete, the base colours are laid out over the sketch. They generally start by detailing one area, in order to establish the style, colours and lighting. Nothing is permanent, though. This is apparent when looking at the changes made during the process.

The legs went through multiple changes. Many different versions were made to make the pose more dynamic. Once the legs are complete, more details are added to the rest of the sprite. Once in a while, the artist goes back to adjust previously completed parts. This involves moving parts around with the selection tool, and redrawing parts from scratch.

Once they are satisfied with the final look, the sprite is complete! Yaa starts a scene with a very rough sketch directly in pixels. The light source is set from the start. Here are a few specific parts of the artwork, step by step. Clean-up in pixel art is similar to the clean-up in 2D Animation.

They share same mind-set and logic. You revise the original roughs and literally clean them up by going over them again with detail. All these adjustments and changes happen at any stage of your work. All the techniques from the previous chapter play a role in clean-up. Most changes occur when you get feedback or auto-critique your work, at the very end.

Many golden era games used this technique. These graphics have inspired the artists of today. This is 1 pixel.

A subpixel, but impossible This is also impossible. The pixel is the smallest unit of resolution. We can NOT go any smaller, nor split pixels between two squares. So we have to pretend and find a way to imitate it. Subpixeling is giving the illusion of something smaller than 1 pixel.

Subpixeling is an advanced and complex procedure. When you see this icon, it means the image has an animated version. You can open these animations and flip through the frames. They can be found in the digital folder that comes with this chapter. For non-moving images, subpixeling is referred to as anti-aliasing and line weight.

For animated sprites it is referred to as subpixeling animation. The very last chapter of the book is here. Chapter 8 is now on Gumroad available for download! This one is about Subpixeling. The very last chapter of the book Animation is half-way done and should be out in Autumn Fall. En ce moment le PDF contient les 5 premiers chapitres du livre. Keep reading.

Chapter 7 is now on Gumroad available for download! This one is about clean-up. If a black outline defined those details, the sprite would be muddy and less readable. A precious waste of pixels and space! Paul introduced a very important concept: Readability, which will be the subject of Chapter 4. Colours can be on affected by limits. Today, there are no limits, but artists still like to challenge themselves!

Sometimes it can create beautiful effects. This confusion lead popular culture to refer to graphics from consoles before as 8-bit, and bit for graphics after Look up the limitations of each console, or computer for more info. NES Commodore64 Even as of , modern day. GIF image files still have a colour limitation of colours. The format last updated in and is still 8 bits per pixel.

This section is for people who want to replicate old video games, hacking a 2D video game or like to have fun with limitations. There is 1 colour ramp for every main colour. This is the final version I decided to use. Reduced the colours from 24 to Not bad. It was barely visible. The sprite is still intact.

However, each sprite is different. Step by step summary 82 Scenes with limited colours Guest writer: Jinn Re-use your colours to keep your palette small.

Colours can be re-used in the same piece without losing its value. You can place colours together that would otherwise belong to different ramps! The key is to diversify your colours as much as possible.

Having different objects with the same colour touching directly will make them blend. The hair is purposefully red to separate the girl from the wall. Luckily, we can make it more intuitive to use by rearranging the colours by how we perceive the colours in terms of luminosity. You can extend the palette further with dithering too.

But be warned: excessive dithering can make a surface look textured or rough. Many other aspects use colours to their advantage to get the most out of pixel art. Just make sure to refresh your colour theory and remember: Experiment! Zelda: LTTP had some muddy sprites. Agahnim is the peak of pixel misinterpretations. So is he wearing a hat, or is it a face? Readability means Clarity. How easy is it for the viewer to understand what you pixeled? How well does your sprite read?

Is Mario smiling or shocked when you lose a life in Mario 3? When he is on a bigger canvas, it is easier to tell. Small sprites need recognizable features for readability. The size of your sprite and canvas will determine what your focus should be. Guest artist: Syosa 88 Case Study: Cryamore One of the most important decisions in the development of Cryamore was the sprite size.

More room to animate. CONS: Time and effort for animation. Frames are finished sooner. Simplified facial expressions. Less detail for complex character design. Of course, we could just keep the HD sprites and reduce the frame count, but that would make things look ten times cheaper, [ Just by the size being cut down, animations will look even more fluid.

Smaller sprites also allow you swap costumes more easily! Bigger sprites have little readability issues. Smaller sprites tend to be a bit trickier. Obvious right? Does he still look like Yoshi? Even within the same canvas, your sprites can always be improved. Make multiple versions and have people pick, if you feel uncertain! The sprite is within 16x However many people see this as a boy holding a cup. Most of the square looks white. It has 2 black pixels and the 2 grey ones to show the shadow of the rim.

