GIMP
Create old-school pixel art images
Still stuck with the ancient GIMP 2, Neil Mohr decides to go even more retro and explore how you can create classic pixel art with it.
OUR EXPERT
Neil Mohr grew up playing Ultimate Play The Game releases on the Spectrum, so knows all about chunky pixels.
Think of retro games and you’ll probably think of the T pixellated look of titles released on consoles such as the NES. Games such as Bomberman and Kid Icarus worked within the limitations of ’80s technology, yet offered hours of fun and iconic looks. The style faded into obscurity with the development of more powerful game consoles and 3D graphics, but has seen a recent renaissance in indie games such as Pepper Grinder (www. peppergrindergame.com). The art is still drawn pixel by pixel using a limited palette, but is much smoother thanks to careful shading and muted hues not available to ’80s game developers. One of the most popular uses of pixel art is in role-playing games based on an isometric grid. We’re going to create an example character (or sprite) for use in such a game.
If you fancy creating your own sprite or just want to use it as an excuse to fire up GIMP and learn how to use some of its tools, creating pixel art can be both fun and educational, and is a great way to pick up some GIMP skills. What’s interesting about pixel art is that to do it well, you need to go into your GIMP settings and adjust the canvas size, create a drawing grid for guidelines, tweak the drawing tools and ideally adjust and create a set palette. Before we actually create a character from scratch, we’ll first look at all that, plus some basics on shading, shadows and dithering, so you have some useful techniques under your belt.
QUICK TIP
Make full use of the layer system and don’t overlook the Group option, so you can, erm, group layers together.
Prepare your tools
Start by creating a new image in GIMP. A canvas size of 100x100 pixels (perhaps 200x200 at a push) is plenty – much larger pieces of pixel art are possible, and look very impressive, but take weeks of work to complete.
Now select the Pencil tool. This, Fill and Zoom are the only tools we’ll be using, but first we need to alter some settings, so we can draw individual pixels. With the pencil selected, click Brush Type and select 1 Pixel You can quickly create a grid using layers or copying and pasting lines and then flipping.