Back in July, at the Aroma Festival at The Rocks in Sydney, Australia (an annual coffee festival), organizers used 3,604 cups of coffee — four shades using different amounts of coffee and milk — to make a replica of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Here’s a stop-motion video showing the production:

More information here

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For your pixelly art project of course :)

A tutorial on how to make this is here!

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The article about coloring lineart is here

I was unexpectedly overflowed by responses. And not just simple responses, most people send me whole stories! And as every artwork tells a story, I would like to share them with you, the reader.

Mambazo (bazosoft.com) created this alien monster. I really enjoy the blue reflections on the red shiny ’skin’!

“Well, I’ve only done one other challenge so I’m lacking in experience there. When I saw line-art I had much trouble deciding which one to do as they were all interesting, but eventually settled for one that had more lines/details. Thats probably just laziness on my part! It is quite inspiring working with her line-art, as it is very different to anything I would created myself. They have great volume to them, even in monochrome, which is something I have trouble replicating. It was a learning experience at the same time.

I don’t really feel as though it is my work when I look at it. Its so different to anything I would do by myself.

Its heavily inspired by the early Unreal Engine III mesh screen-shots, from the tech demos. They had really nice bright back-lighting, and a softer light from the front which really made the details on the mesh’s textures pop (normal-mapping and all that jazz!). I’ve ever-since liked that lighting setup, and wanted to try and recreate that with this piece.

This piece really helped me learn more about defining volume, and a lot about lighting. With the two light sources, I was forced out of my usual shading techniques, and had to think a great deal more than I’m used to. But I’m glad I tried, it puts a new notch on my belt! I’m particularly happy with the shadow between its two left feet (our right). You can almost see the shadow-plane :)”

Fool (foolstown.com)did the usual, what he does best. Brilliant colors popping out on a dark background

“I think it is a parallel inspiration – in the book i’ve just finished there was some interesting theory about vagina dentata in its philosophical aspects. One of  Arachne creatures seems to have a close appearance. They are all defenitely cool , but this one just comes along.

When it comes to visual inside you mind all is left to extract it from there.
Colors are usuall shaman’s dances – tweaking and stuff. I Can’t tell I’m happy with a curent theme, but I got a really retarded schedule right now, sleep whenever  i get a chance. Ought to stop that.
See it, like it, do it. =)”

TheJoe did his best on creating this pink slimy creature. I like the combination of smooth shades and highlight with the grainy pixel clusters.

“I had a lot of fun with it. I don’t have a lot of experience with pixel art. I just treated this challenge like a page out of a coloring book and used it to work on coloring, shading, and texturing techniques that I have seen others use. I learned quite a bit with this piece but I still have a long way to go.

My original color scheme was inspired by paint jobs I have seen on Warhammer 40k Horrors of Tzeentch.
I hope to use what I’ve learned with this challenge in future works to improve myself overall as a pixel artist.”

Darchangel (www.kings-field.com) added some eyes, a nice pattern, and made that mouth very scary and dirty!

“I thought the challenge was great, I enjoyed it very much. The most interesting part, was that we all had the same starting block (the line art). Everyone’s end result is so much different.
I also think that using line art from other members of the PJ community is a good way to acknowledge their talent. Plus sometimes it’s hard to come up with good ideas, so having the line art was half the battle.

I think making it unique was all in the detailing and coloring. Ultimately you still want to make sure it remains Arachne’s line art in there somewhere.
I got the idea while looking at a World of Warcraft art book. A friend lend it to me recently, the book has great illustrations and was good inspiration. The background was the one that gave me the most trouble…it took me 2 days to come up with that idea.”

This was created by Gygrazok. I like this mysterious creature on a mysterious background. The yellow on top works very well!

“I decided to enter because I’m not that good on drawing things out of thin air, and because I loved arachne’s linearts.
I don’t think I have a particular style. I like to use unsaturated color, and I just added a few details like the veins or the red spots around the mouth to make the creature more wicked :)

When I first saw that lineart I thought of Majin Buu from dragon ball Z :) that’s why I decided to make it pinkish with dark eyes.
For the background, I used a couple of pictures as a reference, as well as some pixel arts by various artists. I think it turned out pretty good, although I’m not completely satisfied with the ground and how it blends with the character.”

GTK colored thisone with the Windows Vista Paint colors. It is among my personal favorites, probably because I just love yellow and this cell shaded style!

“My objective is above all to have of fun, I do not make a point of taking part to impress or gain (I do not have the level necessary to reach the top3 in any event) but in Pixel-Art, like the drawing in general, must remain a pleasure for me. It is also an good occasion to improve my technique.

