Friday, December 15, 2006

I Heart Pixel Art

Sadly, because I have nothing better to do on a Friday night, I started reading Make: . Its a really old ass issue but it has some cool stuff on BEAM bots and how to give you're old GBA a frontlit screen. Anyway, on one of the pages is a some cool pixel artwork. This gets my gears moving because I really like that kind of art style, especially in video games like Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (which by the way is a fantastic game and they just announced a sequel). I think to myself, "I'd really love to try my hand at a new art form," so I set off. Being a Mac user, I unfortunately don't have a basic image editor needed to create pixel art. I browse around Source Forge but I couldn't find anything promising. I turned to the almighty Google search engine, and out popped my answer. Open Sword has an absolutely top notch open source image editor specifically designed for pixel artists called Pixen. I mean this thing is just perfect. It has layer support, can export to multiple file formats, and much more. Now that I had my image editor, I needed something to draw. I looked around my room and my eyes fell upon my beloved Nintendo Entertainment System. I got to it and after 15 minutes or so of work I had this:





Not bad for a first try eh? I liked the experience soo much I might draw (or redraw some comx) into pixely creations. Drop a comment on whether you love it or hate it (or not, this blog has exactly one comment) and don't forget to check out the guys at Open Sword.

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