So yeah, i'm currently pretty bored, and i feel like making a tutorial. As the title states, it's about pixel art, of which i'm sure that at least a few of you take interest in. Mind you, i assume that you know how to make a straight line, but if you don't, do tell, so i can add that section.

So without further ado, i shall begin.

1. What is it?

You've read this far, which means that you have at least a bit of interest. Good. But first, we need to ensure that you know what pixel art is. It's pretty simple to explain in rough features, but hitting the nail on the head is pretty hard.
Basically, pixel art is art where you place every pixel (or at least, most of them) manually, usually with a tool similar to the pencil tool in Paint. This is a painstaking process, but in the end, can produce quite satisfying results, even for people with a shaky pencil hand (read: can't draw for shit), such as myself, which is partly why i got into it.
Pixel art should be totally devoid of any automatic anti-aliasing, but you can still do it by hand, which i'll explain later. This often results in a pixellated look, but that's kind of the whole point about it. Y'know, making pixellated things that look good. This isn't a requirement, though, and pixel art that looks smooth can be quite spectacular.
Using certain tools, such as the fill tool or line tool, is acceptable, as long as you are unable to see the difference between the tool and a pencil. For example, if you're going to make a large, yellow square, you might as well use the rectangle tool, as the results would be identical.

In short, pixel art is made with a 1x1 pixel pencil, by placing every pixel individually, or with simple, non-antialiased tools, where you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. The former is the most flexible, but the latter is quicker. Personally i use a mix of the two.


2. The basics

The basic tool, and the most useful tool as well, is the pencil. No, not the one you might be holding in your hand, the one in Paint, or whatever program you're using. It can place a pixel individually, and as such allows for superb levels of detail and what not. But for now, we'll settle with making a simple smiley, akin to the little yellow bastards used by this forum, such as or . Y'know, just so you can get acquaintanced with the pencil and such.

Right, so. The first and most obvious part of the smiley is a circle. Circles are moderately hard to make manually, but it comes with practice. In essence, it's just four curved lines, so we'll look at how to make a curved line first. For the sake of visibility, i'll also make a x5 magnification of the images used. So, let's see an example of a curved line...



Notice how the pixels are placed. 3, 2, 1, 2 and 3 pixels. If you were to draw a diagonal line from the bottom left to the top right, then it'd be symmetrical on this line. From here, you can easily figure out the pattern required to make curves. Note that they don't have to be totally perfect to appear circular, which is pretty convenient. Now, if we make four of those in extension of each other...



We get a neat circle. Practice around with this, as it's pretty neat to be able to make good circles and curves. Now we just fill it with a color of our choice, as we won't be bothering with shading for now. I'll be using yellow, as smileys usually are yellow. Feel free to use the fill tool for this, as it won't make any difference.



No big deal there. Now, we make a face for the little guy. Let's just give him a happy face, so we can practice those curves again.



There we go. Nice and simple.

Congratulations, you now know the basics of pixel art. :U


3. Details

Being able to make the shapes is all well and good, of course, but if they're bigger than an ant or whatever, you're going to need some details, if your artpieces are going to look like what they're representing. Let's make a (flat) barrel, for instance.



Not much of a barrel, huh? It's just an outlined red rectangle, which is quite boring to look at. Now, let's add a couple of rims, and a sticker in the middle.



Still isn't much of a barrel without shading, but we'll cover that later. But as you see, it's now more interesting to the eye, due to the added details. And it didn't take a lot of work. So whenever you're making something, be sure to add a little detail, else it invariably ends up looking bland. It's worth practicing, mang!


4. Shading

Ok, so, we'd like our shapes to resemble 3D shapes, instead of flat planes. To do this, we need to shade them. Mind you, certain things don't need to be shaded, due to them actually being flat surfaces, but most things do need it. As an example, let's look at the above barrel, and give it some depth...



Now it suddenly looks much more like a barrel, eh? Now, there is a thing you should know: Shading looks best when done as if the light comes diagonally down from the left or right. You might be tempted to take the easy way, and shade from the outline and inwards, but don't do it. More often than not, it ends up looking bad, and people might yell at you for it.
But anyways, there are three shapes that you ought to know the shading process of: Cylinders, as above, cones and spheres. Cylinders are probably the easiest, so i'll start with that one.



Step 1: Make a rectangle, filled with a "middle" color. As in, the color in between highlight and shadow.
Step 2: Make the left half into a brighter color.
Step 3: Make the left-most line inside the outline into middle color.
Step 4: Select a dark color, take the right half of the cylinder, and color the right half of that half dark. If that made sense. Now it looks like a cylinder, but if you want it to be shiny...
Step 5: Place an even brighter line of color in the middle of the bright area.

And voila! You have a cylinder. Step 5 can be skipped if it isn't a shiny cylinder, and step 4-5 can be skipped if you want a more cartoony look.
Now, let's look at a cone.



Step 1: Make a triangle filled with middle color.
Step 2: Color the left half with bright color.
Step 3: Take a dark color, and fill the right half of the right half with it. The dividing line should have a slope that is twice as steep as the outline, so it goes 4-4-4-4 instead of 2-2-2-2.
Step 4: Do the same in the left side, but with the middle color, and the dividing line shifted one pixel to the left. So now you have a matte cylinder. To make it shiny...
Step 5: Add an even brighter line in the middle of the bright area, again with a slope that is twice as steep as the outline. If there isn't a middle pixel, go for the left one of the middle two.

And that's a cone right there. It's more complicated than a cylinder, but not as much as a sphere, which is done like so:



Step 1: Start with a middle-color circle.
Step 2: Put lines of dark color, as shown in the image.
Step 3: Fill the areas created with dark color, add an inner outline of dark color, and smooth out the "corners" as shown on the image.
Step 4: Make a really bright spot, that is located roughly half the radius in pixels diagonally away from the center.
Step 5: Encase the spot in a circle that is 2 pixels wider and taller than the spot. Then, expand that circle downwards and to the right with 2 layers of pixels.

This is about as good as you get with 4 colors and without dithering, which will be covered in the next section. Mind you, i'm not particularily good at making circles myself, so you should experiment to see what looks best.

If you're shading other shapes, it helps to either visualize the shape in a dark room, getting hit by light from the top-left/top-right corner, or bringing up a reference image to go from.

To be continued! (due to character limit and due to the fact that this post has been 2 hours under way)