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Virtual Worlds Conference and ExpoWomen In Games3rd ACM International Conference on Digital Interactive Media in Entertainment and Arts - DIMEA 2008Midlands MCM Expo
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Creating Minimal Pixel Art with Photoshop (Part 1)
Exercise #1: Draw something simpleLet's start by opening a new document. Mac: COMMAND + N, or "File" > "New"
Choose a small number of pixels for the window dimensions, like 20x20, and zoom all the way into the window. My Photoshop CS2 still only zooms in as far as 1600%. I'd very much like to see Photoshop increase this zoom capacity. Maybe CS3 has this? Okay, now let’s select the Pencil tool (B). It should be set to Pencil, not Paintbrush, so change it to pencil if it's not already. Select the smallest brush size, 1pixel. For this example, let’s just stick with the default foreground color, Black. Now, click and put pixels on the page. It doesn't matter what you draw, I'm just trying to take you through using the tools. Here's what I did:
Ack! It's funny looking and it's winking! But, still kind of charming being made of big pixels and all. The left is the 1x1 size, the right is 10x1 size for your viewing pleasure. That was easy, right? Well, let’s try making some changes to what we've drawn. Let’s add a new color to the scene. Choosing colors: There are lots of options in Photoshop involving color, but let's keep it simple for now. Click on the foreground color in the tools palette, it will bring up the color chooser. You can choose a color from here and that will be the color you will be drawing with next. There's also a "Colors" palette I keep open. For Mac & PC, hit F6 or choose "Window" > "Color". You can select colors here, or click on the "Swatches" tab in that palette, which is another good place to find colors. You can use the default color palette or load new ones in, which I do. Photoshop comes with additional palettes that you can load and you can find more custom palettes online to download. So, choose a color and use the Pencil tool to draw more pixels to your artwork. Here's what I did:
Man, that's ugly. It's okay though. I don't want anyone getting hung up on making something detailed and amazing for these exercises, myself included. Let's move on. You can close your first example now or save it if you like. "Photoshop" format is fine for now (.PSD). Undo: What a useful feature! If you do anything you'd like to Undo, just press "COMMAND" + "Z" (Mac) and "CTRL"+"Z" (PC). Or choose "Edit">"Undo". Keep in mind, however, it only works on the very last thing you did. The same command is for Undo & Redo. If you want to go back further in your process, that's what the History Palette is for. History Palette: Remember we set the History States preferences in the beginning to 50? Well, this is what that relates to. In the top menu, select "Window" > "History". It's pretty self explanatory as each change you make is listed in order and you can click each command you did to go back in time. Careful though, making a change from a previous state will effectively wipe out all that you have done beyond that point. What you can do to help this is use the little Camera Icon button at the bottom right of the History Palette before going back in time. This takes a "Snapshot" of the last state the image was at, and posts it at the top of the palette. Note: The History Palette is cleared upon closing your file. That info is not saved. For more information on using the History palette, do some research! Haha, sorry, I mean, it's beyond the scope of this tutorial to get any more detailed on that. I mentioned Zooming a few paragraphs ago. Let me take a moment to describe a bit about methods of zooming in and out of your windows. This will be helpful in all Photshop use. To Zoom in and out, I bounce between different methods depending on what I'm doing. In this example, I just used the keyboard to zoom in by holding COMMAND and pressing "+" a number of times until it won't zoom any more. "COMMAND" + "-" would zoom out. In Windows, it's "CTRL" + "=" to zoom in & "CTRL" + "-" to zoom out. You can also use the Zoom Tool (Z) itself and play with that. Click a bunch & zoom straight in, or click and drag a box around a specific area you want to zoom to. By default, the zoom tool will have a "+", meaning it's set to zoom in. Again, hold "OPTION" on Mac or "ALT" in Windows to change it to zoom out. You can also click the little toggle in the tool options themselves, but that is too much work since I zoom in & out so often. My favorite method is to simply activate the zoom tool temporarily or transiently if you like that word better, no matter what tool you're using. Say you're on the pencil tool and want to zoom in to a specific spot quickly. On Mac, hold "SPACE BAR " + "COMMAND", on PC it's "SPACE BAR" + "CNTRL", and the cursor should turn into the Zoom-in tool until you let go of these keys. To make it the Zoom-out tool instead, on Mac hold "SPACE" + "COMMAND" + "OPTION". On PC Hold "SPACE" + "ALT". When you let go of these keys it will return to the tool you had selected originally. Very convenient. I can move around quickly without breaking much stride with this method. I also use the keyboard method a lot, since it resizes the window as well, where using the zoom too leaves the window borders themselves at the same size. You can change preferences on this if you want to. That's more than enough on Zooming. Let's make a new file to work on now.
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