Classic Pixel-Art Basics
Tutorials
By Tim Wesoly, developer of Qubicle Constructor
What you need: any edition of Qubicle Constructor
Working with Qubicle Constructor and creating pixel-art is pretty similar. So if you want to learn Qubicle it’s a good idea to learn the pixel-art basics too. This tutorial covers some golden rules and tips about creating pixel-art with Photoshop.
In the next steps I will show you how I built the logo for my video Qube Race. Let’s start with…
Step #1: Configuring Photoshop
Rule #1: Don’t use automatic anti-aliasing!
Anti-aliasing normaly a great thing, because it provides beautifully smooth curveture of circles on the screen for example. In classical pixel art however it is extremely rare. The reason for this is that pixel art is strongly connected with video games from the late 80s and early 90s. Video game consoles of that time were technically rather limited and could only display few colors at the same time. For anti-aliasing however you need to display either many colors or halftransparent pixels. Both was not the case. Qubicle likewise is not in the situation to display halftransparent cubes, thus anti-aliasing is taboo.
In basic configuration Photoshop has the habit to draw nearly everything anti-aliased. So before you start, you should make the following adjustments:
Tip #1: Set image interpolation to “nearest neighbor”
Picture interpolation is used whenever areas are scaled, distorted or rotated. By selecting nearest neighbor in the general Photoshop preferences (CTRL-k) the color for a pixel will be directly taken from the neighbor pixel instead of a computed intermediate value.
Tip #2: Set ruler units to pixels
The preset standard unit for all dialogs is cm. But with pixel-art it’s all about – guess what – pixels. So if you want the width and height of your selection displyed in pixels change the ruler units to pixels.
Tip #3: Adjust the tools options
The tools you will need – pencil, paint bucket, eraser, rectangular and elliptical marquee tool, magic wand, polygonal lasso – should be adjusted in the options panel as follows:
Step # 2: Creating text and scaling it
At first I needed the letters for the logo. I used a bitmap with the complete alphabet instead of a pixel-font. So I had to copy and paste the letters to form the words Qube and Race. If you use a pixel font be sure to set the size to it’s original size (normaly 8-12 pixel) or a multiple – and again disable anti-aliasing.
The target size of the logo had to be about 600×300, so I needed to scale the words.
Tip #4: For free-transforming areas always select a region whose height and width are even numbers to avoid unwanted interpolation errors.
I scaled the Q and the R to 1500% and the remaining letters to 1000%
Steps #3: Skewing the letters
Rule #2: Avoid jaggies!
The most important thing of all: avoid “jaggies”. Jaggies are small breaks in straight lines. In order to avoid jaggies use perfect lines.
Tip #5: Fast 45° lines
To draw a 45° straight line simply mark a square region (keep the Shift-key pressed while selecting) draw one pixel with the pen into one corner and shift-click into the opposite corner.
Because I wanted the logo to pretend speed, I skewed the letters horizontaly by -18,4°. That corresponds to the principle 1 pixel to the right and 3 upward. Unfortunately Photoshop can’t produce a perfect result. So I had to fix it in some places.
Step #4: Extending the logo
To make the logo more catchy I round the lower right corners and extend the two E’s, so that they look like wings.
Tip #6: How to obtain perfect roundings:
As is the case for straight lines, it is important to avoid jaggies. You simply have to make certain that the steps become continuously smaller or larger. Like in the example above 4 > 2 > 2 > 1 > 1 > 2 > 3
Step #5: Edges, shades, colors
This step surely takes the most time and has very much to do with your own taste and the length of time you are ready to invest. If you want to work with layer effects, don’t forget to create layers out of those effects to fix the anti-aliasing issues.
At last I want to show another technique called dithering. With the help of dithering you can create flowing transitions between two color values even though you are limited to a handful of colors. The letters Q and R are filled with standard gradients produced by Photoshop. The remaining gradients are dithered. Dithering naturally costs much more time, but produces a very special Style.
Tip #7: Use as few colors as possible
Qubicle isn’t limited to a maximum number of colors, but you will strongly simplify the work if you use as few colors as possible.