Pixel Art in Photoshop Tutorial - for Beginners! ✌

Let's become a Pixelsmith!

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There is a lot of nice software you can use for creating pixel art out there. I will cover more programs in another tutorials, but for now we concentrate on Photoshop! Let’s start making awesome pixel art!

The Tools!

The first things we need to know are our tools. You find them on the left of your Photoshop window.

Canvas

All starts with creating a new file. Open Photoshop go to “File” hit “New” and a new window will pop up. Here you can choose the height and width of your canvas. Let’s start with a 100px x 100px canvas. After setting this up click “OK” and here we go!

Pencil Tool

Let’s start with the pencil tool. You can select the pencil tool by pressing “B” on your keyboard or just search it in your toolbar on the left.

When you start drawing you might notice that this pencil is not very pixelated at all. Well, that’s because you selected the brush. But how to change this soft brush into an nice square one?

You can do that by hovering the brush icon again, click and hold your left mouse key on it until a small menu pops out. From that menu you can select the pencil tool. Now right click anywhere on the canvas so you can see another menu. That’s where you change all your brushes and also the size of your brush. I normally draw with the brush size of 1px. You can achieve this by dragging the small regulator under “size” to the left.

Colors

It’s quite simple to change colors in Photoshop. If you look in the upper right corner you will find the color tab. If not, you can make it visible by clicking “window” in your top navigation bar. A drop down menu will appear. Select “Color”.

Now that you can see the color tab, how to choose colors should be self-explanatory. But the cool and useful way of picking colors is the eyedropper tool. You can activate it by clicking “Alt + left mouse key”. The eyedropper allows you to select any color which you hover. This is an big advantage for my work flow. Test it yourself!

Eraser Tool

We all know what erasers are for. In order to get 1px x 1px eraser you have to adjust some things first. You find the eraser in your toolbar on the left or by pushing “E” on your keyboard. We want a crispy pixel art looking eraser. So we have to change the mode of the eraser from brush to pencil. Just click the drop down called “mode” in the topbar. Now you can erase pixel for pixel!

Undo & Redo

Undo is such a time saver. Press ”Strg + Alt + Z” to undo your last couple changes. Often it’s way faster then to erase your fails. And there are many fails when it comes to me! ;)

In case you are not sure with your undo “Strg + Shift + Z” would cause a redo.

Paint Bucket Tool

Press “G” and you will select the paint bucket tool. If you have never used to paint bucket tool before Photoshop is going to select the gradient tool. To change that all you have to do is hold your left mouse key on the gradient tool and select the paint bucket tool from the drop down menu. But like the brush and the eraser it has this smoothness as default. While paint bucket tool selected go to the top bar and uncheck “Anti-alias” and put the tolerance down to one.

The paint bucket tool basically just fills a color within a closed line together. Another neat thing about the paint bucket tool is that if you uncheck “contiguous” and use the paint bucket tool on a color area it’s going to find every color on the same layer and paint it with your selected color. Nice, isn’t it?

Zoom

If you want to zoom in and out just press “Strg + Alt + Scroll”. You want to see your art in 100% of it’s size? Just press “Strg + 1”.

Hand Tool

Another useful tool is the hand tool. Hold down the spacebar and your left mouse key to drag your canvas around. I use this all the time. It’s a real time saver and gives you a nice feeling of confidence.

Almost there! But how to export our new creation?

Saving

There are many ways to save a file in Photoshop. You can save your work as PSD. This will allow you to reopen your work in Photoshop to make changes. When you open up a PSD file again it’s going to be like you left at last time you save. You can save as PSD if you go to “File” and press “Save as”.

Another way is to export your work. Common file formats are PNG or JPG. If you want a picture as file on your pc, which you could also upload to Tumblr, press “Strg + Alt + Shift + S”. A window will appear, where you can adjust many settings.

With the second drop down menu you can select a file format. Every file format has it’s own settings which could be changed. I often let them in their default state.

Do you remember that we set our canvas to 100px x 100px at the beginning of this tutorial. Well, this size may be way to small for your viewer. So we have to scale our image a bit. At the lower right corner you can find a field which is showing “100%”. Adjust this value as you need it. Note that you have to switch the field below to “nearest neighbor” so your picture don’t loses it’s pixel look.

I hope I could help a bit.

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