Tutorials

Alright, you're saying, how do you get those lovely clean lines like that? It's a sectret!

Hehe, no, really, I was only joking. I know I've mentioned this here and there in some of the other tutorials, but I thought I'd make a mini tutorial just for it, so you get a better idea of what I'm talking about. You all can thank my good friend Grimmhooke for suggesting it ^__^

Now then, whenever you draw line art, even with a 1pixel wide brush, you're always going to start out with an image looking like this. The lines are jagged and thick, and it just looks unfinished in general. I used to leave my lines like this, to tell you the truth, but then, one day, I saw the light! It looks much prettier and simpler when it's cleaned up.

When you zoom in close to the picture, you'll see why the lines look so jagged and thick. It's because the lines aren't 1pixel thick, despite the brush only being that think. It always happens, and is near impossible to avoid. If you look at what the arrow is pointing at, you'll see that there are extra pixels there touching, or clinging onto, the pixels of the line art. I'vve circled one of those extra pixels for you.

Now, get yourself nice and comfy. Ready? Because this part is the longest and most tedious part of pixel art. Get out your 1pixel wide brush, set your first color choice to white and your second to black, and begin "shaving" off the extra pixels I was talking about, so that you end up with little chuncks of pixel lines that only touch corners with other pixel lines. See, the extra pixel inside the circle is gone, and I put pink dots where other extra pixels used to be. Doesn't that look nice?

There, see, doesn't that look nice? But take a closer look at the lines. Some of them look a little off. Still kind of jagged looking, and crooked.

Here I just pointed those places out for you :-D I can't tell you where these places will be on your own picture, it's just something you'll have to figure out on your own. Just stand back and see if anything looks wrong.

Take a closer look at those places by zooming in nice and close. You see how the pixel line looks uneven? It does, from the bottom, really long, short, short, medium, short, which doesn't make a very smooth line.

Get out your brush with white and black again. What you want to do is make it go smoothly from long lines to short ones. So here I have long, medium, medium, short. The blue dots are the ones I added (with black, ovbiously), and the yellow ones are ones I took away (with white).

Now, see :) That wasn't hard at all, was it? Once you know the secret, you begin to wonder why you never thought of it in the first place.