Pixel Art

Hello everyone!

It's been a while since the last post, between University and practicing development - I had neglected to continue the blog. This time around - I'm looking to keep it going so long as my schedule allows, at least for the sake of reflection.

Together with RPG Maker VX Ace, I had been looking into pixel art. Likely many of you are already familiar with pixel art, if not, here are some examples of some I have made from practice. Needless to say I am a novice at this and I am still learning the ropes so to speak - but it should give you a good idea.

Character Sprites

These are a few character sprites that I have made that took roughly 5 minutes to 45 minutes to create for different ones. Needless to say, practice and persistence is important. As I come from a Business background, less so an Art's background, the challenge was bringing what I had in mind reflected in the pixel art. This gets easier I found as you get better at the skill, but techniques and practice coupled with some online tutorials that might give you a nudge in the direction that you are looking to move towards will help. 

The program I used to create these was Graphics Gale. Graphics Gale is a pixel arts software which I found to be very good for the task. It is designed towards creating pixel art, and on top of that, has a fairly cheap price of around 15 Euros. You can always give the trial a go to check whether the software is something you would like to purchase. You can, needless to say, use other software such as GIMP and Photoshop - I simply found this software fairly nice to work with, not to mention it comes with the added flexibility to help you animate using frames, which I have yet to toy with.

RPG Maker VX Ace Tile Sprites

(Many of which have heavy inspiration from various Default Sprites, some of which such as the crates were the default assets painted upon for practice's sake with regards to colors and shading)

In terms of tutorials I would recommend achebit on Youtube. His tutorials have aided me in getting the small nudges I needed to start trying out pixel art characters, something which I avoided for the longest time. Depending on what you are looking to learn and do with pixel art - whether it is characters, textures, tiles or scenery, there are numerous tutorials available online. Pinterest I found is quite full of them such as Shel Shel - Pixel Art Textures and Dibujo - Pixel Art Tree. So check these out if you are interested and feel free to share any other tutorials you found to be helpful!

That's all I have for now about Pixel Art, give it a try - it is really fun, and will be a major skill and asset to have should you ever try to develop a game using pixel art!

See you all next time!

Dylan