Just to say that on all your beautiful 4000*3000 pixel displays this may not be noticeable, but on my poor little 1024*768 (SOOO last century dude) everytime someone has the acheivement bar in their sig (pretty much one per page in most posts) the page is stretched out which just makes things annoying.

May I request a smaller bar be made, or at least people who use the bar use [spoiler] tags. Nobody even looks at other people's achievements anyway (at least I don't think so).

Also, I don't think I'm the worst off either, some users may be using 800*600 or 640*480 displays from the early 1960s...

OK, I am in no way a pixel artist (or not yet at least), in fact, the aircraft I make in this tutorial is my first ever pixel project.

So I wanted to make a decent looking aircraft, with a big rocket jet at the back.
And I made this in about 10 minutes with no prior pixel experience :

Actual size :
Ok, not absolutely awesome, but still,  I think it looks decent enough.

So here's how to do it (this works in GIMP, but it may also work in other programs that support layers and transparency) :

Step one, basic shapes :

Just make the general shape of your object with simple colors, no shading, no nothing, like this :


Step two, new layer :

Use the Layer window/dock to create a new layer.

To do this click the button in the bottom left-hand corner, and select transparency as "Layer Fill Type".

Step three, shading

Use the pencil tool, with a low opacity setting (I used 12%). Pencil in black for shadows and white for highlights, on the new layer.

Here are what my Pencil settings look like :


Notice the two selected colors are black and white, I just have to switch between the two to lighten or darken areas.

Here's what the shading layer looks like when layered above a blue background :


As you can see, the lighting layer is what provides the depth and form to the image, the basic shapes layer just gives color.

I find this technique a lot more user friendly than the technique I see in other tutorials, where you select the color of each pixel manually. The downside to this one is it won't work with pallettised systems unless you pallettise the image in post-processing, which can technically screw everything up

Here are three indexed versions of the picture, 32 colors, 16 colors and 8 colors.

32 colors is largely acceptable, but given the small amount of hues (4), this isn't surprising.
16 colors loses a little detail, but the quality is still acceptable.
8 colors loses practically all detail, and it could probably be done better by hand-picking 8 colors and doing it the "proper" way.


I hope this tutorial gets you all pixeling, have fun.

If you have anything to add or you have other nice noob-friendly techniques, post away.