How to Make Pixel Art in Photoshop for Beginners (Tips & Guides)

Part 1: What Is Pixel Art

Pixel art is more than just art made of pixels. It’s the art that looks like an early computer and video game imagery. Everything from Pong to Sonic the Hedgehog falls into this category. Early video games had lower resolution. The tiny rectangles that formed the worlds of Donkey Kong and Space Invaders were impossible to conceal. Thus, the emergence of pixel art was a compelling necessity.

In the 1970s and 1980s, artists creating video games had to innovate and distill imagery to its essence. Some of the red pixels are to be reminiscent of Mario’s hat, while one or two pixels are to be read as his hands or face.

Pixel art became more detailed in the 16-bit era of the 1990s, but the spirit hasn’t changed. Although artists had a larger canvas to work with, they were still using individual pixels, each of which contributed significantly to the overall image.

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Part 2: Start Drawing with Pixels

Pixel art requires a lot of concentration. Unlike a painter, who can use broad strokes, a pixel artist has to concentrate on the arrangement of every single unit in their artwork. A talented pixel artist can capture the basic form of a subject while also simplifying it.

You can start learning pixel art by studying pixelated characters in the works of artists you admire from previous generations. According to pixel artist Emi Monserrate, “References from real life don’t apply as nicely in pixel art as they do in other digital art disciplines.” He also mentions, “You have to learn ways of simplifying complex shapes such as hands or facial expressions.”

While recreating classic pixel art can be laborious, doing so can be inspiring when you follow the pixel paths of other artists. You should not pass off what you copy as your own. When using pre-existing art, proper credit should be given to the creator.

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Part 3: How to Make Pixel Art in Photoshop

After setting up a canvas conducive to producing pixelated images, creating pixel art in Photoshop is simple. The following is a guide on how to create pixel art in Photoshop:

Step 1: Open a new canvas in Photoshop.

Step 2: Create a grid. Choose pixels instead of inches.

Step 3: Reduce subdivisions to one.

Step 4: Select Nearest Neighbor as the image interpolation setting (preserve hard edges).

Step 5: Keep hard edges by using the Pencil tool.

This will provide you with a blank pixel area where you can use the individual squares to build whatever retro image you want. And, you can use these settings to prevent blur and blends that aren’t desired.

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Part 4: How to Make Pixel Art in Illustrator

You can create scalable vector images by making pixel art in Illustrator. When you make pixel art in Photoshop, the images will be made of actual pixels. At larger sizes, Photoshop images may appear pixelated, which can have interesting effects. Using vector images in Illustrator, you can even scale pixel art up or down to any size without losing quality. Follow these steps:

Step 1: Go to View and enable Smart Guides.

Step 2: Select the Rectangle tool from the toolbar to make a pixel grid. Whiten the fill, hold down the shift to form a perfect square, and select it.

Step 3: Click on the square and the Smart Guide displays Path. Drag the square to make a new square. Make one side of the new square perfectly aligned with one side of the original square. Repeat until you get the desired number of pixels.

Bonus! Elevate Your Video Projects with MiniTool MovieMaker

MiniTool MovieMaker is a professional video editing program similar to Photoshop, which can produce high-quality videos. It is ideal for amateurs and professional creators for simple artistic creations.

MiniTool MovieMaker is also free, with no ads, no bundle, and a watermark-free video maker tool. With it, you can design different types of video projects for various scenarios, such as making electronic photo albums, vlog videos, online courses, game commentary videos, etc.

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MiniTool MovieMaker comes with basic editing functions that allow you to:

• Arrange video clips on the timeline and merge multiple video clips into one.
• Make awesome photo slideshows with pictures and music in seconds.
• Enrich your videos with transitions, filters, motion effects, text, and stickers.
• Quickly split, trim, crop, flip, rotate, and reverse video clips.
• Change the video’s quality, resolution, bitrate, frame rate, etc.

Final Words

All in all, this post focuses on how to make pixel art in Photoshop and Illustrator. And, we’ve given you some great tips to help you enhance your video projects with MiniTool MovieMaker, an excellent video editing program.