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The importance of canvas sizes

Part 3 of 9

A beginners guide to Pixel art

By Danielle Woods (Woodspixl)

I get this Question a lot and the answer is always difficult to determine as it both depends on what you are creating and what your skill level in pixel art is. Working on character sprites does not require over hundred and hundreds of pixels as it defeats the purpose of ‘pixel art’. My recommendation is to work small and build up if you need to.

Pixel art is very flexible when working upscales compared to down, both are not good so trying to nail your canvas size is important to get right first

What pixel size canvas should I use?

Brandon James Greer : A very common question myself and others get in the pixel art community from new artists is “How big is this piece or How big should I work at” and in my opinion, working smaller is a good place to start and if needed, you can always make the canvas size larger. But Brandon does a good job in explaining a few examples of games that use different canvas sizes and what you might want to aim for.

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The different canvas sizes Brandon James Greer talks about.

Source: What size is pixel art? by Brandon James Greer

Pixel Art Class
- What's The Right Canvas Size?

AdamCYounis : Another video highlighting the issues of picking your canvas size, on top of that, Adam speaks about the issues of canvas resizing and ‘bands’ of extra pixels in existing games and looking at his personal work and what his preferences are when it comes to canvas sizes. Taking that into consideration, I believe the canvas size is also influenced by your own art style such as I prefer working in smaller canvas’ to make my artwork look more ‘retro’ then over-detailed.

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