Hello friends,
I am moderately new to pixel art , I have been dabbling in it for a couple months now. But I am new to this site.
SO here is my question: What are some suggested sizes on the size of the art peice. For example I am using Pixen (let me know if I should get a different program. But I need a free one. ) Anyways I am not sure on how large I should set my height and width of the overall picture. I looked up sizes from things like GB and NES but I don't know what to use. Anyone have any suggestions on sizes for small medium or big works? Any advice is appreciated!

-PkmCollin

Edited by pkmcollin - 17 January 2010 at 5:50pm

Howdy Collin, welcome to PJ, happy to have you.

1. Pixen was a great project with a lot of potential, but it's been dead for years. The last version released was extremely buggy and prone to frequent crashes when I used it, resulting in a lot of lost work. I'd suggest using something else. Paintbrush is a nice free bitmap image editor. It's not specifically tuned for pixel art, but It's no worse than MSPaint in that regard, and there are a lot of amazing artists here who use MSPaint exclusively.

2. There are no hard and fast rules for canvas size unless you're restricting yourself to the specifications of a particular platform. For historical reasons sprites are often sized to powers of 2: 8x8, 16x16, 32x32, 64x64. PJ avatar size is 64x64, preview size is 100x100. Pixel-art-based games are often made at 640x480 resolution. I'd just start with a big canvas and doodle a lot if you don't have anything particular in mind to draw. You'll probably just instinctively find a good size to work in.