A short while back, I did a teensy course on pixel art with Lachlan Cartland (ramheadedgirl.tumblr.com). Pixel art is something I have always admired and appreciated; especially the time it takes to animate even the smallest movement. With so many other things to learn and do, I hadn′t really put the time into practicing and learning more about it and I thought this would be a good and quick way to at least get an overview of it.

This was also a great opportunity and excuse for me to look back on some of the games I grew up playing. Turns out these had quite a few things in common. They were Japanese, released in the mid 90′s and most were by Sega. Do any of these look familiar?

In this mini–course, we looked at history, looked at artists like Syosa (pixeljoint.com), Paul Robertson (probertson.tumblr.com) and Pedro Medeiros (patreon.com/saint11) for inspiration, went through some of Lachlan′s previous work, learned how to adapt Photoshop to be an ideal drawing program for pixel art and how to create level maps in a fairly simple way with a handy program called Tiled. You can try it out here mapeditor.org for free or support the creator for all their hard work.

Lachlan helped make the process much less daunting and shared loads of handy tips and tools like index painting (you can get a rudown of the process at danfessler.com/blog/hd-index-painting-in-photoshop) and dither brushes in a short amount of time. A little on characters was covered, but there was mention of a future lesson with more focus on this and animation if we were all keen.

I played around a bit with some assets provided in the lesson, made some slight changes and started customising my own little scene. At some point, I would like to put a proper/larger scene together, create my own assets and maybe even make a small level demo out of it just for fun.