I do not seek to be distinguished from the others absolutely, I work rather like I feel it, with a style which is appropriate to me. Sometimes, I try to try out new style, and I keep what I like.

I am not very satisfied of this one. I am content when I look at my way, I see progress, but PixelJoint abounds in many talent and since I know this website, I try to improve myself constantly. I admire particularly the work of Syosa, of .Anubis., of Bisque and of Fool (and too full other artists buy I all will not quote them, the list is too long ^^’), and my main objective is to arrive at an equivalent quality of work.”

I would like to thanks all the artists for their help and their great responses, and I would like to recommend to the reader to get inspired by these different takes on coloring line work!

Read the other article here too!

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2. Pixel art software
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But thats not the best part: He showed exactly how he made this, step by step!

Wip animation

Click here for a full view of all the frames, and some explanation on them (Japanese)

Study it, get inspired, and learn how to make your own animations. Thanks Syosa!

For more info about Syosa, read this interview.

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It is beautiful!

Halloween costume: low resolution

“The shirt took forever to paint, and my face only took slightly forever.”

By kindacarsick.com

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With help of this article you can avoid the zoom blurring bug you get if you zoom in on pixel art in Firefox.

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Small worlds

It is fun to walk trough this artwork, and it has pretty music.

It has been posted everywhere already, but there should be no way you could miss it. So here is a link from me too!

Play it here in your browser

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Please read, and in the comments or the original thread, leave your own thoughts about why you love pixel art as well!

Why I got into it

I was born, quite a few years ago as a creative person. People around me realized, but I did not myself.
I was also born as a logic person. In more than just one way.

So, one day, I do not remember how anymore, I introduced myself to isometric pixel art. I believed it was simple, as it followed logical rules, and required no creativity or much skill. Of course I was wrong, but that does not matter. Thing is, I was able to create nice things by using the line tool right.

A year later, a more important thing happened. I found a community. And any community that would have adopted me could have formed me in any way they would have wanted, but it happens to be this pixel community. At the right time.
So that is the reason I kept going on and on.

Why I love it
But you asked me, why do I love pixel art?

I could have fallen in love with many different hobbies, and I might will someday, but I will keep liking this for ever on. And thats just for one thing: Control!
If I draw by pencil, I can never ever remove a line properly after I drew it. Same goes for traditional painting. If I would paint digitally, I would not get the time to do every little pixel of my image right, and I would always be able to spot infinite correctable things I dislike on my image. On a 32×32 pixel canvas, there are no infinite possibilities! Never!

Why I like it

• Great community
• Retro
• Game fans
• Programmers
• Logic
• Impressive
• Gallery
• MSpaint doable
• Iconic
• Skills being learnt valuable for everything
• Palettes
• Animations
• Isometric stylized stuff

I have much more to say, but I simply don’t want to write more/want to waste your reading time more ;)

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In this article I will tell about my own experiences, how to get used to those new programs and more. As I am a windows user this article is most useful if you run windows yourself too, but some of the software might work on other systems too.

MSpaint

Believe it or not, but still one of the most easy and useful tools for pixel art is Paint. If you run windows it is already on your computer!

Pros

• Easy to learn
• Impresses people more
• 3 colors usable with your cursor (left click, right click, ctrl + click)
• From on winXP it saves PNG’s properly
• Easy moving around with parts of your image
• Color replacing

Cons

• No proper GIF file saving
• No layers
• 3 undos
• Nothing configurable
• No indexed palette support

I still almost always use paint at the start of my drawing. It is extremely useful for making your line art and such, because you can select things and move them around on your canvas easily. It can be useful for coloring as well, thanks to the color replacement feature, but there is better (free) software for that.

Things you should know

• View>Zoom>Miniature, this shows a 1x miniature version of your drawing when you are working zoomed in.
• Eraser – left click color = color to be replaced, right click color = new color. If you have the eraser colors right, you can replace colors by right clicking with it! This makes recoloring your work easy, but watch out for not leaving stuff behind. You can enlarge your eraser by pressing ctrl + ‘+’ .
• Select color using right click, in your palette or with the eyedropper, having the background color as right click color makes working really easy. Without having to switch colors you can now draw with your primary color and replace things with the background color (removing) by right clicking. This works as well as with the pencil as with the brushes, lines, anything. Your secondary color is also the color that appears if you delete things (select, press delete) or if you enlarge your canvas.
• Select, ctrl + drag, a fast way to duplicate things without having to copy and paste is by holding ctrl and draging your selection. The old thing will stay and you will have a new piece selected. You can do this as many times as you want. Similary you can hold shift, try out yourself to find out what that does ;)

Oh, and last but not least, NEVER save your work as GIF or as JPG in paint!

