OrbitalMartian

Why I Pixel Art

📆 28 Jul 2025 10:30 UTC +01:00 📕 709 words ⏳ 5 min. 🏷️ #Pixel Art

I have done art for a few years now. I love drawing, it’s relaxing and focuses the mind. There are a huge variety of art styles and ways to make art: sketches, paintings (of various sorts), digital/physical, and my personal favourite, pixel art.

What Is Pixel Art?

I guess the easiest way to explain what pixel art is, is by referencing Brandon James Greer’s YouTube intro “make pictures out of tiny squares” — this is a perfect description for what pixel art is. It’s a low resolution art form that looks amazing in any situation — standalone artworks, game art, animations, website favicons, social media avatars, and anything else you can think of.

Why I Love It So Much?

You may be wondering why I love pixel art so much, and that’s a great question, I am not 100% sure why I love it so much, it’s just the way of making art that I feel I’m better at than the others.

I have got to say though, that pixel art can look absolutely amazing.

Just have a look at some of the amazing artworks made by Saultoons, Normal Neighbor, and Brandon James Greer all on YouTube. You can also check out all the great stuff on R/Pixelart and R/Aseprite — some absolutely amazing pixel art from everyone over there.

How Did I Get Into It?

Back during my GCSE’s (high school exams), I did a course called Creative iMedia, where one of our coursework units was game development (but sadly as this was during the pandemic, we didn’t actually get to the development side of things, just the concept stage). I did a bit of research and found out about pixel art, so decided to choose it as the art style for my game. I played around with a few different pixel art editors too where (at the time) I landed on GraphicsGales, where I stayed using for a while, making some cool little sprites for my course and for fun as well.

I have tried other mediums of art, but I always come back to pixel art, I am so glad that I got into pixel art, there are so many great artists and people in the community always striving to help others improve through feedback and tutorials. The community is very understanding of newbies (unlike majority of Linux), always happy to explain concepts and techniques, with little hostility(there are a few who can be a bit hostile but majority are absolutely lovely). Very supportive.

What Do I Use?

As I said above, I have tried a good many different editors, and the one I have landed on and am using presently is LibreSprite, I absolutely love it, to the point where I have contributed to the project and am a moderator for the community Discord. I joined the LS community back in August 2021, and have been relatively active in the community, responding to people who are having issues, replying in GitHub issues — basically just helping as much as I can.

Anyone who is wanting to give pixel art a try, I highly recommend using LibreSprite, it’s free and open source and is a hard fork of Aseprite (from the last commit before the license changed to the non FOSS one). Absolutely free, and libre.

Tips For Beginners

My biggest tip is start small, it’s easier to work on the basic skills with a smaller sprite size, yes you can get less detail in, but that means you can focus more on the shape and defining the shapes rather than tiny details. Don’t go complicated for your first piece, just do something simple, like Donuts - Saultoons Aseprite Pixel Art Tutorial. This really trains your skill at creating the shapes and making the most out of so little.

Other than that, try limiting your palette, again trains the make more with less mindset, and allows you to focus on figuring out the colours. Often a challenge, but can be a lot of fun as well.

I think that’s just about it, I’m sorry if this has been a discombobulated, rambling mess or a post, but hopefully it’s useful to someone. BYEEEE!!!