Intro: What is Pixel Art?

This rose-covered cottage will be drawn in the 'pixel art' style using Paint Shop Pro. Pixel Art is one painting method that works equally well with a mouse or a graphics tablet and with any paint program. These instructions, however, are written for Paint Shop Pro X.

Sue Chastain has defined pixel art well... "Pixel Art is a retro form of digital art which is gaining a lot in popularity these days. Pixel Art is generally thought of as a computer graphic where the image is literally drawn pixel-by-pixel in tiny detail, usually using a limited color palette and primitive computer graphics tools… Although pixel art is not hard to create, it does require a great deal of patience!"

That pretty well sums up what we'll be doing with this tutorial. This pixel-drawn rose-covered cottage is not hard to create, but it will require a certain amount of patience and attention to detail. Pixel Art can be very satisfying. To quote a pixel artist named drububu... "the quality of your work will not be influenced by the price of the program you use or your computer's brand and speed. The quality of your work purely stems from what's between your ears."

In addition to being a unique art form, pixel art has many benefits for web work. Because pixel art is designed to be used with a limited palette and hand-painted gradients, the results is often a small file size that is great for animated GIFs! More than 256 colors can be used if you save as PNG file type. Using the JPEG format is not recommended for a pixel painting. It will alter some pixels, possibly blurring the image and destroying the look.

This 'pixel' style is not for everyone. Some may find it very tedious. I find the crisp simplicity of it a relaxing break from complicated artwork that requires a lot of different tool settings and image manipulation. But be forewarned… there's a lot of detail in the following steps and completing this tutorial may take a few drawing sessions! ;-)

Save the following image for use in this tutorial. It is a layered image in .psp format, so any version of Paint Shop Pro will be able to open it. Included in the image are the cottage outline and some color swatches that we'll be using.

Download: azk23-cottage-outline.zip