If we change the sprite drastically, we risk creating new readability problems. Right now it looks like the Game boy became his shirt, and his torso. We can extend the cup and move it up covering the face even more, but this could easily look like a beard or all kinds of other things. We now have a flat grey shape with a white line of 4 px wide. The white highlight makes the object more 3D. This looks more like a kid holding a Game boy!

For small sprites, simplicity usually works. Thus pixel placement plays an important role in order for viewers to understand your work. One pixel might just change how people interpret it! A tiny area like 6 by 6 pixels can offer you a large amount of variety! They were enough to show diversity. Even the smallest pixel can make a difference for low-res graphics. The buzzy beetles from SMB somewhat resembled shells with a big black pearl-like eye.

Recognizable features Guest writer: Ellian So you need to create a new sprite. What size does it actually needs to be? Ask yourself a few questions: Do I need to see their hands moving? Do their mouths need to be visible or animated? Must facial expression be readable? Do they wear or hold an item?

Does the sword have a magical gem in it? No matter how big or small the item is, on a small pixel canvas it needs to be recognizable! The smallest part I want here is facial expressions. Try to figure out the smallest part that needs to be visible. Find out what makes the character unique and represent the concept the best. Even better, ask someone with little to no pixel art knowledge. By Michafrar With less space, there is little room for many facial features or hands. You still can add them, but they will make your work crowded and muddy.

Working in bigger resolutions may seem easier, but anything is possible with small resolutions. They are the trickiest at small scales. Start hands by painting shapes. Tiny line art is too hard. Line art is tricky with barely any space! It will confuse you even more. Use flat shapes, then detail. Much easier!

It will help you picture the hands in 3D in your head. Draw hands like mittens - then add detail. There is no point highlighting every single finger. Focus on basic shapes.

Even when you have fingers spread out, start with mittens. Focus on the index and the thumb. They define the hands. An opposable thumb and an index finger define the human hand.

Those two fingers are enough to show gripping, pinching, pointing, and so much more. Draw only 3 fingers and a thumb if needed. Cartoons sometimes draw 4 fingers to simplify animation. Pixel art too. Only draw 5 fingers if you have enough space.

Use different colours to separate each finger. The more different colours there are, the more they stand out. To tell where each finger is, you will have to play around with colour brightness. Highlights and shadows help bring volume to your otherwise flat hands! Then use it as a reference. You can also study the anti-aliasing to help you out a bit. Symbols II - Eyes 1. Eyes are the main focus and highly important. Human beings are captivated by emotions and faces.

For this reason alone, you should polish your creature sprites, may it be animals or humanoids. Your audience identifies faces by looking for eyes. They are generally the first thing people notice.

Art Guest artist: Temmie Chang 2. Sometimes there is no space for eyes! If so, focus on the shadows cast on the face to create the eye area. If you are unsure, look up some references of games. Glasses: keep it simple! You either focus on The glasses themselves and exclude the eyes.

OR The top of the frame and exclude the bottom side of the frame. A few pixels make a big difference when zoomed out. When zoomed in, some pixel placement may not make ANY sense to you.

When zoomed out, some pixel combinations may give eyes a completely different feel! A-A and sub-pixeling really come in handy here! A white shine can also affect the outcome!

By Michafrar 5. Shock Troopers: 2nd Squad Arcade Eyes usually define your style. With pixels you can do whatever you want in term of eyes. There are no limitations besides your canvas. You can further develop your style but just like regular art, make sure to polish your technique.

Use subtle Anti-aliasing if needed. It has nice results! They give room for emotions and expressions and clearly show who the character is. Heads are the main reference for human proportion and they easily vary! They focus on body language. As a result, you should pay attention to volume, shading and anatomy within these restricted areas. Make sure to use silhouettes. Your characters have personality and act. The proportions you choose depend mostly on what your sprite is used for. General artwork, user icons, overworld sprites, dialogue sprites, different perspectives: you name it!

Silhouettes Feat. Streets of Rage 2 Streets of Rage 3 Streets of Rage - like most sequels do - would improve their sprites over time. The silhouette of Signal is better in the 3rd instalments as his stance, his fist and his hairstyle is highlighted. Duelyst PC Open Beta, Drawing a rough silhouette base and filling up with details is a good practice.

Try not to overlay things, and if that happens, use colour contrast to tell features apart. Their design becomes more recognizable and more readable. Break them down to 2 or 3 main colours like other recognizable characters. She wears a large blue scarf. Well-known characters seen in many games have designs with vibrant colours. Mario Sonic Pikachu Pick the right colours to represent your characters features.

