Iglw's Guide to Pixelling

[Iglw]

 

1. Why Another Guide?

 

In the olden days of Runescape, pixel signatures were greatly popularized by artists such as Misterxman, Hiimbear, DementedHero, Chaosvuistje, etc, etc. Nowadays, people tend to favour fancy graphics signatures rendered with a bunch of filters and whatnot that I am personally clueless around. Compounded with the sheer amount of time pixel art requires and the fact that artists could no longer sell signatures for in-game gold, fewer and fewer pixel signatures are being made. Likewise, many old guides on pixel sigs have fallen into disrepair -- either due to their images no longer being hosted or a change in a forum's layout that has caused the guide's formatting to go all wonky. Nash's guide and his subsequent competition have done an awesome job in helping put a spark of interest back into the art form. Since it's the winter break and I have a bit of extra time, I am hoping to augment his efforts by providing some additional advice and insight into how I do my pixels.

 

This guide will not cover general art concepts such as anatomy, composition, etc. (For these I refer you to some more qualified folks at the end of the guide.) It will merely outline the process that I follow when pixelling and present a few techniques that pixellers use. Keep in mind this guide is merely that: a guide. If you have a better way of doing something, then go for it.

 

2. What is Pixel Art?

 

All digital images are composed of pixels, so what exactly distinguishes pixel art from other forms of art? Can one label any image drawn in MS Paint pixel art?

 

 

Well, no. There's a bit more to pixel art than being drawn in MS Paint. Pixel art distinguishes itself from other art forms in the care and precision the artist uses when creating his or her piece. Instead of relying on an image editor's algorithms to blur or resize an object, the pixel artist must be conscientious of every change being made to each and every pixel. This does not mean you cannot use the paint bucket or line tool; however it does mean you will have to eventually zoom in to 500%+ magnification to make sure all your pixels are in order and where you want them to be placed. At this level of precision, the use of automated tools will often be insufficient.

 

Give each and every one of your pixels the love they deserve. <3:

 

3. What you need

 

• A mouse: While tablets are awesome, a regular computer mouse will do the job just fine.
  
• A paint program: MS Paint works just fine (even if I despise the Win7 version) but here are a few free alternatives.
  
  • GraphicsGale (FreeEdition) - What I use. Designed for pixel art. Free without GIF/animations. Awesome. This guide will be using this.
    
  • Paint.NET - Haven't used this myself, but I've heard good things about it.
    
  • GIMP - Free alternative to Photoshop.

  [*] Patience: You will need this.

 

4. Getting Started: A Rough Sketch

 

Begin with a rough sketch of what you want to do. This may be a wireframe or a blob, for example. Don't be too worried about the details for now. What you want is to get the general feel for what you want to achieve.

 

 

5. Refining the Sketch

 

Now make a more defined outline of the character. I had a better idea of where I was going with the character on the right so it has a tad more detail than the one on the left. (I also ended up changing his position a bit.) If you are using a program with layers, do this on a new layer and hide the previous sketch when done. If you don't have layers, draw this over the previous sketch in a different colour and then erase all the stuff done in the previous colour.

 

 

6. Cleaning the Line Art

 

This is where you have to get all nitty-gritty and zoom into your art. Clean up your line art by removing all excess pixels so all your lines are one pixel wide. Otherwise your line art will look jagged.

 

 

 

This step is especially important if you are going to keep your border black as a messy line art will become quite apparent. You probably want to decide now whether or not you are going to have a black border, coloured border or no border at all. Even if you decide not to have a border, this step will greatly help in defining your piece.

 

 

7. Filling with Colour and Adding More Detail

 

Use the fill tool to fill your image with the base colours you plan on using.

 

 

Continue adding more detail to the armour, equipment, etc.

 

 

At this point I went over the black border with colour as I planed to remove the border entirely.

 

 

8. Shading and Highlighting

 

Pick a light source. Determine where the light hits your character, and colour in some highlights. Where light doesn't reach, colour in some shadow. These colours will be determined by your base colour. I typically go for a 5-7 unit increase or decrease in brightness on the colour-picker slider from the base colour when shading. If you've shaded via scribbling like I did, clean up afterwards to make your image neater to prepare for the final few steps.

 

 

At this point in time I must warn you about a common mistake that most newcomers to pixel art face: pillow shading. It's what happens when a light source is not properly defined and all the shading is done in concentric circles around the centre an the object. This isn't how light works.

