Just a little something I whipped up in GraphicsGale. These characters will eventually be animated.
No doubt you can tell I was feeling more confident with every subsequent sprite, they are shown in chronological order of completion.

If you're wondering, the Deep Blues Gang is a small mob of gangsters who are also chess nerds. Each character is based off a chess piece. From left to right, they are Elvis Gloom, Victor Hedwig, Jean-Baptiste, Castello, Bauer and Art Galahad.

GraphicsGale has a free version. It's biggest limitation being you can't save GIFs. It's an annoyance when you need to post animations online, but it's perfectly functional for game development.

ProMotion costs money. It is to pixel art what PhotoShop is to image editing: the de facto standard.

Grafx2 is a new version of a very old program. It's free and it's got some nice feature overlap with ProMotion (they both trace their roots to Delux Paint), but it's lack of animation support disqualifies it from serious production work.

Cheers for that - though the Grafx2 link appears to be broken.

I have never used DeluxPaint so that means nothing to me, it would be just as fidgety as learning a new program.

I am, however, very much enjoying GraphicsGale and might even buy it. $25 really isn't that much.

-Edit- Okay, so it has keyboard shortcut mapping. Sweet, this program has everything! Thanks a lot, guys, you are all life-savers.

Apologies if this is in the wrong section, but I've been getting back into Pixelart again quite intensely lately, and I've been running into some problems with the software I use.

Primarily I use Photoshop CS2 which for the most part works perfectly. Annoyingly, however, it seems to be really, really inconsistent with registering clicks from my Intuos tablet, meaning that stippling pixel shading is virtually impossible, and even the simple chore of drawing lines is unpredictable and messy as the pixels aren't actually appearing.

I moved onto SAI and found it to be an extremely powerful and capable tool when creating pixelart, but unfortunately the one limitation I found with it was the most crippling - the eraser has no option whatsoever for disabling anti-aliasing. There is no efficient way to "rub something out".

I then moved to The Gimp out of desperation and spent nearly half an hour just trying to figure out the tools and found it to be equally confusing and limiting.

I'm at my wit's end here because I have no intention of slowing down in my pixelling, but my software is seriously getting in the way of productivity! What do you guys use? And if you use the same programs as me, how do you circumnavigate these irritating shortcomings??

Thanks in advance.

Your palette didn't have enough contrast in it, mine is pretty wacky color wise but it's the values and cool/warm transitions that are important.
You know id honestly love to explain what I did but I kinda just started messing around regardless you had the very general shapes ok but some needed some fine tuning and you have to think of the major forms of the figure and how light hits on those( back-rectangular prism, legs-cylinder etc)

I think that makes a lot of sense. When I first started pixelling, I had a serious problem with getting the contrast in a piece where I wanted. Wen you are that far zoomed in and painting one tiny little block at a time the colours have a tendency to stick very close together resulting in a washed-out pallette.
One thing you have shown quite well here which I still need to work on is graduations between warm and cool colours. The more I look at the great pixelart around here, and the closer I look, the more I notice the artists are doing funny things with the colours. It's extra obvious with your version of the Feral Girl right next to the original, but in isolation you just kind of take it for granted and wonder why it looks so dynamic with so few colours!

Okay, so inspired by some of the huge collabs here, one of my friends decided to start an IsoCollab of her own, but because she didn't know how many folks would participate, she decided to do a puny one to start off with to gauge how popular it was.

I decided to lend a hand as I'm way out of practice with my pixelart, and could use an excuse to hone my skills before participating in one of the real deals here.

So far, I'm happy with it, but I noticed I went a bit trigger-happy with the pallette. That's one thing I need to improve on, colour conservation, so if anyone has any tips that would be great.



The other thing that is really, REALLY bothering me is the stream of liquid. I can't figure out how to make it look... not... crap.
Here's a bigger picture for your convenience.



Any and all critique is welcome. Thanks, guys.