There is no shortcut to art, but that’s part of why it is so valuable to society and so rewarding to create.
But don’t let that discourage you. If you want to make your own art, keep working at it. You will always get better with time and practice. It takes a long time and even the best artists frequently feel like their work isn’t good enough. But dedication and practice will pay off in time.
The hardest part of learning any creative skill is that your taste develops faster than your ability. You can see exactly what's wrong with your work but can't fix it yet. That gap is brutal but it means you're improving even when it doesn't feel like it.
Draw, draw, draw, draw. Don't try to be good; just draw. Look for one thing you can improve on, then practice until you get a little better at it. Then look for the next thing and repeat.
You are always going to think that you could have done it better. That's the curse of the artist; don't let it discourage you. Keep drawing and then draw some more.
My kid draws all the time and she gets better at it. She also asks me to draw for her and (surprise) I'm getting better at it. Draw a person. Draw a house. Draw a cartoon character. Don't wait to be in front of your computer so you can do pixel art; draw on a piece of paper, draw on your tablet, draw in the sand. Draw on a liquid crystal drawing board (great for throwaway drawings: no mess, quick erase, no drafts left behind).
And be kind to yourself. You are going to think that your drawings suck. I promise they are better than you think (one is always their own worst critic), but also be realistic on where you need to improve technically. Do ask for advice from other people, and take it gracefully.
(You want to do pixel art. Start with the art, and when you are good enough at it, add the pixel.)
When I took a drawing class in high school, we began by laying a grid on top of the image we wanted to copy, and then only drawing one square at a time. This made it a lot easier to draw, as you weren't focused on the overall image.
I imagine a similar exercise might work for pixel art, with each square of the grid representing a single color.
I have been trying for years to get good at 3D modeling with Blender and have also failed. But I didn’t let that stop me using Blender to produce illustrations for my sci-if epic interactive fiction game that ended up being nominated for a minor award for graphics (it didn’t win).
Let me introduce you to the last resort of the struggling artist - extreme stylization. Really good pixel art is a very difficult discipline but terrible pixel art can be just as appealing if you push a style you can call your own.
not to be mean, but if it was that easy and just a month was enough to go from 0 to 100, wouldn’t everyone be amazing artists?
As a designer, artist and art technologist that has been making computer graphics since the 80s, reading a post like this is somewhat triggering , but I do also understand why today in the age of AI, it would seem that making great art should come easily to you, once you have learned the basics of the tools.
But it is called art, BECAUSE it is difficult, it does require one to build systematically through experience.
Practicing and playing with the medium constantly, doing a plethora of varied exercises and trying do very different types of projects will increase your skillset and teach you the necessary grammar of visual problem solving.
You will also always benefit and become even more proficient by looking at and reading about tons and tons of design, graphics, and art books, websites, shows, works, etc… This is especially true of learning about and studying art that is unrelated to computer graphics —like fine arts, painting/printmaking/sculpture/conceptual art, as well as experimental film/video/animation and architecture/industrial design/historical graphic design, all of which will help you build up your visual vocabulary and problem solving skills.
you dont have to do everything at once just add a steady diet of new visual material to your media consumption. Specifically not the CG/Gaming stuff you already look at. broaden your horizons.
A great artist is the combination of technical skills, a deep knowledge base of visual references, a good understanding and continuous study of art history and a solid grasp of art & craft theory and concepts—-craft here being CGI. This is will give you the solid foundation to build a successful and sustainable artistic career/hobby/vocation.
The limits of creativity is always a lack of foundational knowledge (visual/conceptual references) and curiosity (playing and exploring even when you hit a wall until you find solutions for your artistic problems).
Visual arts are very very vast, but systematically learning to see, examine and understand how others before you have, played, struggled with, confronted and resolved its conundrums are the only way to get better at it.
(Find a copy of and read Rilke’s letters).
OP was just asking for help to learn the skills, dude. They weren't saying they expected to start having solo shows in prestigious celeries or anything.
You can’t study or ready your way to better art. You need to be hands on. When you have trouble with a specific thing, you can watch a video or get some advice on that, but then will still need to practice, practice, practice.
Also be realistic about how much progress you can make in a certain amount of time. You can make a game with very basic sprites. As your art improves, so can the sprites in the games.
The other option is to partner up with someone who has art skills already, but can’t make games. Together you can make more than either one could make alone.
I'm in the same boat, coming from programming trying to get into pixel art. It's been discouraging how slowly I've improved, but I noticed that I have improved a little looking back at my first attempts. Keep working at it, make sure you enjoy using your tools (Aesprite seems pretty good), and remember to count as progress learning your tools better.
You don't have to go at it alone, share your idea(s) and get a pixel artist to join.
Think about how much time you invested in to learning programming. If you're not prepared to do the same for art it's better to get someone else to do it. Especially if you don't enjoy it.
