New to Pixeling

[HalcyonDreamer]

 *Cough Cough* Maybe a little input  .
I know its not the greatest but maybe some C&C?
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I guess I should say this so I don't get shot down first post. I used Megaman sprites as a template for this work. I'm still having trouble with the outlines/ basic body structure, but I have been reading tutorials to help that. Would it be bad to feature these sprites in a game?

[Helm]

make something completely on your own and then you'll get help. This isn't a ripper forum. It's good that you said you used a megaman source, but please just post original art here.

[ndchristie]

idraw is great for its intuitiveness, all of the tools feel as though they are part of you, extensions of the hand.  promotion comes close to this, but not quite as much as Idraw does for me.

again, thers not enough to mspaint to really talk about it as a program.  ive found that for me, it is slow, unwieldly, and at times counter-intuitive.  photoshop is the same way for pixels i think.  it just doesnt feel as fluid as Idraw or promotion to me.  graphicsgale is just nuts i think, but thats because its square/rectangle tool is wonkers and i draw almost entirely with that (except for freehanding the general shapes)

also, what helm said about the sprites.  what good can we do you if you are using someone else's (mediocre) work?  there are a lot fo people here who can help you, but we need a genuine work to start from

[Ai]

I read the Wiki, but am confused as to why Pro Motion is so good for pixel art if I'm not supposed to use any of the tools. If I can't do that, isn't MS Paint pretty much as good?

If the wiki says that, the wiki is wrong. ProMotion is made specifically for creating 2d game art; the majority of which is still pixel art.

The philosophy behind minimizing tool usage is largely about simplifying your choices.. If your tools place 'accidental' pixels, you have then to concern yourself with cleaning them up. If you use more colors, you have to concern yourself with the shapes of more color regions. If you include more objects, you have to spend more time on composition, Larger canvas.. more time on refining the shape harmonics.
Everything takes more attention, the more of it you include.
That's why it's good to start out as small as you can, with as few colors as you can and a simple style.
For this moon image, it can be reduced to at least 16x16 without losing any of it's moon-ness, and it's perfectly possible to draw it in a mere 2 colors. I recommend it.
Here is an example based on your moon -- in 2,4, and 8 colors respectively, with individual stylistic choices matching the respective limitations.





Joseph: My main criteria for whether I can take a program seriously in it's usefulness for pixeling is, does it allow you to change to next/previous color in the palette easily?
MsPain doesn't. Photoshop AFAIK doesn't.
DeluxePaint does. Grafx2 does. Gimp does. Promotion does. IDraw probably does.

MsPain does have a reasonable bezier tool, but that is about all I can say for it; it's name is well earnt.

[robotriot]

Bah, I hate all this Photoshop bashing, most of the functions work really well for pixeling. I should write a little summary of how to use PS to pixel

[Helm]

exactly the thing: if you have to write a summary of how to downgrade ps to work pixels in it... then you need a pixel specific program. Enter pro motion, or at least graphics gale. Idraw wasn't my sort of thing at all and the only way I could see someone enjoying it would be because he's already used it for ages and has gotten comfy.

[tomster 785]

why are all you people saying what every pixel artist (good or bad) got into pixel art with is bad? MS paint rocks if you ask me, I went to PS, sucked, I went to graphics gale (thats good but I've lost the palette-_-) that was pretty good, but I just like MS paint more (for one it's good for it's resizeable canvas)

[robotriot]

I don't think it's much of an argument to say that when you have to alter a couple of things, it isn't worth even bothering working with Photoshop. It's really a very powerful tool. Anyway, I wrote a small "tutorial" on the subject: http://omr.planet-d.net/photoshop_pixel_tutorial.html

[ptoing]

Photoshop is not too bad for pixelart, I actually use it here at work for a few things that ProMo can't do (yet?) as alpha transparency.
But when it comes to straight no frills pixelling imo nothing is faster than ProMo for me, esp since I by now know basically every function and every shortcut of it by heart. In the end it's getting used to a lot, but ProMo is probably the tool with the most versatile features regarding pixelling.

[Helm]

why are all you people saying what every pixel artist (good or bad) got into pixel art with is bad?

Pixel art both predates and evolves without MSpaint. The origins of the artform lie in ancient home computers, and the rise of what we call pixelling today occured on home consoles like the SNES and computers like the Amiga500, with deluxe paint and variations of. All the active demoscenes which involved pixel art were much more on machines that aren't PCs. Atari, Amiga, c64. MSpaint is a recent tool in this historical framework, and not what most of the great pixel artists started out with.