Pixel art tutorials

Everything I've learned in two decades of pushing pixels, organised into categories. These are the techniques I actually use in production work — no filler, no theory-for-the-sake-of-theory. Each tutorial is written for someone who already has a canvas open and wants to get better at what they're doing.

Fundamentals

• Canvas size and resolution — Why 32x32, 64x64, and 128x128 are the sweet spots for different use cases. How to choose a canvas size before you place a single pixel.
• Palette construction — Building a cohesive 8-colour or 16-colour palette from scratch. Hue shifting, saturation ramps, and why pure black outlines are usually wrong.
• Clean lines and jaggies — The pixel-art line rules: avoiding doubles, managing staircase angles, and when a jaggy line is actually correct.
• Anti-aliasing by hand — Manually placing intermediate-colour pixels to smooth curves without losing crispness. The technique that separates decent pixel art from excellent pixel art.

Colour and shading

• Hue shifting in shadows — Why shadows aren't just darker versions of the base colour. Shifting warm colours toward cool in shadow, and the opposite for highlights.
• Dithering patterns — Checkerboard, ordered, and noise-based dithering. When to use each, and when dithering hurts more than it helps.
• Limiting your palette — Working within a fixed palette (like the PICO-8 16 colours or the Game Boy four greens) and why constraints improve output.

Animation

• Idle animation loops — The breathing idle: a 4-frame or 6-frame loop that makes a static sprite feel alive. Frame timing and the importance of ease-in.
• Walk cycles — A reliable 8-frame walk cycle breakdown. Contact, passing, up, down — the four key poses and the four in-betweens.
• Attack and effect frames — Anticipation, action, recovery. Squash-and-stretch at pixel scale. Smear frames and motion lines.
• Exporting animated sprites — Spritesheet vs. GIF vs. APNG. Frame-rate choices. Looping settings for game engines vs. social media.

Character design

• Readable silhouettes at 32x32 — If your character isn't recognisable as a solid black silhouette at target resolution, the design needs work. Exaggeration is your friend.
• Faces at low resolution — Two pixels for eyes, one for a mouth, and somehow it reads. The tricks that make 16x16 portraits work.
• Outfit and colour coding — Using colour to signal faction, mood, or role when you only have a handful of pixels to work with.

Perler bead tutorials

• From digital sprite to bead layout — Translating a pixel-art file into a bead-board plan. Colour matching across bead brands (Perler vs. Hama vs. Artkal).
• Ironing technique — Temperature, pressure, parchment paper placement. The difference between a flat fuse and a domed fuse.
• Large multi-board pieces — Planning, joining, and mounting sprites that span multiple peg boards. Structural support for wall-hanging pieces.
• Photographing bead sprites — Lighting angles that show texture without glare. Background choices and framing for Etsy listings.

Tools and workflow

• Aseprite deep-dive — Layer management, onion-skinning, custom brush tips, and the export pipeline I use for every commission.
• Palette management — Saving, loading, and sharing palettes across projects. Community palette resources worth bookmarking.
• Version control for art — Why I save numbered iterations instead of relying on undo history. Naming conventions and folder structure.

New to pixel art entirely? Start with the beginner's guide before diving into these tutorials.