It’s a completely opposite scenario for me, I accidentally shipped a pixel art game.
It’s actually a game about nonograms. My first attempts at pixel art were bad but it didn’t matter that much, the focus was elsewhere anyway. With time the art improved; far from perfect but it’s still one of the things I like most about that game.
So I guess: practice, room for failure, achievable goals and time.
I’m not good at it, but, I got better by making small enough pixel images that I could try different colors for individual pixels to match the feel of a reference images. 8x8 and then 16x16. With larger images, there is too much work to keep changing the pixels while you are still understanding the color theory.
The big insights came from how, in pixel art, a single high contrast pixel can give the impression of color or shade in a whole area of the image. For example, on a ladybug’s back, a few metallic blue pixels make it look more reflective than white, and doesn’t clash with the predominant red.
I used Resprite for iPad which is similar to Aesprite, for my Godot game.
Pixel art is art. To be good at pixel art requires the same skills as art: composition, color, lights and shadow, shapes.
While there’s no shortcut, I would suggest that in games, consistency in art style is way more important than quality. If you can make your graphic style consistent, although maybe very simple and not so aesthetic, it will make the game appealing.
It’s just like any other artform. It takes active practice. The only way forward is actually making things.
Also, people seem to think pixel art is easier than others forms of art. I think this is a misconception that comes from being able to see the individual elements and being able to place them one by one. This does remove the need for the same type of motor skills required for say painting, but does not remove the need for vision, sense of color, composition. Etc.
If you're going to crochet the result, I don't think you really want 256 colors. A 16 color pallete is probably acheivable if annoying.
Seems like if you print the image, then print a grid on a transparency sheet, you could mark up the sheet with colors until it looks good.
Maybe tracing paper (can you print a grid on tracing paper? Do you want to hand mark a grid on tracing paper?)
I don't use art tools, but you should be able to do something in software too, layer the grid on top, leave it transparent to the image until you pick a color for each square.
Drawing grids over an image is easy. Choosing which colour to drop in is impossibly hard and where the art is. Nearest Neighbour and Average of N Points are some algorithms than can be used but don’t take the overall style of the image into account. For example, one pixel could cover a part of the nose and a part of the eye and averaging them makes a blurry mess.
Problem is that like vector fonts without hinting, naive automatic "pixelation" of images does a poor job. You have to work with the limitations of the medium, and sometimes it entails drawing something in a very different shape than if you had more resolution and color. There are image gen models that do an okay job at pixel art these days though.
You need to learn how to practice. Anthony Jones has a video called "how to study better", where he walks you through his process. It's directed at concept artists rather than pixel artists but the same principles apply. I'd suggest watching it.
Make the sprites as good as you can within a reasonable amount of time. Don't stress too much about it. You can always do a second pass later on. And even if you decide to pay a professional artist, your sprites would still be useful as a vehicle for communicating your vision.
I also tried getting into pixel art, thinking "there's a finite number of pixels - surely I can arrive at something visually appealing via trial and error".
Nope. Turns out it's a whole field of study and an artform in its own right.
If you're making a top-down perspective game, I wholeheartedly recommend Liberated Pixel Cup assets, especially the character generator:
Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books. Of the top ten, nine are programming books (the other is about bookkeeping). Similar results come from replacing "teach yourself" with "learn" or "hours" with "days."
The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about programming, or that programming is somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else. Felleisen et al. give a nod to this trend in their book How to Design Programs, when they say "Bad programming is easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if they are dummies." The Abtruse Goose comic also had their take.
[...]
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Researchers (Bloom (1985), Bryan & Harter (1899), Hayes (1989), Simmon & Chase (1973)) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967.
There is no shortcut to art, but that’s part of why it is so valuable to society and so rewarding to create.
But don’t let that discourage you. If you want to make your own art, keep working at it. You will always get better with time and practice. It takes a long time and even the best artists frequently feel like their work isn’t good enough. But dedication and practice will pay off in time.
That fact that something is hard to do is not what makes it valuable.
It's hard to dig really big holes in the ground all day at random, but it's not valuable.
Speak for yourself, big-holes-in-ground are very valuable to me.
> It's hard to dig really big holes in the ground all day at random, but it's not valuable
Don't mistake "it takes a lot of effort" with "it is hard"
Digging holes isn't hard, it just takes a lot of effort
The hardest part of learning any creative skill is that your taste develops faster than your ability. You can see exactly what's wrong with your work but can't fix it yet. That gap is brutal but it means you're improving even when it doesn't feel like it.
"The hardest part of learning any creative skill is that your taste develops faster than your ability."
I needed to read this sentence. Thank you!
One of the best comments I have ever read on hackernews.
