2d pixel/sprite artists - share your wisdom here...

[neobuyer]

Some of you guys are really good artists, and I bet at least a couple people here know about making old school (animated?) pixel art like the old fighting game sprites in Street Fighter Alpha and Samurai Spirits II (or even better- SSIII- like this masterpiece Zankuro gif here):

My dream has been for years to make my own SSIII quality, full size animated sprite for what would have been a KOF type game, but with the weapon characters instead of the normal fighting ones. It'd be Samsho, Last Blade and Ninja Masters- which would have been like pumping crack directly into my brain. I know how high I am setting the bar here (imo SSIII is second only to Art of Fighting 3 and MOTW as the best drawn/animated Neo game ever. But it can be done and I just have to do it some day.

If I can figure out the workflow to do this, I will make this happen eventually.

If anyone helps me out here, just name a tutorial you want me to make and I'll post it here in creative. I am good with photoshop, mangastudio, hand drawn digital stuff like comics and can teach all kinds of figure and face drawing (oh and I know some awesome stuff about big $ concept (ID) art for games and movies- I took a class with this guy Feng Zhu who worked on the (new) 3rd star wars and for Sony and shit before they deported his ass to Hong Kong or wherever he was from for showing people art he was contractually bound to keep private).

So help out.

 

[not sonic]

i just started trying to make pixel art for a game i'm working on. its not going so well since im not an artist and could never really draw to begin with.

i found this tutorial the most helpful
http://www.derekyu.com/?page_id=218

but there are tons out there.

i'd recommend graphicsgale to draw in.
http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/

took me like 4 hours to do this:

i dont think i'm going to be able to animate it myself

 

[fake]

I made that with Pixen. You can go frame by frame and animate in that program as well.

 

[@M]

I mess with sprites a little bit, usually as supplemental/reference material to my sculptures.

I use GIMP to make/edit my animated sprites (I believe I downloaded an animation plug-in for it as well). The individual image layers serve as the frames of the animation--not sure how other art programs handle it. Depending on the sprite's complexity and number of frames, I find it to be a fairly time-intensive process.

While I applaud your enthusiasm, making an entire original fighting game is a pretty big project to take on all by yourself. Making a single character for MUGEN would probably be a more realistic thing to undertake.

 

[cannonball]

Hit up this forum for some good info on pixel art.
I use Cosmigo's Pro Motion, although I'm still not very good, but getting better all the time.

It's good to start off with very basic objects (like rocks) and work on shading them properly without getting into the habit of pillow shading (very bad thing!)

 

[rarehero]

S, I would assume that pixel art animation is similar to regular animation.
You have your normal to extremes and then you create the in between animation to get to the extreme.
I would brush up on traditional animation and then look at translating that to pixels.
Pixels are great to us simply because of nostalgia,
but in reality was a limitation by the hardware the animated 2d sprites were executed on.
Not saying it's bad, it's just another medium like charcoal, or pastel crayons on paper.

 

[beh3moth]

Just saw this thread and thought it might be cool to share some of my friend's pixel work.
He has been converting films into Lucasfilm/Lucasarts stle point and click visuals.

Sorry the text is all in Danish.

http://nrkp3.no/filmpolitiet/2011/05/spill-kunst-og-piksler/