Pixel Art

Easy pixel art illustrations on Clip Studio Paint

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Zeamaizoro

Pixel art is all about keeping it simple. Sharp edges, chunky shapes and limited color palettes. In this post I'm going to share with you my best tips on how to keep your tools and workspace in CSP simple in order to create beautiful pixel art wallpaper, to be exported in any size and displayed on any screen.

Canvas Size

Let's start with setting up the workspace

I recommend keeping the canvas size under 500 px per side for us to achieve this pixel art look. However, you have to keep in mind the ratio of the screen it will be displayed on to select your final sizing.

In this case, we will be doing a wallpaper for a standard monitor, so I'll be working on a canvas size 320 x 180 px to keep the 16:9 aspect ratio.

Done! Our canvas is now set to start painting. But your brushes aren't. You'll notice that if you use a regular brush, it doesn't look like pixel art but rather a really low quality image. To fix this, i'll show you how you can create a pixel art brush really easily.

Creating a pixel art brush

To create the brush, we will first start off by creating a new material to set it as our brush tip, a simple 8x8 px square.

The easiest way to do this is by creating a new canvas sized only 8 x 8 px, and fill it completely with a solid black color.

TIP: it's really important to set the basic expression color to monochrome!

Keeping it selected, we will go to Edit>Register Material>Image... and we will set our 8x8 square as following:

We will go to our brushes section and click on the three lines on the top left corner, to create a new custom sub tool.

For your new custom tool, you can put any name and tool icon, but make sure the output process is selected on Direct Draw and the input process on Pen.

Now a new window will be opened, to change the config on our brush.

Turn off the anti-aliasing and select the 8x8 px square material we created before.

That's it! you have a brush and a canvas ready to start painting.

Start painting!

To start painting, let's quickly select a color palette. I've chosen a pretty blueish palette that inspired me to do something oceany.

Now, we will lay all our colors as a gradient across the canvas, it's an easy way to start!

Here is a quick tip on how to make a more appealing gradient.

Give different importance to each color, so they take more or less space than others, to keep it dynamic. It can vary the way you want it to, it's about what you think will look bether, so have fun with it!

Let's have fun playing with how the colors connect to each other, try drawing different patterns or shapes to make the transition smoother and more interesting!

Play with positive and negative space, bigger or smaller strokes, different levels of detail and shapes.

That's looking good already! We could leave it at this step, but i'm going to add a few more elements to make it feel a little bit more finished.

For this, I mainly work with silhouettes first and then add lightning and shadows on extra layers.

Let's add more environement shadows using different blending modes on the layers!

You can keep adding and modifying your image until you are happy with your results! I'm already happy with mine, so I'll teach you now how to export your image on a bigger size, for you can use it as your wallpaper!