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Well, I assume you're from England judging by the slang, and things might be different there, but over here in the States, if someone from the school were to find these images, the students would be in trouble...

It's actually happened numerous times over things like entries on MySpace and whatnot...

It's a by-product of the paranoia brought about by all of our school shootings, like Columbine and such... There's a kneejerk overreaction to this sort of thing, even if it's pretty obviously a joke...

At 9/18/07 08:26 PM, Darkaxl wrote: Yeah because paper to computer is a direct transfer...Even if you use a tablet its still a completely different feel so dont come the smarts with me. Just make yourself look silly <3.

Oh and i've never used mspaint cutey <3

A decent artist can work in almost [i]any[/i] medium and acheive good results, even for the first time working with a certain tool or medium...

It is absolutely no big stretch to think that someone who can draw well on paper (or with a mouse) can use a tablet to draw a decent picture, first time or not...

True artistic talent is [i]not[/i] dependant on the tools used or in having experience with them... It is in how the mind visualizes things and directs the hands to create them, using whatever tools are available...

So again, if a person has true artistic talent, he or she can use virtually [i]anything[/i] to create good art...

Yes, only practice with a specific tool or medium will result in [i]mastery[/i] of that tool or medium, but that is more of a learned and technical aspect of the use of the tool, not the true, raw artistic [i]talent[/i]... This improvement in skill with a specific tool or medium is not really an increase in the underlying talent, but an increase in knowledge of the tool's abilities, and familiarity with the "feel" of the tool...

Pixel art can be done in any program that allows pixel-by-pixel drawing. MSPaint is probably the simplest and most direct, but higher-order editors can be used as well.

The thing to remember with trying to do pixel art inside of something like Photoshop (or Paint Shop Pro, or any of the others of this type) is that you need to turn off all of the fancy automated effects, especially anti-aliasing. That's the one thing that will kill pixel art.

To use Photoshop, you generally just need a single pixel brush/pen/pencil/whatever, with opacity and hardness settings to full 100%. Then, just go to town! (generally zoomed in to the level where you can see your work pixel-by-pixel)

Avoid vector work (this means that Flash is generally no good for this). Try to remain strictly raster.

Purists will also avoid using any of the pre-built shape drawing tools and any of the other gadgets, but if you have to use them (often, it's just a waste of time to try to pixel a perfect circle when the program will do it for you, even though most of these tools create vector elements), always make sure to refer to the rule above: turn off anti-aliasing, and make sure all hardness and opacity settings are cranked to full.

Along this line, another thing to remember is that it is best to work at the single-pixel level. If you do wish to work larger, and shrink it down later, remember to ensure that the resizing settings you select do not cause blurring of the final outcome. You want direct pixel resizing (most resizing in high-order editors automatically applies anti-aliasing effects... you don't want that) Another thing to keep in mind with this method is that you need to stick to a strict grid of squares, no matter what size you're working in. At the 1-to-1 pixel level, this is simple; there's no way to do anything but work within the grid of pixels. But if you're working at 200%, with a 2x2 tool, you need to make sure that you're placing each mark within a grid of 2x2 squares, and not half and half.

You want your drawing to remain looking like it was pixeled, not like it was done using brushes and filters...

Now, this is not to say that a good piece of pixel artwork can't be shaded to near-photographic quality, with smoothed, hand-anti-aliased lines and so forth, but the further you get along this route, the further it grows from looking like pixel art. This point is a matter of personal taste, though. Some pixelers strive for the highest-resolution, near-photo quality they can get, while many others prefer (almost religiously) to remain "primitive", to protect the "purity" of the art form.

Part of the "spirit" of pixel art is that it remains looking pixeled. Otherwise, why not just draw the image using all of the fancy effects and brushes?

But yeah, as long as you can set your program up to draw pixel-by-pixel, it's just as good as any other for making pixel art.

The final thing to remember is that JPG is no good for pixel art. The artifacting caused by JPG's lossy compression will blur and ruin pixel art (this effect is not as noticeable in normal images, but it simply wrecks pixel art). PNG and GIF are the best ways to go (BMP works, too, if you like overly huge filesizes : ) ). I prefer PNG, but unfortunately, the NG forums do not (yet?) accept the format, so GIF it has to be.

