Intro
This week we were introduced to the style of drawing known as pixel art, a form of 2D drawing where you paint with individual pixels. Pixel art is different from regular raster art as usually the pixels themselves play an important role in the composition of the piece.
I had already been accustomed to pixel art before attending University as it was a very big interest of mine and the main art style I used in previous personal projects.
Sprites for Platformer
I used this as an opportunity to draw the sprites for my platformer game, as I was intending on drawing them in pixel art. I began by drawing the main character of my game, a purple cat.
When designing the cat I kept the previous sessions in mind and tried to implement a very circular and round silhouette to represent his bounciness.
The idea I had for my game was one where as the character would progress through the levels the overall colour palette would change and get darker and darker symbolising increasing danger. So following this restriction I drew some tile sets for my game.
The tile set for the first level consisted of a grassy surface, bright saturated colours and a brightly lit open world. I populated the scene with plenty of background objects such as the rocks, grass and flowers as well as adding a background scene to show the blue sky and clouds.
These tiles were a much darker colour and I intentionally left out the background here altogether to evoke an unsettling atmosphere and to push the idea that this level was more dangerous than the previous ones.
Conclusion
I’m quite happy with how the sprites to my game turned out and I think that pixel art is a very appropriate style to use here. I do think that it leaves a lot of room for interpretation in art as you have much less control over application of detail and are forced to isolate what is most important to convey your idea.