Pixel art is a process of line art or color clumping, basically you generally want to work from darker to light much like painting.
Also, I suggest you start doodling more on paper because an understanding of drawing is very important, you can't just go straight into pixel art if you've never drawn on a piece of paper, I mean it's possible. But my advice is start doodling, like now.
- Pixel art tutorials can only help so much, you are much better off making something and then posting it in the correct forum.
I'd suggest,
www.pixeljoint.com or
http://www.wayofthepixel.netTIG source is only going to help you so much with pixels, so I'd suggest going to a community based on them.
(no offense to TIGsource, just that these forums focus on pixel art and have some great members)
The reason tutorials don't work is because you end up just copying them and not learning
anything much.
- I still use a lot of msPaint... BUT I do use other programs for animation.
Graphics GalePromotion 6- When researching animation, don't look for pixel art tutorials look for animation tutorials.
It's also handy to have a basic understanding of physics for your weight timing.
Also I'd suggest buying the book -
The Animator's Survival Kit by Richard WilliamsAs pixel artists we work with frame by frame animation so we are practically using traditional methods which are still very relevant to this day.
(most all of the animations below are property of
baccaman21 aka
Pete Ranson)
Anyways... When dealing with a lot of animation mainly when working with running animations or moving limbs, you want the limbs to ease into their motion.
The amount of frames you use can help you do this.
Basically whenever you think of an arm, or a leg think of a pendulum.
Now with animation there is also stretch and squashing.
Use of stretch and squash is good for multiple things when animating.
Now when you add a bit of anticipation to that same animation it gives the ball more believable weight.
That is then when you can get into adding your secondary movement.
Remember when your animating you want to keep things simple, you don't want to have to be animating shadows and fixing your sprite with touchup's until the actual animation is fully made with solid colors.
Stretch and squash leads you up to dis-jointed animation
Which allows for much more character in some sprites more in a cartoon style.
Timing is everything in animation, it's what makes or breaks the believability of weight in your actions.
Sub-pixel animation
This is going to be very hard to explain myself so I'm just going to steal someone else's explanation as to how it works.
it's not that complicated, basically you use antialias to move an element in the picture seemingly by less than a pixel at a time.
Made a quick picture to show it. Top: one pixel at a time, bottom: sub pixel movement so smoothen it out.
For actual pixelart this can be used for small idle wobbles of stuff like motors or for subtle breathing animations on smaller sprites where you can tween between 2 frames like this.
Here are some examples of some minor sub-pixel animation.
Hopefully now that you know what it is you can see it in animations.
Walk cycles are the best thing to practice, either by practicing making one leg, or even just one arm move. Practice makes perfect. (well almost)
It's best to start with your most extreme positions, we call these keyframes.
Each animation is made of frames, but the keyframes are the ones that do the most extreme amount of motion.
Plus, once you have one leg working it's not hard to add the other one.
Explosions and effects
Effects are some of the easiest things to animate since they are usually so quickly displayed.
In order to animate explosions you will have to first understand how they actually work.
Check out this explosion animation tutorial.
The funny thing is, this may seem like a lot.
But I'm only scratching at the surface.
There is still such terms as
AA (anti-aliasing)Selout (Selective Outlining)Half Toning/Dithering(if you want to know how to dither go look up the pixel art demo-scene and check out pixeljoint, it's a great gallery of pixel art to reference)
Also pixeljoint has a
GREAT collection of tutorials if there is anything I missed.