ok, so I have quite advanced Photoshop skills but pixel art totally baffles me. I spent a considerable amount of time with my first artwork and ended up with MS Paint-like art despite following as much good advice as I could from this website: http://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299&PID=139318#139318.  It gave me a lot of good tips like: turn off all anti-alias. use the pencil tool. zoom in. Use a limited palette. Show a grid.

I'm not using Photoshop. I'm using a tool called Affinity Photo which is a cheaper version without a pencil tool. Spam me with your favorite tips for making successful drawings. TIA!

If it has vector-like drawing tools, you can still draw straight lines, rectangles and circles as usual. Just make sure that anti-aliasing is turned off and you use a 1-pixel hard brush. If it has objects or layers, make sure you draw each distinct element in a separate layer. If you muck it up, you can adjust that layer or delete it and start again without affecting the other layers.

If you have a transparent background and zoom in 800%, then each square of the checkerboard background corresponds to 1 pixel (at least in all programs I've used). This avoids needing a grid.

You could make a start with something like this:

(See the link at the bottom of the graphic for loads of similar tutorials)

HTH

Goliard

If you prefer to draw your art using pencil/pen and paper first... scan in the art... crop to the correct ratio if necessary then reduce the image size to your pixel art resolution. e.g. 256x80.

Then in your image editor, push the contrast up to maximum... this will get rid of the grey and convert everything to either black or white. Then adjust the brightness setting to get you the desired line thickness.

Once you've done this you should have a black and white pixel art image that can be coloured. Make sure you turn off anti-alias when you use the fill tool to add colour.