The other day someone posted some pixel art which gave me a chance to show some of the stuff I did a while back. Well, I had so much fun looking over my old stuff (haha) that I decided to get back into pixel art. This time I plan on concentrating on isometrics and large scenes.

So here is a work in progress, at 2x size (so you can see the pixels.)

http://writer.zoho.com/public/pseckler/toyfactory-image/

(I'll try and link actual images, but right now I'm at work, and away from my ftp).

And here are some useful links:
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_art
* http://www.natomic.com/hosted/marks/mpat/

Swank!

Just in case you were too lazy to click a link earlier:



I think i am abandoning my toy factory picture. It was a good warmup though.

Instead I started working on these little alien guys.



And at 2x Size...

You can kinda see my "notes" in graphical form here in the alien picture. The missile and the tank turret, for example, were done separately from the chassis, and then sort of dragged over on top. There's a stock alien both inside and outside of a bubble for sizing up purposes when i was drawing the other vehicles.

The trouble with the isometric style is drawing anything outside of a standardized set of angles. So that robots leg coming up looks just a bit off to me. This is why so many isometric-style pixelists work on buildings.. buildings can have super-standardized angles.

The really great pixel-guys of course (not me), can do just about anything, including curves, and make it look perfect. Also it seems to take an eye for color that I am just now starting to understand. Like, I can see now that I should have placed a white highlight phong on the pink tentacle ships. and I could probably texture up the bomber and the robot a little.

Oh yah, the artists tool here:

MS PAINT. No lie. I did copy it over to Paint Shop Pro at the end to save it because MS Paint's Gif implementation is somewhat crappy, and I wanted to save a 2x version.

(The Toy Factory was done in PSPaint, but that was one of the things that made it frustrating. When working with pixels you need a very simple interface. MS Paint works really good for this.)

Very cool!

Mighty sweet! Makes me think of Earthbound.