Draw, draw, draw, draw. Don't try to be good; just draw. Look for one thing you can improve on, then practice until you get a little better at it. Then look for the next thing and repeat.
You are always going to think that you could have done it better. That's the curse of the artist; don't let it discourage you. Keep drawing and then draw some more.
My kid draws all the time and she gets better at it. She also asks me to draw for her and (surprise) I'm getting better at it. Draw a person. Draw a house. Draw a cartoon character. Don't wait to be in front of your computer so you can do pixel art; draw on a piece of paper, draw on your tablet, draw in the sand. Draw on a liquid crystal drawing board (great for throwaway drawings: no mess, quick erase, no drafts left behind).
And be kind to yourself. You are going to think that your drawings suck. I promise they are better than you think (one is always their own worst critic), but also be realistic on where you need to improve technically. Do ask for advice from other people, and take it gracefully.
(You want to do pixel art. Start with the art, and when you are good enough at it, add the pixel.)
Im a 3D artist not a pixel artist but I've had these Saint11 tutorial series bookmarked for a while:
https://saint11.art/blog/pixel-art-tutorials/
+1 to these, amazing resource. Really helped me.
When I took a drawing class in high school, we began by laying a grid on top of the image we wanted to copy, and then only drawing one square at a time. This made it a lot easier to draw, as you weren't focused on the overall image.
I imagine a similar exercise might work for pixel art, with each square of the grid representing a single color.
I have been trying for years to get good at 3D modeling with Blender and have also failed. But I didn’t let that stop me using Blender to produce illustrations for my sci-if epic interactive fiction game that ended up being nominated for a minor award for graphics (it didn’t win).
Let me introduce you to the last resort of the struggling artist - extreme stylization. Really good pixel art is a very difficult discipline but terrible pixel art can be just as appealing if you push a style you can call your own.
Be bold.
not to be mean, but if it was that easy and just a month was enough to go from 0 to 100, wouldn’t everyone be amazing artists?
As a designer, artist and art technologist that has been making computer graphics since the 80s, reading a post like this is somewhat triggering , but I do also understand why today in the age of AI, it would seem that making great art should come easily to you, once you have learned the basics of the tools.
But it is called art, BECAUSE it is difficult, it does require one to build systematically through experience. Practicing and playing with the medium constantly, doing a plethora of varied exercises and trying do very different types of projects will increase your skillset and teach you the necessary grammar of visual problem solving.
You will also always benefit and become even more proficient by looking at and reading about tons and tons of design, graphics, and art books, websites, shows, works, etc… This is especially true of learning about and studying art that is unrelated to computer graphics —like fine arts, painting/printmaking/sculpture/conceptual art, as well as experimental film/video/animation and architecture/industrial design/historical graphic design, all of which will help you build up your visual vocabulary and problem solving skills. you dont have to do everything at once just add a steady diet of new visual material to your media consumption. Specifically not the CG/Gaming stuff you already look at. broaden your horizons.
A great artist is the combination of technical skills, a deep knowledge base of visual references, a good understanding and continuous study of art history and a solid grasp of art & craft theory and concepts—-craft here being CGI. This is will give you the solid foundation to build a successful and sustainable artistic career/hobby/vocation.
The limits of creativity is always a lack of foundational knowledge (visual/conceptual references) and curiosity (playing and exploring even when you hit a wall until you find solutions for your artistic problems).
Visual arts are very very vast, but systematically learning to see, examine and understand how others before you have, played, struggled with, confronted and resolved its conundrums are the only way to get better at it. (Find a copy of and read Rilke’s letters).
OP was just asking for help to learn the skills, dude. They weren't saying they expected to start having solo shows in prestigious celeries or anything.
You can’t study or ready your way to better art. You need to be hands on. When you have trouble with a specific thing, you can watch a video or get some advice on that, but then will still need to practice, practice, practice.
Also be realistic about how much progress you can make in a certain amount of time. You can make a game with very basic sprites. As your art improves, so can the sprites in the games.
The other option is to partner up with someone who has art skills already, but can’t make games. Together you can make more than either one could make alone.
I'm in the same boat, coming from programming trying to get into pixel art. It's been discouraging how slowly I've improved, but I noticed that I have improved a little looking back at my first attempts. Keep working at it, make sure you enjoy using your tools (Aesprite seems pretty good), and remember to count as progress learning your tools better.
You don't have to go at it alone, share your idea(s) and get a pixel artist to join.
Think about how much time you invested in to learning programming. If you're not prepared to do the same for art it's better to get someone else to do it. Especially if you don't enjoy it.
Do you have recommendations on where to share ideas to find like-minded people?
In my experience, finding communities is kinda hard
It’s a completely opposite scenario for me, I accidentally shipped a pixel art game.