Wrong colours lead to confusion. Nose or beak? However their nose was coloured orange, which makes it look like a bird with a beak. Later games fixed this. Super Mario Maker WiiU fixed it. Light is used to show important details, Dark pixels fills the silhouette or outlines different features.

Light and dark could change roles depending on your background colour or light source. Use both together to form shape, volume and depth. The brightest tones highlight edges and crucial details. Using a different light source e. Spacing is using limited space to fit in as much information as possible. If you use up too much space in your sprite, give it more room to breathe!

Think of it like letter-spacing with fonts! They can hinder readability as seen in Chapter 1 p9 , Chapter 3 p20 and in this chapter on the previous page you just read! The way pixels are spaced out makes it look like bunny ears instead! Except for one good frame: Mario kicking a shell is undoubtedly a frog head. The eyes are completely white with no eyelids.

If we use the space between the eye and the sideburns, we create a tangent! We can create more space for the hair by selecting a part of the face and move it to the right. Now the hair has 2px of width, enough for it to stand out. Make sure to try multiple versions! So to paint the hair we have to use the darkest skin tone and make the hair more noticeable. What do you want your audience to focus on? If you are not making a game, you still want to distinguish backgrounds from objects.

This happens in other mediums such as Photography. This is for Readability. The colours of the background are softer to compliment the foreground. As seen in Chapter 2, AA can slightly improve readability when used moderately. Right: Edited. Dithering checkered shading is pretty useless on small scale sprites. Dithering works well on larger pixel art or textured surfaces. It makes your sprite look rougher and less smooth.

A less common technique nowadays, but useful for colour limitations. When working on a picture, make sure to zoom out a lot. To prevent this you can also just have a permanent preview of what your work looks like at its true resolution.

By Michafrar Blurring the picture. Sprites will most likely look blurry on different devices, or even the human eye will blur pixels when viewed from far away. Blurring can also help you find banding.

If it looks bad when blurred, you have to go back and fix it in the pixel version. By Michafrar Waifu2x Waifu2x allows you to upscale any picture, not just pixel art. It upscales your work, reduces the noise level and carefully optimizing your work for higher resolutions. With limited space we sometimes have to have to sacrifice detail to keep things clear and readable.

Remember that every single pixel matters. Working small is a challenge, but it will make you realise how important every pixel is. Food for thought Tips and tricks Art design Introduction Size matters… …but pixels matter more! You use patterns to mix colours.

With only a few colours you can create the illusion of 3 colours or more! Dithering is often associated with the early days of pixelart. Older computer graphics got the most out of their colour limits with dithering techniques. Pixel art? It gives pixel art an unnecessary gritty texture. Over time, game graphics added more and more colours. Dithering is less common now. It also harms readability, as seen in Chapter 4, p. To understand how often and to what degree dithering is used, study game art and learn from your favourites.

Try shading with clean shapes first, though. Textures see stylized dithering. Heavy colour limitations. Backgrounds: skies, space, vast areas that may otherwise look empty or flat. The fully dithered version on the top left is the original as it appears in the game within NES limitations. The others are modified versions. Should you get lost, remember each level with a pattern.

Checkers, crosses, squares, diamonds, etc. Mario Tennis Gameboy Colour You can choose how many levels of dithering you want between 2 shades. It all comes down to preference or the length of the gradient or how many shades you have. Dithering for curves Curves can be trickier to dither, so make sure to fiddle around to see how it looks.

Sometimes you may get double pixels that look out of place. This is because tile sets are always an even number of pixels. If this happens, make sure to have 2 different tiles. Your goal is to have dithering seamlessly blend colours without them standing out. With low contrast, it feels softer. Keep the contrast low, so the dithering will be smoother.

Lines work better for blur than checkerboards do. This only works for limited animation, NOT smooth animations.

Parallel lines were for buffer-shades and opacity tricks for old CRT televisions. The only difference is that this show more value and levels of gradients. It can also add a neat effect. It uses only 1 line of checkerboards. They resemble dents or teeth. This dithering is useful for textures if you have little space. The gradient sometimes goes back to lighter patches on its way to the darkest shade.

Different patches of checkers are weaved together. You can still do this manually, but having 2 layers makes it easier not to get lost! You still need to make sure the gradient seamlessly flows from light to dark. Random dithering can be obtained by randomly hand placing pixels here and there.

It can appear quite lazy, so use it in clever ways and on big canvases. It still needs a lot of work and looks like random noise.