Note that I'm no expert in the field, so only take the above as some friendly advice from someone with some experience with this, and not as some sort of Pixel Artist Commandments, or something...lol

Anyways, here's another piece (this one from another game, one emulating the well-known puzzle game where you have to slide cars around to make a path for the target car to exit the lot. this game is not my own, but I did the artwork for the developer):

Actually, it was crazerfish50 that bumped it (he was directed to it by a reply in his own pixel art thread).

I'm always amazed (though I'm enough of a veteran to know this effect well) of how Time works on the internet. The last reply to this thread before the bump was just over two weeks ago, yet it's already considered "dead". It's like when someone posts a link to a YouTube video from a few weeks ago, and everyone's saying "ooooolllllddddd!" lol It's like Narnia or something when you're online (you know, ages pass inside when only mere moments pass in the "real world").

But regardless, thanks for the comment! And my apologies for this little off-topic philosophical rambling.

Thirdly is "SkyWurm". It's a vertical scrolling shooter.

Next up, is my DBZ fangame, called "DBTC".

I hope multiple-posting isn't frowned upon too heavily if there's actual content, but I have more pictures to share.

As I mentioned, I'm a hobbyist game creator. Theprogram I use to make games i one that uses 32x32 tiles. This post (and more to follow) contain screenshots of my games. First up, is Murder Mansion, a top-down murder-mystery game.

Awesome work in this thread, guys (I just read through all of it)!

I'm a pixel-pusher as well, though I rarely dabble in isometric. Here's a little sample of some of the stuff I've done over the years. As you might be able to tell, I'm a DBZ fan. The characters in the top left section are the oldest in this bunch (from somewhere around 8 or 9 years ago), and hopefully you can see some improvement when comparing them to the much more recent Gokus in the bottom right. The area with many, many little variations of the same characters (again, DBZ characters, Goku and Gohan) are NPC graphics used in a fangame of mine (more on that later). Also included are some other random pieces.

I don't think it looks too bad colored, even with a really cheap 'n dirty application of flood fill (sorry to turn your thread/picture into some kind of coloring book)

But you're right that the black "highlights" do come out looking like oil...

Either way, awesome pic!

At 7/31/07 04:26 PM, OrbitalDebris wrote: Congratulations, you've mastered the Fill Bucket.

Now wait a minute here... In his defense, he could have used the color replacer.

It looks great!

One of the most important things about great pixel art scenes (especially these isometric cityscape kinds) is the details... The best ones always are crammed full of little things to see and discover (perhaps hinting at untold stories) almost hidden around the picture in every nook and cranny.

So I think that your picture could use much, much more of the little details. I realize that that will be difficult, since it is intended to be an abandonned area (like the title says), but even the small things like litter blowing around, abandonned burn barrels and boxes used by long-gone vagrants, broken windows in the center building, street lights (broken or otherwise), signs, weeds, heating/cooling/venting machinery on the rooftops, etc. There's a million things that could be added to fill up the unused space and add more interest to the scene.

But so far, it looks fantastic!

It's really old, but here's one!

Actually, they're my own design. It's a sort of a look at what they might wind up to be when they "grow up".

Michaelangelo has become a wrestler/entertainer, Raphael has gone full, one-man-army, ninja-vigilante, Donatello has had a few lab accidents that required him to create robotic prosthetics, and Leonardo has moved on to the meditative life of a monk.

They might seem familiar because these ideas have been used by other, more official, TMNT sources. For instance, the Image Comics TMNT issues have Don becoming a cyborg, and Raph wearing a mask, etc. And the CGI TMNT movie has Mikey doing "Cowabunga Carl" party performances (plus, I think in a few of the older TMNT comics, the turtles became wrestlers in outer space or something like that) and Raph as the armored "Nightwatcher".

However, when creating them, I actually came up with these ideas independently of those other sources. Heck, the original image was drawn back when I was in High School, and I graduated 8 years ago. I guess the reason for the coincidences is mostly that these future paths for each of the turtles is a logical conclusion. I.E. it is highly probable that Donatello would end up with mechanical parts, it is likely that Raph would end up as a Casey Jones-esque vigilante , etc. These things just make sense based on their personalities and such, so multiple people end up thinking along similar lines.