It’s actually a game about nonograms. My first attempts at pixel art were bad but it didn’t matter that much, the focus was elsewhere anyway. With time the art improved; far from perfect but it’s still one of the things I like most about that game.
So I guess: practice, room for failure, achievable goals and time.
I’m not good at it, but, I got better by making small enough pixel images that I could try different colors for individual pixels to match the feel of a reference images. 8x8 and then 16x16. With larger images, there is too much work to keep changing the pixels while you are still understanding the color theory.
The big insights came from how, in pixel art, a single high contrast pixel can give the impression of color or shade in a whole area of the image. For example, on a ladybug’s back, a few metallic blue pixels make it look more reflective than white, and doesn’t clash with the predominant red.
I used Resprite for iPad which is similar to Aesprite, for my Godot game.
Pixel art is art. To be good at pixel art requires the same skills as art: composition, color, lights and shadow, shapes.
While there’s no shortcut, I would suggest that in games, consistency in art style is way more important than quality. If you can make your graphic style consistent, although maybe very simple and not so aesthetic, it will make the game appealing.
It’s just like any other artform. It takes active practice. The only way forward is actually making things.
Also, people seem to think pixel art is easier than others forms of art. I think this is a misconception that comes from being able to see the individual elements and being able to place them one by one. This does remove the need for the same type of motor skills required for say painting, but does not remove the need for vision, sense of color, composition. Etc.
Similar in concept but for different reasons; does anybody know of a way to convert images into a '8bit pixel map'?
My wife likes to take images and crochet them into tapestry/blankets/cozies.
It seems to me that if we could get a grid overlay onto an image she could then make whatever she wanted. (One color per 'pixel')
If you're going to crochet the result, I don't think you really want 256 colors. A 16 color pallete is probably acheivable if annoying.
Seems like if you print the image, then print a grid on a transparency sheet, you could mark up the sheet with colors until it looks good.
Maybe tracing paper (can you print a grid on tracing paper? Do you want to hand mark a grid on tracing paper?)
I don't use art tools, but you should be able to do something in software too, layer the grid on top, leave it transparent to the image until you pick a color for each square.
Drawing grids over an image is easy. Choosing which colour to drop in is impossibly hard and where the art is. Nearest Neighbour and Average of N Points are some algorithms than can be used but don’t take the overall style of the image into account. For example, one pixel could cover a part of the nose and a part of the eye and averaging them makes a blurry mess.
Problem is that like vector fonts without hinting, naive automatic "pixelation" of images does a poor job. You have to work with the limitations of the medium, and sometimes it entails drawing something in a very different shape than if you had more resolution and color. There are image gen models that do an okay job at pixel art these days though.
You need to learn how to practice. Anthony Jones has a video called "how to study better", where he walks you through his process. It's directed at concept artists rather than pixel artists but the same principles apply. I'd suggest watching it.
Can you draw non pixel art? Do you need to learn how to draw pixel art or how to draw in general?
Make the sprites as good as you can within a reasonable amount of time. Don't stress too much about it. You can always do a second pass later on. And even if you decide to pay a professional artist, your sprites would still be useful as a vehicle for communicating your vision.
Take your time.
That works. Or just crank out shitty art and focus on making your game work. When the game works, you can refine the sprites (or not)
I also tried getting into pixel art, thinking "there's a finite number of pixels - surely I can arrive at something visually appealing via trial and error".
Nope. Turns out it's a whole field of study and an artform in its own right.
If you're making a top-down perspective game, I wholeheartedly recommend Liberated Pixel Cup assets, especially the character generator:
https://liberatedpixelcup.github.io/Universal-LPC-Spriteshee...
There's a crazy number of configuration options and you can create all kinds of humanoid characters out of it.
Peter Norvig should write an essay about teaching yourself pixel art in 10 years, to go with his article about programming:
https://norvig.com/21-days.html
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Peter Norvig
Why is everyone in such a rush?
Walk into any bookstore, and you'll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 24 Hours alongside endless variations offering to teach C, SQL, Ruby, Algorithms, and so on in a few days or hours. The Amazon advanced search for [title: teach, yourself, hours, since: 2000 and found 512 such books. Of the top ten, nine are programming books (the other is about bookkeeping). Similar results come from replacing "teach yourself" with "learn" or "hours" with "days."
The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about programming, or that programming is somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else. Felleisen et al. give a nod to this trend in their book How to Design Programs, when they say "Bad programming is easy. Idiots can learn it in 21 days, even if they are dummies." The Abtruse Goose comic also had their take.
[...]
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years
Researchers (Bloom (1985), Bryan & Harter (1899), Hayes (1989), Simmon & Chase (1973)) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, telegraph operation, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967.
[...]
A month is nothing. Embrace limitations. Make something with just two colors. See shapes, not things.
You just need to practice.
Pixel art takes a shit ton of time.