Hi there! Today’s topic is pixel art, and what its pros and cons are.
I’m an artist who started drawing when I had absolutely no drawing skills whatsoever, and I certainly didn’t have any talent to speak of. My very first drawings were so awful that I find it physically hard to look at them now (although I still have them saved on my hard drive). And knowing that I’m a really bad artist, I decided it made sense to learn pixel art, as it seemed much easier for animation and use in game development.
This is actually both true and not true at the same time. Pixel art is deceptive in that it looks easy to learn. In reality, just like regular art, it has specific problems you wouldn’t even suspect. Take, for example, this character:
As you can see, this is a standard character. But in reality, its size is exactly the same as this character:
The second character looks different, but their sizes are actually identical. This is where one of the main advantages and main drawbacks of pixel art lies: namely, size limitations.
There are plenty of tutorials on how to create pixel art, and most of them mention the standard pixel art canvas sizes. 16×16, 32×32, 48×48, 64×64 and 128×128 are all standard canvas sizes for drawing characters in pixel art. But why not draw on a 512x512 canvas or larger? Well, some people do that, but then the art ceases to be pixel art and becomes simply ‘pixelated’ art.
Why is that? Because the higher the resolution, the fewer details you see. And pixel art is precisely when you can see each pixel individually and understand exactly what has been drawn.
Because of this, pixel art requires not just a clear understanding of what you want to draw, but also limitations on size and detail for display.
This might not seem like such a big problem at first; after all, you can draw a character at 128x128 and it will still have plenty of detail and space to work with. That’s true, but to create ‘clean’ pixel art that looks good, you need to check every pixel in the artwork, and the higher the resolution, the more time it takes to clean up the artwork. And that’s not to mention animations, which also require a lot of cleaning up.
And so as not to be accused of making empty claims, here is some messy pixel art:
And here is some clean pixel art:
You might say I drew this badly on purpose, but no, actually I just tweaked the pixels and colors in the second image without changing anything else.
But having outlined the drawbacks of pixel art first, I now want to talk about its advantages. In fact, pixel art has one of the biggest advantages over conventional art, namely coloring.
Coloring in normal art takes up more than half the time spent working on the piece. Of course, drawing the lines is an important part, but that’s just a sketch, and a fully-fledged piece of art only emerges once you’ve colored it in completely. In pixel art, this problem doesn’t exist.
Coloring in pixel art is actually quite simple if you want to create standard pixel art where each color has between 2 and 4 shades. Here’s what I mean:
In most cases, even if you simply fill the relevant areas with a standard color, you’ll end up with a decent result:
And if you add shadows and highlights, you get this:
That’s it. You’ve completely finished сoloring your pixel art. There’s no need to worry about different shades on the art’s details here; you can simply fill in the character’s color and add just a few small details, and that’s all.
Another advantage, apart from the сoloring, is that the character size is fixed. Why? Because you don’t have to worry about what size your game’s characters should be. Of course, this is from a game developer’s perspective, but it’s a major advantage.
You have pre-defined character sizes, and based on these, you can draw the characters’ surroundings and other details.
Also, if you’re simply creating pixel art, you’ll already have a prepared canvas, and your art will have a consistent look.
Pixel art may seem easy and ‘unprofessional’, but in reality, learning and using it will take just as long as you would spend learning to draw conventional art.
And although I love pixel art, I’ve already realised that pixel art, just like regular art, has its limitations in terms of how it can be used in game development. Of course, I’ll still continue to use it for my games, as I need to finish all my projects, but in the future I want to develop further and move on to 3D.