Introduction to Pixel Art for Games. Pixel art: the best works and illustrators Big pixel art

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The term “pixel graphics” is not familiar to everyone, nor is it underground slang. Wikipedia will help you find out what this is. The main thing to understand is that pixel graphics determined by the way the drawing is created (pixel by pixel), not by the results. Therefore, drawings obtained using filters or special renderers are also not included in it. In the first part of the article, and maybe even a series of articles dedicated to this art, I will show some of the works I liked.

Amazing illustrations, excellent shadow work. (Polyfonken's Pixel art) .

The topic is quite broad. There are variations of dice.

Rod Hunt's illustrations are very colorful and realistic. The artist combines vector graphics with pixel art.

Brazilian-German bloggers Thiago, Pi, Jojo and Mariana present themselves as pleasant, laughing pixelated characters.

This painting was created by Juan Manuel Daporta using only MS Paint! The work took 8 months. Impressive.

Pixels also live outside of computer screens. It's amazing how well the plots of pixelated pictures are understandable.

Space wars in the style of Super Robot Wars. In the world of pixel graphics, Roberson has his own unique style.

City of crazy dolls. The illustration, although drawn in vector, still looks like pixel art. Interesting job.

This direction of pixel art particularly interests me. These pictures are drawn not on the screen, but on the canvas acrylic paints. This masterpiece was made by Ashley Anderson.

Pixel cities are a separate big topic. There are usually a lot of details and storylines. In this picture there is an embankment and colorful balls and a sushi bar and even protesters.

Pixel art(written without a hyphen) or pixel graphics- a direction of digital art that involves creating images at the pixel level (i.e., the minimum logical unit that makes up an image). Not all raster images are pixel art, although they all consist of pixels. Why? Because ultimately, the concept of pixel art encompasses not so much the result as the process of creating an illustration. Pixel by pixel, and that's it. If you take a digital photo, greatly reduce it (so that the pixels become visible) and claim that you drew it from scratch, this will be a real forgery. Although there will probably be naive simpletons who will praise you for your painstaking work.

It is currently unknown when exactly this technique originated; the roots are lost somewhere in the early 1970s. However, the technique of composing images from small elements goes back to much more ancient forms of art, such as mosaics, cross-stitching, carpet weaving and beading. The very phrase “pixel art” as a definition of pixel art was first used in an article by Adele Goldberg and Robert Flegal in the journal Communications of the ACM (December 1982).

The widest application of pixel art was in computer games, which is not surprising - it made it possible to create images that did not require resources and looked truly beautiful (at the same time, they took a lot of time from the artist and required certain skills, and therefore required good wages) . In bloom, highest point in development are officially called video games on 2nd and 3rd generation consoles (early 1990s). Further progress in technology, the emergence of first 8-bit color, and then True Color, the development of three-dimensional graphics - all this over time pushed pixel art into the background and third place, and then it began to seem that the end of pixel art had come.

Oddly enough, it was Mr. Scientific and Technological Progress, who pushed pixel graphics to the last positions in the mid-90s, and later returned it to the game - introducing mobile devices to the world in the form of cell phones and PDAs. After all, no matter how useful a newfangled device may be, you and I know that if you can’t at least play solitaire on it, it’s worthless. Well, where there is a low-resolution screen, there is pixel art. As they say, welcome back.

Of course, various retrograde elements played their role in the return of pixel graphics, loving to be nostalgic about the good old childhood games, saying: “Eh, they don’t do that anymore”; aesthetes who can appreciate the beauty of pixel art, and indie developers who do not perceive modern graphic beauties (and sometimes, although rarely, simply do not know how to implement them in their own projects), that is why they sculpt pixel art. But let's still not discount purely commercial projects - applications for mobile devices, advertising and web design. So now pixel art, as they say, is widespread in narrow circles and has earned itself a kind of status as an art “not for everyone.” And this despite the fact that it is extremely accessible to the average person, because to work in this technique, it is enough to have a computer and a simple graphics editor at hand! (the ability to draw, by the way, won’t hurt either) Enough words, let’s get to the point!

