Anonymous asked
Kada! quick question, when doing pixel art what canvas size would you recommend? I assume it's gotta be tinyyy, but I'm not sure!
Technically, any size you want! Im not a pro by any means when it comes to pixel art, so take my advice with a grain of salt.
This is some way old test stuff, but when youre working with pixels I find it best to have a huge canvas so you have a lot of space and breathing room to sort out your ideas!
With games in mind – I looked this up some time ago, and common resolutions for pixel art games with the pixels scaled 2:1 at 1080p would be 960x540 px, scaled 3:1 640x360 px, and 4:1 480x240 px. For example, that half-finished Executioners thing I made was at 640x360, so if it was blown up to 1080p the sprites would look 3 times as large
For character sprites themselves, it’s highly dependent on your tile size (this is again, going by game design stuff). tile sets or pixel art assets usually fall into 16 x 16, 32 x 32, or 64 x 64 squares, depending on what you’re doing. Sprites usually fall around the same scale their world is –
(from shovel knight, drawn to life, deadbolt, pokemon, and duelyst, respectively). You can see a lot of them fall around the 32 px area, with adjustments for details that poke out.
HOWEVER, if you’re not constraining yourself to smaller proportions, there’s really no right or wrong size! For example, way back I was working on rogues gallery sprites, and they turned out rather large!
two of my major sources of inspiration for bigger work like this are professionalmanlyguy69 (who then went by bigjerkart, and then deleted all of their gosh dang blogs as far as I know. If you google image those two names you’ll see their work tho ((I hope they come back I love their stuff)) ) and syosa (pixel joint and blog) Both of those artists have very different but very slick styles.
Pretty much anon, it comes down to your personal preference! If all else fails, you could try a downsizing exercise – syosa gives a good example of it here, where you draw a sprite and keep making it tinier and tinier while retaining its details and design. Something like that could help you find the size and style youre looking for!
