Make Your Own Pixel Art

Create Graphics for Games, Animations, and More!

by Jennifer Dawe and Matthew Humphries

March 2019, 200 pp.

ISBN-13:

978-1-59327-886-1

4-Color

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Download the Chapter Resources Here

Hand anyone a pencil and paper and they can start drawing, but it's just as easy to draw digitally using a keyboard and mouse. With Make Your Own Pixel Art, pixel artist Jennifer Dawe and game designer Matthew Humphries walk 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. By the end of the book, you'll be creating art far beyond what's possible on paper!

Make Your Own Pixel Art will teach you how to:

Create pixel art using the most popular art software and the common tools they provide
Draw with pixels, including coverage of sculpting, shading, texture, and color use
The basics of motion and how to animate your pixel art creations
Best practices for saving, sharing, sketching, and adding emotion to your art

With a dash of creativity and the help of Make Your Own Pixel Art, your digital drawings can be brought to life, shared with the world, and form a basis for a career in art, design, or the video games industry.

Author Bio

Jennifer Dawe is a self-taught animator and character designer who has been a professional pixel artist for the past 15 years. She can usually be found on Twitter @GMShivers posting doodles and answering questions about drawing and digital art.

Matthew Humphries is Senior Editor at PCMag.com and a professional game designer. Over the past 15 years he has worked on games for Disney, 20th Century Fox, and Games Workshop among others. You can find him on Twitter @mthwgeek.

Table of contents

Preface

Chapter 1: Pixel Art Tool Guide
Chapter 2: Shapes and Shading
Chapter 3: Colors and Palettes
Chapter 4: From Concept to Complete
Chapter 5: Get in the Game
Chapter 6: Animating Pixels
Chapter 7: Special Effects for Animation
Chapter 8: Where to Go from Here

Appendix

View the detailed Table of Contents

Reviews

"Aside from being unbelievably cute (the cat character throughout the book) it has been useful."
—Tired Fox Projects Blog

"This book is incredible and you 100% should buy it if you have even the slightest interest in learning how to create pixel art! It's so much fun."
—Lisa Hignett, @LisaHignett

Updates

View the latest errata.