Some of my tips and tricks for art!

[NinAcTi0N]

I’m currently typing this late at night, but finally got time to say hello to this forum again ^^ I’ve been busy with moving.

Tomorrow, I’ll talk here about my tips and tricks for pixel art, and just creating in general 

Stay tuned, fellow webmasters and surfers!

[NinAcTi0N]

Alright, let's start this off, shall we?

I think, for me, good pixel art starts from very wobbly sketches. You don't necessarily need to think on it looking good pixel-wise, right off the bat. What you wanna focus on is the shape of it - and which purpose it holds, big or small.

I used to believe that good pixel art was the painstaking kind. It would take hours to clean up and in some cases, even animate. And then, the wonder of tiny pixel graphics and simple animations started to evolve into a more charming niche for me ^^

One turning point for me, however, was when Pizza Tower came out. That game's artistic direction just shattered the perception that pixel art is always that neat, pixel-by-pixel type of expression in art. In that case, it felt so nicely freehanded I couldn't help but feel encouraged to be more carefree with my pixels.

If anything, it was even wilder when I discovered a brush for FireAlpaca that had the same effect as the clean lines pixel brush from Aseprite. I could just freehand things, and I would only need to do some minor adjustments to the overall linework and look! It made my workflow so much better  The title for this chapter was freehanded in that way!

Here's the brush pack with the aliased brush I'm talking about!

I also use some custom brushes on FireAlpaca, which do change opacity despite the pixel-esque look. All I used was a square texture, set it as a bitmap, and allowed pressure sensitivity on the opacity. You must set the size to 1 or another small value, and deactivate the anti-aliasing for it to work properly tho, or else it'll look blurry.

Here's a little example of that brush! -->

One tip if you wanna do a similar thing tho- the opacity changes may make the lineart appear see-thru underneath, so it's recommended to select the outside of the linework, invert, and fill it all in with one color. Then you lock transparency, and only work within it!

I can add the settings to it here later, and other brushes you guys may be curious about ^^ If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

[rhenn]

Nice guide! I love the little guy you drew 

I hope you don't mind me jumping in - there's actually some great tips and tricks in this github repo on how to keep pixel art looking smooth. They also have some info on animation for anyone looking to get into it :D

[NinAcTi0N]

Nice guide! I love the little guy you drew 

I hope you don't mind me jumping in - there's actually some great tips and tricks in this github repo on how to keep pixel art looking smooth. They also have some info on animation for anyone looking to get into it :D

Ohh, I don't mind it at all ^^ In fact, I'm actually super grateful you felt like showing me some pixel tutorials, so that way we get an even more useful post! 


They'll come even handier for me, considering I kind of dream of making a 2D puzzle platformer with pixel graphics 

[zawieja]

I don't use firealpaca sadly, but thank you for sharing! The bit with antialiasing I can see giving an interesting final look to the piece

Pizza Tower is a very good inspiration for animation. In general, I don't think people should worry about clean animation too much other than keeping some main keyframes neater looking - the movement is just too fast to worry about the details, better to focus on making it fluid and fun!

I hope you don't mind me jumping in - there's actually some great tips and tricks in this github repo on how to keep pixel art looking smooth. They also have some info on animation for anyone looking to get into it :D

This is so awesome, thank you for sharing as well! I will be definitely using these.

[soapfriendo]

anti aliasing is like a beautiful wife to me tbh <3 <3