Creating your Pixel Art with Photoshop

Preparations:

Choose an image that you want to create pixel art with. It will be better if you can draw very well and scan into Photoshop.

I’m not good at drawing so I found my favorite anime character, Naruto for this tutorial.

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Step 1 – Tracing General Outlines:

Set the opacity of your image to 40%.

Using Pen tool, trace out general outlines of the character.

Ignore those lines from shadows and highlights for the time being.

Step 2 – Touching Up Paths:

Most likely there will be some corners of the path that will look a bit off.

You can improve the corners by using the Convert Point tool. Simply click on an anchor point and drag the controls to adjust.

Rename this path layer to General Outlines once you are done.

Step 3 – Tracing Highlights:

Similar to Step 1 and 2, trace the outlines for the highlights of character with Pen tool.

Rename this new path layer as Highlights Outlines..

Step 4 – Tracing Shadows:

Same thing here. Trace the outlines for the shadows of character with Pen tool

Rename this new path layer as Shadows Outlines.

Step 5 – Stroking Paths:

Select General Outlines in Paths tab to load the paths.

Go to Layers tab and create a new layer. Name it as base.

Set your foreground color to #000000. Select Pencil tool and set its size to 1px.

Select Pen tool and right click on the path to choose Stroke Path with Pencil.

Step 6 – Applying Base Colors:

Select the Paint Bucket tool, set Tolerance to 0 and uncheck Anti-Alias.

On the same Base layer, fill in the basic colors of the character.

Step 7 – Applying Highlights:

Create a new layer and name it as Highlights. Repeat Step 5 and 6 for the Highlights Outlines in Paths tab.

But stroke the paths with foreground color #FFFFFF this time.

Fill in the shapes with #FFFFFF as well. Set the opacity of this layer to 60%.

Step 8 – Applying Shadows:

Create another new layer and name it as Shadows. Do the same as Step 7 for the Shadow Outlines in Paths tab.

Stroke the paths with foreground color #000000.

Fill in the shapes with #000000 and set the opacity of Shadows layer to 20%.

Step 9 – Touching Up Details:

We are almost there! But the lines of the forehead logo seems to be too thin

I set my Pencil tool to 2px, select that logo with Path Selection tool and stroke it again with #666666.

Optional:

Complete the design by adding a nice background. I applied Noise filter to the background.

Hope you enjoyed the tutorial. Thanks!

Click here to view the final image.