MTpaint

Yes, this is something different as MSpaint. It is not connected to paint at all. This is a free open source drawing program, perfect for pixel art! You can download it here

Pros

• Great indexed palette support
• Save gifs properly
• 2 colors usable with your cursor
• fast eyedropping (ctrl + click)
• zooming with scroll wheel
• Works on Linux & Windows

Cons

• Layers and animation support is not great
• Moving around part of your images is not easy

In my opinion MTpaint is THE best free program to color your pixel work. The indexed palette support is really great, thanks to functions for sorting your palette, changing colors etc.
The only thing I would like to see is better layer support. You can work with layers, but as far as I can remember (I only did once or so) it was really annoying, as every layer was a loose image. (And you had to save all loose images at the end)

Things you should know
Try out a lot of things! That is the only way to discover how to use a new program. Press alt, ctrl and shift whenever you want something to happen. A few things I figured to get you started: When you want a selection to be placed on the canvas, right click and switch back to the pencil or another tool. For drawing perfect vertical lines hold shift, just as in paint. However, when you want to draw horizontal lines hold shift and alt (or ctrl, dunno ;) )

Graphics Gale

Graphicsgale is a nice pixel art program, much used for sprites and it is a great animation program! I never found an easier to use one! Sadly the full version costs about 25$ (1,995 Yen), but you can already do a lot with the free version too. You will just have to put some more effort in saving animations, thats about all ;)
Website

Pros

• Indexed palette support
• Great animation support
• Great layer support
• Easy eyedropping
• Layout completely configurable

Cons

• Just one color to use on your cursor
• Full version not free

For animations it is just the thing I love most. I hardly use it for other stuff, as MTpaint does all I need, but for animations this is the tool! If you do not own the full version (I do, thank you internet!) you can still save animations when they are done image by image, and then put them together online on a website such as iaza.com or with unfreez.

Things you should know

• Open graphics gale, not the gale browser. They are 2 different programs, remember!!!
• Right click = eyedropper! Useful!
• Onion skinning. I wont explain much, but experiment with it while animating. It is the very bright green button of the running man!
• If you need to save transparant gifs, make the frame transparant, not the last layer! The frame only!

Other software

Pro motion is the software used by a lot of old-school pixelers because of its similarity to the old-school program Deluxe Paint. It is great for animation, pixel art, anything. It does cost some money (78$, 60€) and takes a lot of time to get used to if you do not know Deluxe Paint already. I hear a lot of people saying its worth it, but I did never try it extensively. The trial works fine for a lot of things, so if you are interested don’t hesitate to download!

Unfreez, as mentioned before it is a free gif animation tool. Put unanimated gifs in, get an animated gif out! Works great!

Photoshop. Hard to get used to, especially to find the settings to make it pixel art sutable, but once you are used to it (maybe you already are) it is quite workable. Layers, lots of undos, looks professional, enough reasons to use photoshop! Does cost you some money! (full version standard edition 700$)

Paint.net. Has nothing to do with windows MSpaint, but it is a nice free drawing program. If you don’t know what to pixel with or do your other cheap digital drawings with, choose this. Free, layers, just a lot better than a lot of other things! This program however is not  a pixel program. It is possible, but I believe other options are better for it.

Gimp. The free equivalent of photoshop. Hard to get used to, but it might be worth it for you! And another big plus is that it works on Linux, Windows and mac!

Grafx2. This is the only program in the list I did not try myself. However, it is again a program based on the old school deluxe paint, still in development.  I know some quite good artists that use it. Free

Pixen. (added to this list on 6-11-2009). This is free pixel art software for the mac.

Getting used to a program

Getting used to a new program takes time and effort. Check out the list of features, see if you think it could be worth it, try it extensively for at least 2 months before you descide it is too hard learning, not worth it or whatever. Things might seem easier after all.

The key to changing is by stopping to use other tools immediately, so you will have to find all your new solutions the hard way. Just search trough the help, randomly press buttons (on your keyboard as well) and with some luck you will find it a useful program at the end!

I can still see myself switching to Pro Motion someday. Or maybe photoshop, as I am going to learn that anyway.

Moving the mouse to draw is luckily the same in every program, and often zooming in and out as well. Saving is a floppy, filling is a bucket. Nothing can go wrong with this knowledge on forhand, you must be able to produce something from on the start! Success!

In the comments there is room for discussing the programs, or whatever you have to say about this article, switching from programs, making decisions etc.  I hope you enjoyed reading!

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