Good 2D Sprite Art/bitmap Graphics Tutorials?

[Wrath Of Khan]

Does anyone know of comphrehensive sprite art tutorials on the net?Is their any books published showing how to draw?
There are brief tutorials here and there,but nothing much.I dont see books on play or amazon.com etc.Any ideas?

 

[Eniko]

There's the classic, Tsugumo's So You Want To Be a Pixel Artist. The only other tutorials I know of are mostly for going deeper into certain concepts like selout.

I also tried my hand at creating a tutorial for creating a single sprite from start to finish (no tiles though) and I named that Birth of a Pixel Baby. There's also an appendix.

 

[SomeGuy99]

I started doing some Nes sprites. Just did it...

The resolution and colour limits were strangely conducive to creativity. You can't just do anything you want... you try and fix the horrible thing you created... and out of the chaos of crap, emerges something. It was forged by you, working around the limitations. You worked together. It's brilliant.

I did a load of spaceships. Peice of piss. I did some 8x16 figures... trickier, but eventually I cracked it. It's hard to make that few pixels look like anything at all, you see.

Now on the other hand, I then did a huge 16bit style sprite. It wouldn't even work on the Nes in hardware terms, but I was curious.

Let's just say that the difficulty curve there is insanely high. Like a factor of 100.

Anyone who can do 16bit sprites has my respect.

Like Eniko. Those are just WOW.

 

[LineOf7s]

Here's one off the top of my head by Derek Yu, artist on Aquaria: CLICKY

I know there are others around, but I thought I'd post this one just quickly as a start.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

Thanks any good tutorials will be helpful.keep suggestions coming,please.

 

[Eniko]

Now on the other hand, I then did a huge 16bit style sprite. It wouldn't even work on the Nes in hardware terms, but I was curious.

Let's just say that the difficulty curve there is insanely high. Like a factor of 100.

Anyone who can do 16bit sprites has my respect.

Like Eniko. Those are just WOW.

Truer words have never been spoken. You might have noticed that most of my Onee-sama Tasukete! art might as well only have 3 or 4 colours. I go with mostly a base colour and a shadow colour on the sprites with black outlines, the power up beam is only 3 colours as well, and tiles are mostly a maximum of 4 colours. I do it that way partly to make it feel retro and partly because it's easier and thus lets me get more work done.

KISS applies to pixel art so much.

 

[SomeGuy99]

Now on the other hand, I then did a huge 16bit style sprite. It wouldn't even work on the Nes in hardware terms, but I was curious.

Let's just say that the difficulty curve there is insanely high. Like a factor of 100.

Anyone who can do 16bit sprites has my respect.

Like Eniko. Those are just WOW.

Truer words have never been spoken. You might have noticed that most of my Onee-sama Tasukete! art might as well only have 3 or 4 colours. I go with mostly a base colour and a shadow colour on the sprites with black outlines, the power up beam is only 3 colours as well, and tiles are mostly a maximum of 4 colours. I do it that way partly to make it feel retro and partly because it's easier and thus lets me get more work done.

KISS applies to pixel art so much.

I still don't think I've cracked it to be honest. This guy is a work in progress:

 

[Prometheus]

Show them the other guys, SomeGuy.

@Eniko - +1 to that. And implying stuff instead of struggling to fit in ridiculous levels of detail (both visually, and in the animation department) is so important, too.

 

[Eniko]

Oh for sure, the human brain can imagine detail where there is none far better than any animator or artist could ever explicitly define it. Give the viewer just enough to extrapolate the rest, that's the way to do it.

SomeGuy, that actually looks pretty good. Just needs some more shading. Also less defying of the rest of the picture's resolution by that cloud over there.

 

[SomeGuy99]

SomeGuy, that actually looks pretty good. Just needs some more shading. Also less defying of the rest of the picture's resolution by that cloud over there.

Yeah, I made a bunch of frames for him since this, and he has more shading (and a back leg and arm). Animating is bloody tough. I respect anyone that can churn out 16bit animated sprites. It's a serious challenge, and so much work.

Resolution? The cloud is in the same resolution! These are actual Nes sprites imported into paint.

 

[atomicthumbs]

I'm going to try to do the art for my game. I plan to use a DSLR with video to do some kind of rotoscoping/manual motion capture technique.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

I'm going to try to do the art for my game. I plan to use a DSLR with video to do some kind of rotoscoping/manual motion capture technique.

sounds cool.prince of persiaesque

 

[SomeGuy99]

I'm going to try to do the art for my game. I plan to use a DSLR with video to do some kind of rotoscoping/manual motion capture technique.

sounds cool.prince of persiaesque

Didn't they do this for Flashback?

I remember reading that they did it with transparent paper. On monitors. Every frame was projected, traced with a pen, then put over the monitors one by one and copied into pixels. I seem to recall it took a team of animators absolutely FOREVER.

But modern tools eh!

Nes sprites used to be graph paper and hex codes

 

[DaveC]

I did these along time ago. They were for remakes that never happened (I can't code and the coder got busy).

Yeah I know, not too original. Everything was pixeled though and none of it ripped if that means anything. Also each image uses only 28 colors total for everything.

 

[gruso]

Not bad at all Dave. Stretch them to the Pandora screen, apply a couple of filters, they'd look tops.

 

[cosam]

Not bad at all Dave. Stretch them to the Pandora screen, apply a couple of filters, they'd look tops.

Haha, I was just about to GIMP them but now you spoiled the surprise ;-P

 

[torpor]

DaveC! Those sprites are awesome, and they're begging to be put into some working code for a re-make! Please publish the sprite sheets, and maybe something fun can come out of it ..

BTW, for those artists looking for a quick way to get something working in a fashion for SDL (and thus, all our favourite consoles), have a look at the animator tool, which is a 2D/vector graphics cmd-line tool which utilizes SDL:

http://repo.hu/projects/animator/

This works very well on Pandora (you can compile it onboard, Bollocks!-developer style) and can be used to do 2D graphics demos and tests very easily. I've been meaning to port it (and plumb) to the Pandora for a while .. its a very nice, easy way, to get some 2D graphics happening .. maybe even you could do the MarioBros/DonkyKong remake with this, easily enough, DaveC .. check out the lunar lander example included in the animator sources, to see what I mean ..

 

[worzyl]

You can check this site which is dedicated to pixel art. There are tutorials and it's very forum based as they run pixel art competitions every week.

http://www.pixeljoint.com/default.asp

You can also have a look at pixelation.

 

[SomeGuy99]

Does anyone know good programs for sprite animation and map construction? I tried some stuff, but nothing that really did it for me.

Pixen seems to be really good, but I need something Windows or Linux based.

 

[Middo]

I'm going to try to do the art for my game. I plan to use a DSLR with video to do some kind of rotoscoping/manual motion capture technique.

http://jordanmechner.com/category/old-journals/page/5/