Open a new canvas on Photoshop by selecting File ▸ New… and set it to 240×160 pixels so you can look at it and choose the size for your character. Then your working resolution will be half of that size, or 240×160 pixels. This should be based on the screen size of the device you’re targeting, and how large you want the “pixels” to look.įor example, let’s say you want the game to look double-sized on an iPhone 3GS (“I really want to give a retro, pixel look to my game!”), which has a resolution of 480×320 pixels. To avoid this problem, you should first put some thought into exactly how large you want your game character/enemy/game element to be before you get started. If you try to scale it up, it can look OK as long as you use a multiple of two. If you try to scale it down, it will look like a mess.

Let’s try it out! Getting Startedīefore you start making your first pixel art asset, you should be aware that pixel art is not easily resizable. In the end, pixel art is all about taking great care about the placement of each pixel in a sprite, most often manually and with a limited palette of colors. However, you can configure them to not anti-alias their edges, giving you control over every pixel they fill, so they are “pixel art friendly”. Other tools such as the line tool or the paint bucket tool also automatically generates pixels. Nevertheless, using fewer colors is a good practice of pixel art. But since most hardware nowadays can deal with millions of colors, you can ignore this. Some would say that even automatically generated colors are not pixel art, implying that layer blending effects that mix pixels between two layers in a preset algorithm are not allowed. Anti-alias tools generate new pixels in different colors to make something look ‘smoother’.

Pixel art krita tutorial