I move between a heavily cofigured photoshop and MSpaint.

I like drawing in MSpaint, but I like mocking up designs and processing in photoshop.


Features I really enjoy about MSpaint:

It's fast. I can determine my own layout for a spritesheet and work on a single continuous workflow. I don't spend time hunting through a layer dialog working out if I'm painting on the right layer.

Using transparent selection will drop out the background-color, allowing you to preview onionskin via a selection.

I can manually swap colors using the eraser tool. The alt mode for the eraser tool will swap the foreground with the background color.

I can quickly swap large blocks of color in a selection by cutting with the replacement color as my secondary color, then pasting with the replaced color as the transparent background color.

I like that I can undo an dragged action by right-clicking during the drag.



Things I don't like:

I can't define a strict palette for drawing.

I can't globally, or regionally swap a bunch of colors around quickly.

I can't easily draw complex vector shapes and reduce them to a raster.

I can't work with transparency

I can't constrain a selection to a strict size.

I can't constrain the canvas to a strict size.

The undo queue is pretty limited.

Flood tool is contiguous-only.

There are no easy keyboard shortcuts for most keys.

Resize/zoom is too limited. I want 16x zoom, and the ability to scale things by >400% at a time.

Pencil brush can be larger than 1px, but it it too strictly limited in shape and size. Line brush and eraser brushes are similarly limited.

Lack of animation preview.


Photoshop is pretty glorious, but it sucks for working fast with pixel art. The layers menu is too complicated and annoying to work with.

Filters are borderline worthless and the smart layer feature is damn awful.

For the most part, Photoshop struggles with disabling anti-aliasing and feathering. It's just a pain in the dick to make pixel art because photoshop is always fighting with you in terms of varying your alpha intensity slightly.

Paint, Dream maker and rarely Pyxel Edit.

I dislike overlays.

technical dislikes
Canvas limit is an absolute torture
It's hard to track the transparency range you used.

I use Dreammaker mainly because that's the one I'm most used to and I don't feel like I'm missing out on any essential tools really. The only drawback on it is prehaps the size maximum and that it gets quite laggy if you're trying to draw in a big canvas.I know people like to crap on it but yknow, to each their own.

I also bought Pyxel Edit to have a better program for animating, but I rarely use it for now since I try to procastinate on doing animations. I also use it's color shade tool thingie.


P.S.: Not an everyday thing but I recommend playing around with Flick's PartIcons you can make some pretty cool things with it if you spend a little time learning how to use it

Strictly MSPaint, then copying the images over to DM.

Ter13 wrote:

The tools don't make the man.

Use whatever you are comfortable with. Wouldn't recommend MSpaint, but it's not gonna make you shit at art.

Thanks for posting the subpar art I was speaking of made with MSPaint which literally looks like Zelda art knockoffs in 16x16.

When it comes to art you're suppose to find shortcuts, cheats and ways to work faster with good quality so literally the tool does make the man if the tool makes your job easier and faster. Would you dig a grave with a hand held garden shovel? MSPaint doesn't have half the features graphics gale or programs MADE specially for pixel art has.

If someone wants programming advice you can chime in but when it comes to art we don't need your input.

While you can learn to create pixel art in pretty much anything, I would recommend taking a look at GraphicsGale or at least something similar (GraphicsGale being what I use).

GraphicsGale is designed for creating Pixel Art, and as such, is very time efficient compared to other more general artsy programs.

Ter13 wrote:

Actually, almost all of that was in 8x8. Love that you recognized the inspiration. Proves that I'm doing exactly what I intended: paying homage to the Zelda franchise: The games that actually got me into gamedev in the first place.

Even worse. You stick to small size work to hide how garbage it is. Can you even create anything bigger than 8x8? or is that your limit?

When ever someone gets called out for plagiarizing they come with the tired out excuse, "It was inspiration" no... It was stealing due to your lack of creativity. lol people on byond love to throw around the gamedev title but does your garbage ass "games" qualify you for the title gamedev?

(My favorite part is getting called out for knockoffs by a dude who literally did nothing but work on the same naked preteen Naruto/Bleach character art for an hour and a half at a time before giving up.)

Are you getting me confused with Paris? Pretty sure I made a bunch of stuff besides bases(Didn't know bases were only naruto/bleach art amazing wisdom from Ter) and I was talked into making a Naruto game it wasn't something I wanted to do but now im stuck with the art and It'll probably rot on my HDD. When did I only spend an hour and a half on pieces? Care to tell me where you got that bullshit from?

You've finished what? Three naked weebateens in ten years?

These are the last things I uploaded but feel free to upstage me with your amazing 8x8 MSPaint art.

My dick's firmly on this table, South. I'm not surprised that you'd double down tho. It's totally what you do in every post you are in. FYI: Expressing an opinion strongly isn't the same thing as making a good point.
Owait: I forgot you won't look at anything that you can't waifu to:
Better?

Nothing I expressed was a opinion everything was a fact. I suggest you keep the corny Anime jokes on stormfront Mayo Devil.

@South: If you had done more than two pieces of pixel art over the last decade, you'd know that you EITHER get to accuse me of plagiarizing, OR get to accuse me of ripping something off in 8x8 when the original works were 16x16 or better.

I know you don't know the difference between these two concepts, but every literate person does.

I love your chest-beating ignorance. It makes my point for me harder than any shitpost I could throw at you.

Southend_boi wrote:

Those are pretty amazing original characters there. You should try to market them.