The Nighest Hour

I’m about to run out the door (so I might expand on the answer later), but the one-liner is this:

http://www.retronator.com/gettingstarted

Alright, I’m back, so here’s more info:

On the above link you will find a prototype version of my tutorial for complete beginners in pixel art. It goes on for 7 days and takes about 15 minutes a day. You can complete it at your convenience.

It’s got a few rough edges, especially the jump from day 6->7 is too much for most people. So a lot will need to be adjusted, but that’s the best you can get from me at this point.

However, there are other great places to get started as well. I love the more action-oriented approach where I give you concrete things to do, but you have plenty of tutorials that explain pixel art in general (it’s up to you to put them into practice).

My favorites are:

Pixel Art Tutorial by Cure, good intro article that explains what pixel art is and isn’t including all the pixel art-specific terminology.

So You Want to be a Pixel Artist by Tsugumo, a lot of good reading and then on chapter 8 and 9 you get into actually making a sprite.

On that same topic, Pixel Art Tutorial by Derek Yu is also one of the best for sprite drawing process, but assumes you already know how to draw a character.

For more specific topics, I have these three slides in the even rougher prototype of a daily drawing plan.

This last slide is where you will find links to important things to study.

Other than that …

Definitely follow @pixelartus for lots of pixel art features (more than I can put out :)), but you definitely need to check out his List of Pixel Art Tutorials.

I recently started saving tutorials I come by on Pinterest so you can take a peek at this board for completely unordered random topics: Pixel Art Tutorials 

Finally, I am making a video game called Pixel Art Academy that will put all these tutorials to good use in point-and-click adventure storylines and there will be an in-game virtual library with all the knowledge.