30 Days of Learning Pixel Art
As someone who wants to develop and eventually publish their own games, I always run into the same roadblock:
I suck at art
I won’t dive into what defines art as “good” or not because that’d be an entirely different discussion, but I mean to say the images I see in my mind never get translated well.
So, I decided to spend a month learning pixel art.
Why Pixel Art?
The beauty of pixel art is the simplicity. There’s no brushstrokes, linework, or color blending. In fact, most people don’t even use a digital pen! The core of what makes good pixel art relies on focusing on the fundamentals:
- Form
- Color
- Lighting
I’ll get back to these later, but this simplified approach to art is what (in my opinion) makes pixel art such a great place for beginners.
The Process
To get started, I created a quick plan for the next 30 days. I lazily generated a list of topic ideas using ChatGPT, which I ended up heavily revising, but that got me started and prevented me from overthinking about what to make.
My list looked something like this:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
### Week 1: Basic Objects and Simple Scenes
1. **Day 1:** Simple Figure
2. **Day 2:** Tree
3. **Day 3:** House
4. **Day 4:** Fruit Bowl
5. **Day 5:** Rock
6. **Day 6:** Flower
7. **Day 7:** Sword
...
Each day I would create a new pixel art piece and post it to Cara, a relatively new social platform specifically for human art. The goal here isn’t to grow a following, but instead to hopefully get some feedback and learn from other people.
Results
This will only be a few highlighted pieces. To view all the pixel art I made, visit my Cara profile
Week 1
Day 1: A sunset landscape
Day 2: Sun rays casting through some trees
Day 5: A rock
Week 2
Day 1: A purple potion
Day 2: “Sacred Lake” study
Day 5: A grass tile
Week 3
Day 1: Ball animation
Day 2: Mountain lake scene
Week 4
Day 1: Sword in the Mountain
Day 2: Tidepool
Day 2: Animated Fireball