“Fix My Sprite!” Volume 4

Volume 4: When to draw a line. Or, turning your drawing into a painting

Instant pixel art backgrounds with the Dan Fessler Method

Turn Photoshop into a pixel art powerhouse with beautiful dithering by a clever use of layer styles

“Fix my sprite!” Volume 3

Volume 3: Smaller pixel styles. Taking a break from the usual ‘fighter’ sizes, we discover that smaller isn’t always easier.

So you want your sprites to be 16 colors

A Photoshop or GIMP technique for reducing your colors and conforming to a 16-bit palette

The Making Of: El Zombo

Spriting in Street Fighter Alpha/Marvel vs Capcom style

Line weight thickness in sprites

Varying your line weight isn’t just for inks.

Resizing your sprites with Nearest Neighbor

If you’re the type who enjoys building your sprites pixel-by-pixel straight from the ground up but find the results stiff and lifeless, consider this quicker method.

“Fix my sprite!” Volume 2

Volume 2: Reducing detail doesn’t mean reducing style. Plus: How to fix sprites in Photoshop

Learn better anti-aliasing for your pixel art

Master the art of smoothing jagged pixel edges with the perfect anti-aliasing exercise

Vector to Pixel 2: Making sprites in Illustrator

Or, “The masochist’s guide to making pixel art in a vector program.”

Video walkthrough: Cleaning lines with Threshold

Here’s a quick trick for taking your drawn lines and reducing them to sprite size with much easier and faster cleanup.

Picking the best colors for your sprite

It’s always been a challenge for me, but a few tricks can make it easier than you think.

“Fix my sprite!” Volume 1

Volume 1: “Too much detail, too little fun”. How building your sprite with too much attention to detail strains the eye and the artist

The Making Of: Tekken Megaman sprite

The Grayscale Index method

Give your sprites depth with sub-pixel animation

Animating your clunky pixels smoothly and subtly

Vector to pixel: Building your sprites in Adobe Illustrator

Vector artists who want to build sprites in their favorite programs. Impossible, right? Think again

Spriting basics: Anti-aliasing

It’s probably one of the first lessons you’d learn from most pixeling tutorials, so here’s some quick examples to get you thinking about this useful technique

Pixel a Capcom Background

Imitate Capcom’s 50% dithering style to pixel a Street Fighter or Marvel stage

Speed Spriting in Photoshop

Got the basics down and want to start producing stuff faster? Try this Photoshop trick and save yourself tons of coloring work