#pixel art tutorials

with the uncertainty of social platforms sticking around in recent years, i would recommend artists to get PureRef and start saving their bookmarks & art references on their own curated PureRef boards instead!

Psst, want a foliage palette?

My blog may be dead but my love of pixel art isn’t!

For Beginners!

a small introduction to pixel art

a good beginner's pixel art tutorial (pictured)

Derek Yu’s (creator of Splunkey) crash course on pixel art and his follow up tips on improving

easy steps to improving your sprite work

three more tips on improving your spritework: 

a few more quick tips!

Collections

Studio Miniboss has a TON of tutorials and I highly suggest them - they’re the people behind Celeste & Towerfall!

LoSpec, a site that collects tutorials and pixel art palettes for anyone to use (pictured)

RHL experiments with colors a lot and gives some great tree and other scenery advice

MortMort's video tutorials - he’s been doing it for a while and has tons to look at

Pixel Pete’s Video Tutorials - cover the basics well

Brandon James Greer’s Youtube Tutorials - He does some really rad sprite analysis and Challenge Videos too

some water tile tutorials I found a while back

RPG Maker/Game Oriented

nice tutorial about making a character in the standard rpg/three-fourths perspective

a nice series of pixel art tutorials focused on top down/three forths  perspective games like RPGs and 2D Zelda-likes (pictured)

my tips on spriting charactersets for RPG Maker 2003

a quick tip on character walk cycles

metatiles: what are they, and how to make them

More Advanced

tiny introduction to clusters

a great talk on banding, clusters, and dithering, and how to correct common mistakes

interesting way to create a palette

cyangmou's stuff is absolute gold and has a lot of analyses, check out his stuff on perspective! (pictured)

a deep look at pixel art in general

this guy's nice dense talk on pixel art, including deconstructing good rpg tilesets & varying your tiles for video games. 

slynerd's stuff is rad and comprehensive

Pixel Logic - A Guide to Pixel Art

(Pixel Logic is an in-depth pixel art tutorial book) The full book (242 pages) as well as a free preview (37 pages) can be found on the related website: pixellogicbook.com

This book focuses on VISUAL learning and limits text as much as possible, unlike other tutorials. Images > Text.

The tutorials will cover pixel art from start to finish, by studying video-game graphics from the past 30 years; with topics ranging from creating initial line art, to fully animating sprites. These tutorials will not focus on my own personal methods; instead they will combining examples from the past with modern application!

CHAPTERS:

Ch.0 - Introduction

Ch.1 - Line art

Ch.2 - Anti-aliasing

Ch.3 - Colours

Ch.4 - Readability

Ch.5 - Dithering

Ch.6 - Game perspectives 

Ch.7 - Clean-up 

Ch.8 - Subpixeling 

Ch.9 - Animation

♦️ Article on Lifehacker about Pedro's pixel art tutorials! Check out!

aw thank you i'm happy to hear that! i hope u stick with it ♥

with landscapes/bedrooms/cities i use 275x155. this provides a fair amount of detail while still keeping it pixely, plus it resizes to wallpaper size. for vertical i just reverse it at 155x275.

i've also recently started to use 215x215 (same amount of pixels as above) so that i can resize my art to easily fit both wallpapers, and mobile videos... since tiktok and instagram reels are everything nowadays 😒

for characters and animals, generally i will base the size of the canvas around how i stylize eyes.

so i'll draw the eyes first, then just draw everything else around that.

i also have a smaller resolution style with 2px dot eyes that i use for adding characters to landscapes, since my landscape resolution is too small for my regular style unless the character is close to the screen.

Pixel Logic - Pixel Art Tutorial Book

> created by pixel artist Michafrar and many guest artists.

> 36 page free preview available (includes chapter 0 + chapter 1)

“Pixel Logic is an in-depth pixel art tutorial book currently at 200 pages! 

This book focuses on VISUAL learning and limits text as much as possible, unlike other tutorials. Images > Text.

The tutorials will cover pixel art from start to finish, by studying video-game graphics from the past 30 years; with topics ranging from creating initial line art, to fully animating sprites. These tutorials will not focus on my own personal methods; instead they will combining examples from the past with modern application! 

Current Chapters:

Ch.0 - Introduction

Ch.1 - Line art

Ch.2 - Anti-aliasing

Ch.3 - Colours

Ch.4 - Readability

Ch.5 - Dithering

Ch.6 - Game perspectives

Ch.7 - Clean Up

Ch.8 - Subpixeling

The very last chapter of the book (Animation) is half-way done and should be out in Autumn (Fall). We’re almost there! 1 more chapter and we’re DONE.”

Top 5 Basic Tips For Pixel Art (by Cyangmou)