2. Tools.

What do you need to create pixel art? As I said above, a computer and any graphics editor capable of working at the pixel level are enough. You can draw anywhere, even on a Game Boy, even on a Nintendo DS, even in Microsoft Paint (another thing is that drawing in the latter is extremely inconvenient). There are a great variety of raster editors, many of them are free and quite functional, so that everyone can decide on the software themselves.

I draw in Adobe Photoshop, because it’s convenient and because it’s been around for a long time. I won’t lie and tell you, muttering my dentures, that “I remember Photoshop was still very small, it was on a Macintosh, and it was numbered 1.0.” This did not happen. But I remember Photoshop 4.0 (and also on Mac). Therefore, for me the question of choice has never been a question. And therefore, no, no, but I will give recommendations regarding Photoshop, especially where its capabilities will help significantly simplify creativity.

So, you need any graphic editor that allows you to draw with a tool of one square pixel (there are also non-square pixels, for example round ones, but they this moment not interested). If your editor supports any set of colors, great. If it also allows you to save files, that’s great. It would be nice if he knew how to work with layers, because when working on a fairly complex picture, it is more convenient to arrange its elements into different layers, but by and large this is a matter of habit and convenience.

Shall we start? Are you probably waiting for a list of some secret techniques, recommendations that will teach you how to draw pixel art? But the truth is that, by and large, there is nothing like that. The only way learning to draw pixel graphics means drawing yourself, trying, trying, not being afraid and experimenting. Feel free to repeat other people's work, don't be afraid to seem unoriginal (just don't pass off someone else's work as your own, hehe). Carefully and thoughtfully analyze the works of masters (not mine) and draw, draw, draw. Several useful links await you at the end of the article.

3. General principles.

And yet there are several general principles, which will not hurt to know. There are really few of them, I call them “principles” and not laws, because they are more of a recommendatory nature. In the end, if you manage to draw a brilliant pixel art bypassing all the rules - who cares about them?

The most basic principle can be formulated as follows: the minimum unit of an image is a pixel, and, if possible, all elements of the composition should be proportionate to it. Let me break it down: everything you draw consists of pixels, and the pixel must be readable in everything. This does not mean that the picture cannot contain elements at all, for example, 2x2 pixels, or 3x3. But it is still preferable to construct an image from individual pixels.

The stroke and generally all lines of the drawing should be one pixel thick (with rare exceptions).

I'm not saying at all that this is wrong. But it's still not very pretty. And to make it beautiful, let’s remember one more rule: draw without kinks, round smoothly. There is such a thing as kinks - fragments that break out of general order, they give the lines an uneven, jagged appearance (in the English-speaking environment of pixel artists they are called jaggies):

Fractures deprive the drawing of its natural smoothness and beauty. And if fragments 3, 4 and 5 are obvious and can be easily corrected, with the others the situation is more complicated - there the length of a single piece in the chain is broken, it would seem a trifle, but the trifle is noticeable. It takes a little practice to learn to see these places and avoid them. Kink 1 is knocked out of the line because it is a single pixel - while in the area where it was inserted, the line consists of segments of 2 pixels. To get rid of it, I softened the entry of the curve into the bend, lengthening the top segment to 3 pixels, and redrew the entire line in 2 pixel segments. Breaks 2 and 6 are identical to each other - these are already fragments 2 pixels long in areas constructed by single pixels.

An elementary set of examples of inclined straight lines, which can be found in almost every pixel art manual (mine is no exception), will help you avoid such kinks when drawing:

As you can see, a straight line is made up of segments of the same length, shifted by one pixel as it is drawn - only in this way is the effect of linearity achieved. The most common construction methods are with segment lengths of 1, 2 and 4 pixels (there are others, but the presented options should be enough to implement almost any artistic idea). Of these three, the most popular can confidently be called a segment length of 2 pixels: draw a segment, move the pen by 1 pixel, draw another segment, move the pen by 1 pixel, draw another segment:

Not difficult, right? All you need is a habit. The ability to draw inclined straight lines in 2-pixel increments will help in isometry, so we’ll look at it in more detail next time. In general, straight lines are great - but only until the task arises of drawing something miraculous. Here we need curves, and many different curves. And we take into account a simple rule for rounding curved lines: the length of the curve elements should decrease/increase gradually.