Of course, random dithering can be done by hand. You can create this effect from scratch, if you wish. You start by painting several shades of colours and finish by blending the edges with random noise. Get creative! The previous forms of dithering were quite rough.

With stylised dithering, you can apply your own textures to create gradients without that gritty feel! Remember, that you need space to use these. Stylised dithering is a great way to get started and have fun with textures!

This randomness is controlled, rather than loose. Gradients are the transition from light to dark. Textures are the feel of material. Stylised dithering can be a combination or both, or just regular gradients. Dithering can provide texture if you use it for patches, but not as gradients. These graphics below have textures, but no dithering nor gradients. On this screenshot alone there are many examples. There is no dithering and it holds up well.

Even with unlimited colours, dithering sometimes imitate soft shading. Think of this usage of dithering like a smudge brush. You can do the same technique, but just using a buffer-shade in your colour-ramps. This looks fine cel-shaded but dithering looks better here … Mixing colours Dithering can help you blend colours, especially on blurry displays.

Computer graphics after this point would have more colours and even transparent alpha layers, so this technique is extremely rare nowadays. However, older graphical displays such as the 4 colour CGA mode hugely benefited from having extra values by blending cyan, magenta, black and white! When dithering is time-consuming, there are ways to use dithering-brushes! Some of these programs use dither patterns or brushes that help you speed things up. More interestingly, game artist and game developer Dan Fessler DanFessler studies HD Index painting for Photoshop which makes dithering easier to manipulate.

Article: danfessler. The Sega Genesis Mega Drive heavily relied on lined dithering. Cross hatching is the oldest form of using patterns to show tone and value by using just 1 colour.

It can be found in pencil drawings, printmaking, etching, woodblock etc. Pointillism also requires small distinct dots to create an image. Many pixel dithering patterns were used to show greyscale. It all comes down to preference. It can be quite time-consuming and tricky to get right. You can choose to avoid it and stick to clean, solid shapes.

Dithering is a powerful tool nonetheless. There are some marvellous things to create with each pattern. If you do choose to have dithering, use it with moderation. The further an object is, the smaller it looks. The closer it is, the bigger it looks. When creating pixel art illustrations, perspective is a necessary skill. As artists and designers, we need to think outside the box to make explorable worlds!

Use a perspective that benefits your game-play. Make sure the visuals of your world and characters work with your game design. Plane A 2D flat surface that shows length and width. Axis A geometric line with a fixed direction. Axis Y is up and down, axis X is left and right, and axis Z goes back and forth.

Vanishing point Due to perspective, two parallel lines meet at a single point. Like a road that extends towards the horizon and disappears into a single dot. Projection The way a 3D view is drawn in 2D. Think of it like how the world is shown on a map. Orthographic Flat views with no perspective.

Only 1 or 2 planes are visible with game-play being on a 2D plane. With only 2 planes visible, and no vanishing points, everything looks like a square grid. The geometry is just a guideline though.

You can draw things at any angle you want. No matter the view, the line the character travels s along does not change. You can have different variations of top-down angles. It depends on how high, or low you want the camera to be. As a result, the room is in perspective while the objects are not. They appear in a top-down angle instead.

Dungeon example. Oddly enough, outside the dungeons, Zelda games adopt the traditional top-down view. This looks vastly different from the 1-point perspective used in dungeon rooms. Everything looks correct when sprites are near the north wall A. By flipping the screen upside down, we can see why the sprites in B look very wrong, yet the perspective stays the same.

Some games include walls; others remove them to show more of the floor. This design choice is uncommon and only works for a particular set of game-play types.

You can find real world examples of this style in geographic maps, blue prints and floor plans. This view is good for aerial views, but it lacks depth.

If you want to focus on height, the following views are better options: Top down, dimetric and planometric oblique. See p. This perspective shows 3 sides of an object, at all times. Focuses on the horizontal TOP plane. Isometric means that all axes are equal. Dimetric means only 2 axes are equal. Oblique means the front is flat, the rest is slanted. This is technically This makes it harder to fit into square grids and align them.

The area where the lines connect is clean. Unfortunately the areas where lines cross each other are chunky double pixels and not so nice to look at. Use this method to avoid chunky cross sections! One diamond is spread across 2 square tiles. Every other adjacent diamond is spread across 4 tiles. Try making a checkerboard to practice! You will always need a grid to help guide you. If you use free-form backgrounds for games, you will have to turn them into a playable map.

It can look more unique, but can be a nightmare to program if you have to turn it into a map. Make sure whatever you draw can have proper collision. Not everything has to be necessarily blocky. Cubes and cylinders can have a load of personality and come in all shapes and sizes.