While reading my feeds, I've found this interesting How-to article: How to become a Pixel Artist.
Pixel drawing would be obsolete, a legend in this days that everything is in 3D, but thanks to the mobile phones, it still lives.
As I grown up playing videogames (starting with a green & black screen Amstrad PC/W and the mighty Pong), I've seen the graphics evolve from 2 color to 16 color (NES, Spectrum), 64 color (AMIGA), 256 color (x86) and high-color before coming to 3D games. I've never been good painting, but when I was a child I spent tons of hours copying sprites from Monkey islands to a paper grided notepad, and then drawing them on my AMIGA with Deluxe Paint 2.
Apart from all this useless speech about my geeky childhood, I wanted to post the article link plus a few more pixel drawing links, just in case someone likes to learn more about it:
- Derek Yu's Pixel Tutorial: An excellent, step-by-step tutorial to pixel drawing. Very visual.
- The Complete Guide to Isometric Pixel Art: Another fantastic tutorial, this one oriented to learning how to draw isometric sprites (perfect for videogames ;)
- Gaming World: A massive 2D resource website, targeted for 2D RPG games. Contains thousand of sprites for characters, enemies, backgrounds, items...
- Game Sprites: Another huge collection of game sprites, both commercial and freeware/public domain.
Here's an example (from Derek Yu tutorial) of how a sprite is made:
