Hey, I'm a programmer and I suck at making pixel art. Although, I'm really good at hand drawing so I can draw concept art. When it comes to pixel art I use GIMP or Photoshop and putting each pixel at a time ends up looking really bad for me (especially when drawing characters with an animation that needs to have the same ratios).
Is there an effective way to convert my hand drawings into pixel art I can use with my games? It would make the whole art process a lot easier without having to pay someone or depend on someone else.

If you have a tablet or a phone theres a lot of apps/youtube tutorials on how to link that to your computers photoshop. Whenever I'm doing art I just hook up my kindle fire to photoshop and use a stylus. Heres a youtube video.

You could use something like Inkscape to trace your lines and perform coloration and shading, to produce clean and sleek vector art. Conversely, you could also use your drawings as references and use something like Blender to model it in 3D, then skin/rig/animate it. From there, if you desire 2D sprites, you can simply pre-render it from different viewpoints and in different poses.

Pretty neat solutions suggested above, so I'll focus on pixel art specifically.

If you want pixel art from your line art (rather than vector like JTippets suggested with Inkscape or pre-rendered like Blender), my solution would be to scan it, scale it down, then re-trace the line since scaling is going to make it super fuzzy. Lemme break it down.

The easiest way to transform a sheet-paper drawing is to scan it, but a digital camera will also work if you're a little careful with lighting (since the only thing you care about is the lines). It's best to ink the drawing before scanning/photographing so the lines are more distinct. After it's digital, you'll probably want to mess with the levels in GIMP or Photoshop to make the lines more distinct (Ctrl+M in Photoshop).

Once you have the line art set up in your software of choice, scale it down to your desired sprite size. The following example is from pre-existing line art, but the basic principle is the same.

Basically, this..:
[attachment=11517:J-20.png]

...turns into this:
[attachment=11518:J-20_2.png]

Notice how the lines aren't clean thanks to the scaling? Well this is where your artistic gumption comes in. Sort of, anyway; it's just tracing. Basically, just draw over the fuzzy scaled-down version with the pencil tool to grab the essence of the lines in pixel form. Usually for this step I switch to MS Paint since I think Photoshop and GIMP are irritatingly overwrought for pixel-level editing. You might find it way easier to draw the basics in Paint and then switch to something else for clean-up or color correction (which is what I do).

Here is the traced version (I use a completely different color so it's more distinct):

[attachment=11519:J-20_3.png]

Now you can just select out the lines or just erase all the leftover fuzzy crap from the initial scaling, leaving you with pure pixel lines ready for coloring (this might be helpful if you're also having trouble with that: http://www.gamedev.n...r-my-pixel-art/).

Only the lines shall remain:
[attachment=11520:J-20_4.png]

I also happened to explain pretty much exactly what you want to know in of my chapters in this book.

Note:Sorry about the small image sizes, does anyone know how to scale attached images in BBcode?

Thanks all! +1 rep each

there is NO WAY ms Paint beat Photoshop in ANY level of work, other than that you are good to go, just learn a little bit about the standard programs to make this kind of work and you'll see the difference. Cheers.

I disagree. For basic pixel lineart and even shading, I prefer Paint because at the pixel level (128-64[sup]2[/sup] or lower) it's simply faster do very simple things like mirror a side, move a portion of the sprite, etc than the Photoshop interface, which requires layers for pretty much everything. That being said, GraphicsGale is probably the best for pixel art in general since it maintains the kind of interface that's good for pixel-level editing while having some more of the advanced features of Photoshop.

Thanks guys!