So yeah, you might have seen artwork elsewhere (even simply fanart from others who have made the same conclusions that I have) that resembles these alternate designs.

One more:

Woohoo for TMNT!

Yeah, I believe the deadline is noon EST, which is about 4:15 away from now.

Well, here's mine!

Good luck to everyone! There are some seriously great entries in this thing. I don't envy the judges...

Click here for a slightly higher-quality .png version

Yup, it's all fully functioning (even the individual lions' mouths open and close). That was my number one priority (a very close second being that it looked correct), so the lions each transform just as in the show. All connections are handled by technic pins and such as well, so I don't have to connect bricks to snap him together.

This also means that he has a certain level of articulation (his arms can rotate at the shoulders, his elbows bend, his wrists turn, and his hips can move, but not his knees yet) However, the thing is actually too heavy (somewhere over 5 pounds total) for the joints to support themselves in any position other than the standing one shown. If I ever find a suitably strong Lego joint that can move, I'll have to upgrade him.

He's been a labor of love for a few years now, actually. I began the project back when Lego first started putting green bircks in the bulk buckets (before then, green was usually reserved for only trees and baseplates and such) He used to look like this, but I recently gave him the overhaul that resulted in what you've seen above. I actually had to special order a handful of parts from an online Lego seller to complete him this time.

I'm glad you guys approve!

Thanks!

And yup, the face is molded out of Sculpey III polymer clay (the kind that hardens in the oven). I just didn't think I could get the right level of detail if I tried to "mold" the face out of Lego, so I "cheated" a bit there.

Sheesh. No post editing?

Well, sorry for the double post, but I screwed up the URL in the link above.

The correct page is here.

I'm not sure if this quite fits the topic of this forum section, but I consider this to be art, so, here goes.

This project that I've recently completed combines two of my favorite things from childhood. I'm extremely proud of it, so I'd like to show it off as my first thread on the NG forums (I've been an NG viewer for quite some time, but only ventured into these parts thanks to the HD Sprite contest).

I'm trying to follow the rules by posting this introductory image, but there are so many more images to view, that I'd like to invite everyone to click here to go to the pages I've set up for the rest of the images. (Yes, that's a GeoCities account, but I'm paying for the removal of the ads, so there won't be that stupid little pop-up if you go.)

Anyways, without further ado:

Hello!

I saw this contest through the reinstated "bytesize viewer" on the main page, and figured I'd give it a shot. Yep, this is my first ever post on the NG forums. I read some speculation a few pages back about the large number of new posters that have entered this contest, and my guess is that most of us have the bytesize viewer's plug to thank (rather than most of the newcomers being alternate accounts from existing members).

Anyways, it took me quite a while to decide upon working with this sprite. I wanted to find a sprite that met the following criteria:

1) Not too simple. (This one makes it sound like I'm just being too lazy to fill in my own details, but I honestly wanted to work within the restriction of having a certain level of built-in detail to match/improve.)

2) Not too detailed. (This is the biggest disappointment I've found looking through some of these entries, and I wanted to avoid it. Where's the fun or challenge if you take a sprite that already looks like a high-res drawing, and essentially just do some anti-aliasing? Some entries along these lines look really amazing, and show a great level of skill, and that only makes them all the more disappointing, as they've completely missed out on the spirit of the contest.)

3) I wanted something well-known. (I was willing to give this one up if I ran across a really nice sprite from something obscure, but it seems to me that the end result will have a greater impact on the viewer if it is something they're familiar with.)

And so, I settled on working with this SF Cammy sprite. Now, I actually was trying to avoid using a Street Fighter sprite, as it seems too cliche, given the inspiration for the contest, and not to mention the unconscious comparison to the HD remix project that most will make. However, in the end, out of all of the candidates I narrowed it down to, I simply just had to go with her.

Still not finished, obviously, and needing a lot of polish, but for a WIP, I like how it's coming along. Now, I've just gotta hurry up and finish her before the deadline!