Awesome Pixel Art

A curated collection of resources and projects focused on Pixel Art.

Contents

• Tutorials
  • Basics
  • Color
  • Animation
• Books
• Inspiration
  • Games
  • Videos
  • Other
• Community
  • Artists
  • Hubs
• Tools
  • Editors
  • Miscellaneous

Tutorials

Basics

• Introduction to pixel art
• Creating a cube
• Creating round objects
• Outline basics
• Outline colors
• Getting started from scratch with Aseprite

Color

• Creating a color palette
• Color palette and HSL
• Moawling’s color palette process

Animation

• Walking animation cycle in games
• Tips for animating 2D games

Books

• Pixel logic - Pixel Logic is an in-depth pixel art tutorial book.
• Make Your Own Pixel Art - Walks you step-by-step through the available tools, pixel art techniques, the importance of shapes, colors, shading, and how to turn your art into animation.

Inspiration

Games

• Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island - Play as Yoshi carrying Baby Mario, platforming through a dangerous world. The painted feel and soft pastel colors create an hearth-warming handmade style that breathes the charm of a children’s book.
• FEZ - Explore a 2D retrofuturistic world by rotating in the third dimension. The minimalistic style, bright vibrant colors and dynamic lighting bring the 16-bit era into the future.
• Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP - Laid back adventure in a bronze age mountain wilderness. Dreamy soft colors in a living world affected by moon phases.
• Undertale - A story-driven RPG where you explore a world of monsters. Turn-based combat. Retro 16-bit visuals, a rich narrative, and multiple endings based on your choices.
• Shovel Knight: Treasure Trove - Classic action adventure with an 8-bit retro aesthetic, taking the looks of a modern NES game.
• Hyper Light Drifter - Top-down action in a sci-fi world that radiates light and warmth. Using a colorful palette and kaleidoscopic neon yet setting a grim ambiance.
• Owlboy - Explore a detailed steampunk world in the clouds. With it’s range of endearing animations and expressions the world and it’s characters come to life.
• Stardew Valley - Manage a farm from a top-down perspective and engage with a charming and cheerful world in 16-bit.
• Starbound - Travel across vibrant, colorful and expansive galaxies, including creative dynamic animations.
• Void Golf - Shoot giant pieces of space rock into black holes, using gravitational fields, physics-defying walls and wormholes in a minimalist top-down view.
• Minit - With a minimalistic design (only two colors palette). Minit is an adventure where each exploration journey is limited to 60 seconds.

Videos

• Sean Browning - Pixel Art Animation Reel 2018 - A collection of Sean Browning’s pixel animations, ranging from simple scenes to recreations of popular shows like Steven’s Universe and RWBY.
• Pixel Paul - An Interview with Pixel Artist and Animator Paul Veer - Paul Veer, a professional pixel artist with work on games such as Super Crate Box, shares his interest in pixel art as well as his workflow and style breakdown.
• MortMort channel - Creative videos & streams including tips, discussions and tutorials.

Other

• Lospec palette list - Collection of color palettes for pixel art with examples and artist information.

Community

Artists

• eBoy - German, pixel art group founded in 1997 by Kai Vermehr, Steffen Sauerteig and Svend Smital. They are regarded as the “Godfathers of Pixel Art”.
• Paul Robertson - Australian, creating cute, sometimes cosmic and psychedelic, and sometimes weird nightmarish pixel art.
• Syosa - Japanese, girlish style using bright and organic color palettes creating cute humans and animals.
• Thomas Feichtmeir - Australian, dark and mature: fan of knights, dinosaurs, pirates, epic beasts, anatomy and history as well as everything twisted and weird.
• Toyoi Yuuta - Australian, capturing small animated scenes of everyday life in unsaturated colors.
• Slynyrd - American, game designer with tons of material, game specific knowledge and mini-tutorials.

Hubs

• Reddit /r/PixelArt
• Pixel Joint
• Pixelrepo
• Lospec

Tools

Editors

• Aseprite - Paid and source-available, works on Linux, macOS and Windows. Awesome UI with a lot of nifty tools to ease pixel art creation.
• Pixen - Paid, works on macOS and iOS. Superb OS integration, create pixel art on a tablet using pressure-sensitive drawing.
• Pro Motion - Paid with trial, works on Windows. Advanced features tailored to creating pixel art for games.
• GIMP - Open source and free, works on Linux, macOS and Windows. Not specifically for creating pixel art but is more than capable to do so.
• PixelCraft - Open source and free, works in the browser. Easy to try out in the browser and as a PWA offline.
• rx - Open source and free, works on Linux, macOS and Windows. Minimalist and keyboard driven with animation support.
• Wobblepaint - Pico8 editor that give life to pixel art with a little wobble.
• Pixelrepo - Free and works in the browser. Import files and palettes, save locally. Minimalist, easy to use, and perfect for quick pixel art editing.
• Draw! - Editor for creating tiny GIF animations. Open source and free, works in the browser.

Miscellaneous

• Broider - Make 9-patch borders, export as CSS.
• pixeldudesmaker - Small character generator, including basic animation.
• PixelArtChallenge - Pixel art recreation challenges, practice solo or compete in real-time 1v1 matches.
• Palette Extractor - Free and works in the browser. Pull a sprite’s exact palette, export .gpl, Lospec .hex, CSS or JSON.