Pixel Art — Start Here

This shelf is a curated path through the best pixel-art teaching on the internet, aimed at one concrete goal: replacing the placeholder squares in a 32×32 top-down farming game with real art. It doesn't rewrite the masters — it puts them in order and tells you why each one matters.

The two sources this shelf leans on#

• saint11 (Pedro Medeiros) — 80 one-screen tutorials, each a single dense image teaching one topic, filterable by tag. The gold standard. He also wrote an ordered beginner article series — long-form, Aseprite-based.
• Lospec — the largest tutorial index (~600 entries, filterable), plus the de-facto standard palette database and their own where-to-start guide.

A third name appears constantly in the docs that follow: Slynyrd (Raymond Schlitter) — a 60+ entry numbered blog whose top-down entries read like they were written for this exact farming game.

The path#

1. Fundamentals — pixel placement, shading, anti-aliasing, outlines. Read before drawing anything you intend to keep.
2. Palettes and color — why limits help, how to pick a palette, hue shifting. Decide your game's palette here, once.
3. Tiles and environment — grass, dirt, water, props, trees. The farming game's world, tile by tile.
4. Characters and animation — the 32×32 farmer: idle, walk cycles, tool swings.

Tools#

Pick one and settle. Aseprite (paid, ~$20) is the standard the tutorials above assume; Pixelorama and LibreSprite are capable free alternatives. The tool matters far less than a locked grid and a small palette.

The one rule#

Every piece you make ships into the game — practice pieces are warm-ups, but the measure of progress is placeholder squares dying one by one.