Low resolution high quality Medals/Awards

[EqueL]

Hey,
Kind of a new here. I'm helping out with a game, and since the last Graphic's Designer quit (or went inactive).
I'm trying to help to make new medals, but in the style of the old one's. So I'm looking for any direction where I would find Inspiration/Tutorials on how to achieve something like the previous designer made.
Here's a small example:

[Conzeit]

www.wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=15198.new#new did  you happen to land this job by any chance? :p

to me it looks like he worked on this in photoshop with a 1px width aliased brush. I dont think you'll find a tutorial of how to make this unless the last designer wrote one.

I suggest you use 1px brushes and other small brushes with low opacity and try to pick colors with low saturation.

There was a guy who used to come here a very very long time ago, who made art similar to that but unfortunately I dont have a direct link to his site, and his name was always hard to pronounce.

His name was something like mahjiga, he made a big ben, animated some trains, a running cheetah, smoke effects all in photoshop with small brushes, like this style but better. He was very fond of making animated gif signatures. Any old timers here remember what was his actual name or have a link to his site?

[EqueL]

Hey,
Nah, not that job, just helping out in a web game.
Thanks for your reply, and I've tried making it on a big canvas then resizing it down, not the best results though.

[Crow]

If you do that, you should scale it down using a bilinear algorithm. Otherwise, you'll get that nasty ringing effect at the edges.

[Mathias]

Yep, you usually wanna avoid sharpening halos with this sort of thing.
Once scaled down, you can apply your own sharpening. If in Photoshop, convert the layer(s) to a Smart Object before scaling. Then you can apply non-destructive Smart Filters, such as sharpening. This way, you maintain full control and lose no pixel data.

[EqueL]

Thanks,
Will try to give it a go with these suggestions.