 

 

9. Banding and Anti-Aliasing

 

Even with clean lines, jaggedness can occur via something called banding. This happens when the naturally occurring angles in a pixel coincide or align with the angles being created by surrounding pixels. See the dungeoneering cape below.

 

 

To combat this we can use anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing works by averaging out the two bounding colours and using the result as an intermediary between them, effectively blurring the border between the two.

 

 

Use this wherever there seems to be too sharp a distinction between two coloured areas to soften it up.

Be careful to avoid causing more banding with too much anti-aliasing!

 

 

10. Dithering

 

I'm not good at dithering so I don't use it too often. Dithering is the use of two colours patterned in a way to produce additional shades and colours. Think of it as the pixel equivalent to cross-hatching.

I used dithering fairly extensively on the Bandos character's cape and in the following sig:

 

 

I broke up the large area of the cape into smaller areas, dithered, then did some anti-aliasing to smooth out the pattern.

 

 

11. Finishing Touches

 

Add any final details and go over your image several times over to make your you didn't miss anything.

(I didn't realize until near the end that the thief's staff ended up between his arm and his cape. A faint motif from the boss version of the tassets was added to the other character.)

Border, text, fancy effects, etc.

 

 

12. Additional Tips

 

- Save often!

- Avoid saving in JPEG at all costs! The compression will destroy all your hard work.

- Don't be afraid to erase. If you're about to make a big change, duplicate your current layer or save your image and work on a separate copy.

- Practice, practice, practice. Even if you practice other traditional forms of art, the concepts that carry over will help you greatly.

- Start small think big. This was my first pixel. By limiting yourself you learn to do as much with pixels as you can with as little as you have ->

- Save often!

 

13. External Links

 

- Pixel Joint: Very Comprehensive Pixel Art Guide

- Way of the Pixel: Pixel Art Theory

- Cedarseed: Human Anatomy Guide

 

14. End

 

Hope you found this guide helpful, or at least somewhat interesting.

I do realize I did quite a few changes on the fly between and across steps so if there are any questions, feel free to ask.

Thanks for reading, good luck, and have fun pixelling! :thumbsup:

[tripsis]

I mostly skimmed it since I'm not actually interested in pixelling but it seems like a really helpful and detailed guide. Thanks for sharing :)

[Bows]

Great guide. Keep up the good work! :thumbup:

[GrandZephyr]

I liked this guide very much, Goodjob!

[Beaumonde]

Amazing guide, the way you apply the lighting is really good. About Banding, I can tell from the image what it is, but I'm not sure I understand what you mean by angles aligned with other angles.

[Iglw]

Amazing guide, the way you apply the lighting is really good. About Banding, I can tell from the image what it is, but I'm not sure I understand what you mean by angles aligned with other angles.

 

Bleh, got a bit tongue-tied there. I meant something along the lines of how the natural squareness of a pixel tends to cause it to be placed with other pixels in groups that cause jaggedness.

 

Banding occurs when pixels are clustered together in a certain way that causes the image to give the impression of a lower resolution ('fat pixels') than it would have without the banding.

In the case of the dg cape, I did a really poor job of this and proceeded to band in a stepwise fashion, causing an impression of 'blocks' of pixels going down the back.

 

 

Note that while anti-aliasing can reduce the impact of banding, doing it using a column of pixels of exactly the same height as that of the 'blocks' wouldn't help as that would just add another 'band' to it.

 

I'll probably rework and reword that section a bit when I get the time and split up banding and AAing into two separate sections since they don't always go together and the way I've put them together may be misleading and cause confusion.

 

Thanks. :>

[Ouchy]

I've got to say, this is a brilliant guide. Good job :thumbup:

[Hawks]

You've almost inspired me to pick up pixelling again. Almost. I don't have enough patience for it, but if I feel like it, this guide is an awesome place for me to start.

[Rohanonrs]

Never been much of an art person but Pixel art catches my eye. I might attempt to do one and this guide will definitely help thanks!

[Arthu]

I like to support this guide.

Many good points and simple, great methods usable even by a beginning artist.

 

I might have another try at pixeling...

kidding! No way I could do it ever again properly. My attention span just sucks too much.

Now that you made me think about my signature, only part I like about it is the sky. The rest just sucks.

[Estonian dude]

Not really. You have really nice looking grass aswell, even though it might be lacking a bit in detail.. Wish I could do it that well.

And I have never dared to try a human besides that Nomad attempt. But Nomad was half-covered with that scarf and he was bald.

[Humus]

This is such a great guide.. I've always admired pixelling. Nice one :)