A Study on Pixel Art-- Canvas Size

Over President's Day weekend I was having a bad time. Just a really bad time. I don't want to dump personal stuff or be TMI, so let's just say I wasn't in a super great place mentally. To keep my mind off the bad, I looked for something to learn. I felt like drawing, and I remembered I had a little art program I'd downloaded years ago called Aseprite. It's meant for making Pixel Art-- so I decided to learn more about Pixel Art.

Pixel art is handy because, well, you can't really draw well with a mouse traditionally. But placing lines and dots on a grid is something a mouse or a finger can do well-- meaning whenever you have a computer near you (which is pretty much always, with everyone having a smart phone), you can draw. So I thought it would be fun to learn more. 

My weekend study of pixel art can be broken into 3 questions:

1. What size of pixel canvas do you draw on?
2. What size do you draw people or faces?
3. What colors do you use?
    

What Size of Pixel Canvas?

So you open Microsoft Paint or one of a million little pixel art applications (Piskel or Lospec are two common online websites for making them), and you hit "new canvas"-- and it asks you "how big do you want your canvas?" That's a good question. If you look it up, people will say a bunch of things. Unhelpful people on Reddit say “Idk, just whatever looks or feels right, stop asking and just start practicing.” There are some who are more helpful though. But I think there’s actually some useful stuff you can learn.

Pixel art generally stops being pixel art once you can’t see the pixels outline anymore. Otherwise, technically all art we see on a computer or phone screen would be pixel art. Everything you're looking at on screen is composed of pixels.

But when do people stop seeing the blockiness of pixels? It depends, for example, on the size of the screen (or paper) it’s displayed, and how far away the person’s eyes are from the image, and the intended zoom of the image. Also, you can't just look at the resolution of a piece of pixel art. This is because most image files, like .png or .jpeg, will try to smooth out your low resolution and take away the pixel edges. These are really helpful for normal photos or art, since they get rid of the blurriness and save on memory, but it messes up the pixel art you worked so hard on by blurring it all. Silly thing. So most pixel art is made to have a much higher resolution than it should, just so the image file doesn't ruin the blockiness. 

Original resolution of 64x64 pixels wide-- PNG tries to blur out the image when I show it

Image has been made 4 times larger so it won't do that stupid blur thing

If you’re trying to determine Canvas Size in Pixels, there’s a few rules of thumb that can help with knowing good Canvas Sizes. 

1. Most Pixel Art was done for early video games, so keeping it around their resolution can help you stay in the right area. I've put a reference I made below, but generally they scaled things to fit in boxes below 256 pixels. There are some larger ones though, upwards of 300 or 400 pixels for later early consoles. You don't have to mirror these, they're just helpful for scale.
   
2. The largest pixel art piece I found had around 600 pixels wide. They're usually far, far below that though.
3. If you’re just doodling around on scratch paper, then 512 by 512 is lots of room, and you can always go up to 1024. Just remember to practice drawing things in scale to fit in these smaller boxes.
   

 

Note: in most pixel art, people use squares of 16 pixels. So each grid square represents 16 pixel squares on the picture. I've got listed consoles from the Gameboy (GB), the Gameboy Advance (GBA), DS and Super Nintendo (SNES)

Bigger sizes. Don't take my word as law though-- I'm sure there are some great exceptions that I didn't find. This was just my observation. The sprites are from Pokemon Emerald and Chrono Trigger, to give some reference.

 

I'll write more on this later-- I'm worried this is getting too long.