How to make pixel art: a beginner's workflow that actually works

Most people who try pixel art for the first time open a 256x256 canvas, pick 40 colors and give up an hour later. The trick is the opposite: start smaller than feels reasonable and use fewer colors than feels possible.

Below is the workflow I use for small game sprites, shown on an 18x18 cat I drew. It works the same for characters, items and icons.

1. Pick a tiny canvas

Small canvases are easier, not harder. Every pixel is a clear decision and you finish before you lose motivation.

If you're unsure, take 16x16. The cat above is 18x18 because its tail needed two more columns.

2. Limit your palette

Pick 4 to 8 colors before you draw a single pixel. A limited palette forces the image to read clearly and keeps colors consistent across sprites.

The cat uses six: a near-black outline, the orange body, a cream belly, and three tiny accents (peach, pink, white) that only cover eleven pixels together. If you don't want to build a palette yourself, borrow one: PICO-8 (16 colors), Endesga 32 and Sweetie 16 are popular starting points.

A tip that took me too long to learn: don't use pure black for outlines on colorful sprites. A very dark neutral (here #171717) looks cleaner, and on soft styles a dark version of the body color looks even better.

3. Block in the silhouette

Fill the whole shape with one color. No outline, no details. You're only checking one thing: is it recognizable as a single flat shape?

If the silhouette doesn't read, no amount of shading will fix it later. Squint at it, or zoom out to 1x. For the cat, the two ear bumps and the tail are what make it read as a cat, so I made sure they stick out clearly.

4. Add the outline

Draw the outline on top of the silhouette. Two rules keep it clean:

• Avoid "doubles": in a diagonal line, each step should touch the next only at a corner. An L-shaped clump of three pixels makes the line look thick and jagged.
• Keep steps even: a curve made of steps like 3-2-1-1 looks smooth; 3-1-2-1 looks wobbly.

Inner lines (the eyes, the mouth) come in this step too. On a small sprite a single pixel is a face feature, so place them carefully. Here the eyes are two short dashes and the nose is one pixel.

5. Flat colors

Now fill each area with its base color: body orange, belly cream. Still no shading. This is where you check that the colors work together and that areas are big enough to read.

Small areas (1–2 pixels wide) often become noise. If a stripe or a patch doesn't read at 1x, remove it or make it bigger.

6. Details and shading

Last, add the small things that make it feel alive: pink inside the ears, a hint of paws, a highlight. On a sprite this small, fewer details are better. The cat has no real shading at all, just color areas, and it still reads well as a game icon.

When you do shade bigger sprites:

• Pick one light source (top-left is the classic choice) and stick to it.
• Use 2–3 tones per color: base, shadow, highlight.
• Shift the hue a little, not just the brightness: shadows slightly cooler or more saturated, highlights slightly warmer. It looks far less muddy than plain darker/lighter versions.

7. Export without blur

Pixel art is drawn at 1x and scaled up with nearest-neighbor scaling, in whole numbers (2x, 3x, 4x…). Any smoothing turns crisp pixels into mush:

• Save as PNG, never JPG, which adds color noise.
• Scale by whole numbers only. 2.5x makes some pixels wider than others.
• In game engines, turn off texture filtering (in Godot: Default Texture Filter = Nearest; in Unity: Filter Mode = Point).

Tools

You don't need anything expensive. Aseprite is the standard paid tool, and LibreSprite is a free fork of an older version. Piskel and Lospec's editor run in the browser. I draw in SimplePixelArt, a free browser pixel art editor I build, which has palettes, a grid and nearest-neighbor export built in. Any of these will do. The workflow matters more than the tool.

Practice ideas

The fastest way to improve is many small finished sprites, not one big unfinished one. A few to try, each in 16x16 with at most 8 colors:

1. A potion bottle (simple shape, good for practicing highlights)
2. A slime (silhouette practice)
3. A sword (diagonal lines without doubles)
4. A cat or a frog (readable face in a few pixels)
5. A heart, coin and key set (consistent palette across items)

If you want references, browse what others drew at the same size on the pixel art gallery at SimplePixelArt and look at how they place single pixels for eyes and highlights.

Happy pixeling!