Gorsal's Pixelart Tutorial 2017

[Gors]

A dot, a passion, a living

Disclaimer: All explanations in here are personal and thus should not be taken as the only way to make Pixelart. This is for didatic purposes only. Do not copy this text or post it as your own. Thank you.

Preface

Pixelart is an art media that is older than you might think. Thriving as mosaic, then as embroidery, many of pixelart's elements can be traced back to those ancient medias. Creating pixelart is enjoyable, as long as you build the stepping stones of what is a pixelart, and how much you can extract out of it. Think about it as a dictionary for pixelart. I want you to browse and look up for the meanings of the terms, and practice them yourself.

Getting Started
I'll be working on this thread during the course of this year. I have learned lots of things since the last time I made the current Pixelart Dictionary, and this is the moment to improve upon it. Nothing better than a pixelartist to talk about pixelart, much like you want a programmer to deal with programming and a musician to make music. I want to have full control of what is being made here, is all.

I'll create each entry in this thread as its own post, so that you can easily browse between them. This also means, I'd appreciate if no one posted here until I'm finished. If you really need to talk about it, send me a PM and I'll work on it. Additionally, since I'm no longer a mod, this means that the forum programming will automatically merge my posts if I attempt to make many posts in succession, so I'll have to wait at least 1 hour until I make the next entry. I apologize for the slow start, but I intend to create something that will be more durable than the current thread.

History
Pixelart is above all, an art of non-complexity. Not in the sense that it is easy to make, far from it. But it is a media that requires the piece to be understood clearly even in a small resolution. A pixel is the lowest graphical element in a pixelart, and thus some detail is lost in the process. Additionally, game cartridges came with very limited graphical capabilities, which further crippled the way you can make pixelart in a game. It's a media about using resources well, in a strategical manner, to represent an element, or a character. This gives Pixelart a very iconic feel - each frame or each character is like a symbol that is read - and being able to quickly discern it is the speciality of this media.

There is no such thing as "half-a-pixel", and while you can mimic it, there are inherent complications on how to represent a given graphic. This in turn gives us a whole slew of terms that are not only art-related, but Pixelart-only terms that needs to be understood. This Tutorial's aim is to provide you, the reader, a better understanding of those techniques, with examples and how to make them.

Glossary
Click on the term to jump to its entry. Note that some of them can't be clicked yet due to reasons stated above. These terms are in alphabetical order for your convenience. The small parenthesis denote the parent topic of the given subject.

8-bit
Antialiasing
Banding (Shading)
Cluster
Contrast
Custom (Sprite)
Dithering
Edit (Sprite)
Format
Frame
GIF (Format)
Gradient Shading (Shading)
Index Painting
Isometric (Perspective)
JPG (Format)
Jaggy (Outline)
Layering
Lightsource (Shading)
Lone Pixel (Cluster)
Modular Sprite
Motion Blur
NES (8-bit)
Outline
Palette
Perspective
Pillowshading (Shading)
Pixelart
Readability
Recolor
Resolution
Saturation
Selout
Shading
Sprite
Subpixeling (Antialiasing)
Splice
Tileset