How do i be a better artist

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Feenicks
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Post by Feenicks »

A lot of what I'd be saying has been said by other people, but to distill my points:
  • Make sure to practice art in general, not just pixel art
    Don't be afraid to use references; even if you're doing something cartoony or simplistic, it pays to know what the original form of something is before you begin simplifying it
    It's generally better and easier to leave out small details on things than it is to try and cram them all in and risk making the thing look overly busy
    Anything approaching an 8-color ramp on the size of resources the OHR uses is a bit much, except in exceptional circumstances; use a smaller amount of colors
    Use a drawing program that 1) is suited for pixel art and 2) actually plays well with palettes (that is, not MS Paint), it will help you in the long run
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Post by Nathan Karr »

Pheonix wrote:
  • Use a drawing program that 1) is suited for pixel art and 2) actually plays well with palettes (that is, not MS Paint), it will help you in the long run
Have any actual examples of such a program? I've never found a program better for sprite art than the OHR's built-in graphics editor or MSPaint.
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Post by Feenicks »

I use GraphicsGale. There's a paid and a free version, but the free version should be perfectly fine for OHR needs.
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Post by TMC »

You can also have a look at the wiki: Graphics Utilities. Feel free to add your own commentary section to that page if you can write a comparison of programs.

I'd just like to point out that Inlandfool is using RPG Maker, not the OHR, so some of that's not relevant to them.

Also, there's a whole section on the wiki for pixel art tutorials:
http://rpg.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce ... _Tutorials
Do people still recommend Tsugumo's venerable tutorial? Looking back at it now... screen resolutions must have been a lot smaller back then. You're going to have to zoom in a lot.
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Post by Inlandfool »

Would photoshop be good to make pixel art
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Post by BMR »

If you can afford Photoshop, or if you already have it, there's no reason it couldn't be used for pixel art. That said though, it offers a whole crapton of bells and whistles that you won't need. Also, unlike other software, it's not really optimized for pixel art. Sure, you could use it, and if you're already familiar with it go ahead. But again, there's better stuff out there that's specialized for the task.
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Post by Nathan Karr »

TMC wrote:Do people still recommend Tsugumo's venerable tutorial? Looking back at it now... screen resolutions must have been a lot smaller back then. You're going to have to zoom in a lot.
When I was introduced to it those pictures filled the width of my monitor.
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Post by kylekrack »

I personally recommend Gimp, because it's a decent program and also it's really easy to optimize pictures for the OHR using it.
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Post by Nathan Karr »

kylekrack wrote:I personally recommend Gimp, because it's a decent program and also it's really easy to optimize pictures for the OHR using it.
I tried it and it burned me for taking peoples' recommendations for art programs for years. Literally nothing about using it was user-friendly or a step up from my experiences with MSPaint.
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Post by kylekrack »

Ah, well user-friendly, no. I actually do remember being pretty confused by it back when I first tried to use it, but there's a lot of control you have over the palette and changing the color index to import nicely into the OHR always works for me. Maybe that's just because I have a Mac though. I don't have MSpaint, so I really can't give much comparison other than what I've done in the past with it.
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Post by Foxley »

I have to say I like Paint Tool SAI a lot for drawing big non-20x20-grid pixel art. I've been drawing the HUD and backdrops for the contest game I'm working on using the single pixel tool and a graphics tablet with some pretty good results. Makes me feel all Bob Ross 'n slime.
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Post by BMR »

kylekrack wrote:I personally recommend Gimp, because it's a decent program and also it's really easy to optimize pictures for the OHR using it.

I'd recommend the GIMP as well, but that's only because I'm used to it and I use it for both pixel art and for other art. It's not very user-friendly, but it is a whole lot more customizable than Photoshop in my experience. However, it does suffer the same problem in that it's not exactly specialized for pixel art. There are some plugins and the sort that you can add to it to improve pixel art support, but it might still be a good idea to go ahead with one of the more pixel art-centric programs.
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Post by TMC »

I admit I haven't really tried to use The GIMP for pixel work aside from minor image touchups, so don't know how good it is for that. But regardless of how good it can be, I would never recommend it, because it's just an incredibly huge and complex program that seems difficult to learn to use. I'm not surprised at Nathan Karr's reaction in the slightest; I also had a bad time when I first tried to learn it. In particular, I know it can manage custom palettes (eg quantise an image to the standard OHR palette) but it palettes seems like a big point of weakness and even after years of using it, I can only figure out how to do that one time out of four!

Every time someone asks, I say I use GrafX2 (on Neo's initial suggestion actually). The nice thing about it is that even though it's got a myriad of features and a number of quirks that have to be learnt, you can hover your mouse over anything and press F1 and get a well written help. But if you want MS Paint-leve user friendliness, it's still far from that.
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Post by BMR »

I guess the question as to what would be ideal to you really boils down to, "What are you looking for?" If you're looking for ease of use, it'll be one program. Customizability would be another. Raw power and number of features would be yet another entirely. You'll get lots of different answers, and as can be expected, there's hardly a single one that will work for everyone, so you'll need to figure out what you want out of your software and just how much you expect to do.
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Post by Nathan Karr »

MSPaint (pre-Vista versions of it at least) is probably the best program to go to for user-friendliness. Biggest downside is having to draw with MSPaint's default 16 and then re-coloring in the OHR but I always considered that a minor hindrance.
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