The exit from the straight line to the rounding is carried out smoothly, I indicated the length of each segment: 5 pixels, 3, 2, 2, 1, 1, again 2 (already vertical), 3, 5 and so on. Your case will not necessarily use the same sequence, it all depends on the smoothness that is required. Another example of rounding:

Again, we avoid kinks that spoil the picture so much. If you want to check the material you have learned, here I have a skin for Winamp drawn by an unknown author, a blank:

There are gross errors in the drawing, and simply unsuccessful roundings, and there are kinks - try to correct the picture based on what you already know. That's all I have with the lines, I suggest you draw a little. And don’t let the simplicity of the examples confuse you, you can only learn to draw by drawing – even the simplest things.

4.1. Draw a bottle of living water.

1. The shape of the object, you don’t have to use color for now.

2. Red liquid.

3. Change the color of the glass to blue, add shaded areas inside the bubble and a light area on the intended surface of the liquid.

4. Add white highlights on the bubble, and a 1 pixel wide dark red shadow on the areas of the liquid bordering the walls of the bubble. Looks pretty good, huh?

5. Similarly, we draw a bottle with blue liquid - here the same color of glass, plus three shades of blue for the liquid.

4.2. Drawing a watermelon.

Let's draw a circle and a semicircle - this will be a watermelon and a cut out slice.

2. Let’s mark the cutout on the watermelon itself, and on the slice – the border between the rind and the pulp.

3. Filling. Colors from the palette, medium green is the color of the rind, medium red is the color of the pulp.

4. Let us mark the transition area from the crust to the pulp.

5. Light stripes on the watermelon (finally it looks like itself). And of course – seeds! If you cross a watermelon with cockroaches, they will crawl away on their own.

6. We bring it to mind. We use a pale pink color to indicate the highlights above the seeds in the section, and by laying out the pixels in a checkerboard pattern, we achieve some semblance of volume from the cut out segment (the method is called dithering, more on that later). We use a dark red tint to indicate the shaded areas in the section of the watermelon, and a dark green tint (again, pixels in a checkerboard pattern) to give volume to the watermelon itself.

5. Dithering.

Dithering, or blending, is a technique of mixing pixels in two adjacent areas of different colors in a definitely ordered (not always) way. The simplest, most common and effective way is to alternate pixels in a checkerboard pattern:

The technique was born thanks to (or rather in spite of) technical limitations - on platforms with limited palettes, dithering made it possible, by mixing pixels of two different colors, to obtain a third one that was not in the palette:

Now, in an era of limitless technical possibilities, many say that the need for dither has disappeared by itself. However, its proper use can give your work a characteristic retro style, recognizable to all fans of old video games. Personally, I like to use dithering. I’m not very good at it, but I still love it.

Two more dither options:

What you need to know about dithering to be able to use it. The minimum width of the blending zone must be at least 2 pixels (those checkered lines). More is possible. It's better not to do less.

Below is an example of unsuccessful dithering. Despite the fact that a similar technique can often be found on sprites from video games, you need to be aware that the television screen significantly smoothed out the image, and such a comb, and even in motion, was not visible to the eye:

Well, enough theory. I suggest you practice a little more.

Pixel art can be drawn in any program for working with raster graphics; it is a matter of personal preference and experience (as well as financial capabilities, of course). Some people use the simplest Paint, I do it in Photoshop - because, firstly, I’ve been working in it for a long time, and secondly, I’m more comfortable there. Once I decided to try the free Paint.NET, I didn’t like it - it’s like with a car; if you recognize a foreign car with an automatic transmission, you’re unlikely to get into a Zaporozhets. My employer provides me with licensed software, so my conscience is clear before the Adobe corporation... Although they charge unimaginable prices for their programs, and they will burn in hell for this.

1. Preparation for work.

We create new document with any settings (let the width be 60, height 100 pixels). The main tool of a pixel artist is a pencil ( Pencil Tool, called hotkey B). If the brush (and the brush icon) is enabled in the toolbar, hover over it, click and hold L.M.B.– a small drop-down menu will appear in which you should select a pencil. Set the pen size to 1 pixel (in the top panel on the left there is a drop-down menu Brush):