Pixel Art Tools
By definition pixel art is created pixel by pixel by creating outlines and using a limited color palette. In Photoshop an artist uses a limited number of tools. Purists of the art form will debate the use of any tool that blends or the use of any filter that creates effects. Most pixel art is created with a pencil tool.
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Pencil
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When the pencil tool is used for pixel art is set on one pixel and used primarily for outlining. You can change the color to outline areas in different colors.
Brush
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The brush is used like the pencil tool but to cover larger areas of color inside an outline. You should use the hard edge setting.
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Eraser
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The eraser tool removes pixels from the drawing and is used to clean up areas of color and outlines. Set the eraser at one pixel.
Eye Dropper
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When you want to know what the color of a certain pixel is, you use the eye dropper tool to identify it. Just touch the dropper tool on the pixel in mind. This will set the foreground color or the background color, depending on what ground is selected at the bottom of the tool bar. When the foreground is selected with the desired color and you select the pen, brush or paint bucket tool, the selected color is loaded into the tool.
Marquee
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The marquee tool isolates a geometric or irregular shape on your drawing surface and allows you to manipulate or copy that area.
Magic Wand
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The magic wand works like the eyedropper tool and the marquee together. It identifies a pixel of color and those colors around it that are close to the color. You can control how close you want to select a color by changing the tolerance of the wand. The larger the number, the less selective the wand is and the more colors it will identify that are close in color of the selected pixel.
Paint Bucket
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The paint bucket tool is used to fill outlined areas of a drawing with one color.
Antialiasing
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Antialiasing is a term for the process of removing jagged edges from an object by blending it with a transitional color into the adjacent color. There are tools and filters that will do this. Instead a purist creator of pixel art sticks to the pixel by pixel rendering of the effect, while some pixel art artists will use tools to blend. The purist will blend rough edges of the figure or object by adding pixel by pixel a color that blends the outline to the background with the pencil tool. If the outline is black they will use gray to blend.
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References
Resources
- Photo Credit enveloppe icon image by michele goglio from Fotolia.com
