Best art program for a beginner?

BREAK Brick

there is no "best" program to make art but for beginners there is some of then that are dificult to understand if you are totally blank about graphic softwares.

if you know how to draw using pencil and paper i recoment you to scan your art with Paint and then export to paint tool SAI to cut out the parts of your character and then you can animate with brashmonkey spriter

if you want to learn digital painting/drawing or pixel art, use paint tool sai tool because is pretty direct and easy, for pixel art you just take the Binary tool and start to use it

for animations, it depends of the complexity of your characters, if they are simple you can use the tool inside C2, if they are complex you can adventure yourself on photoshop. but beware, photoshop is heavy and not too much intuitive

a pretty basic pixel tutorial: http://www.photonstorm.com/art/tutorials-art/16x16-pixel-art-tutorial

advanced pixel tutorials: http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/pixel-art-tutorials/

thanks for the links and advice valdarko. I',m gonna get craking with checking out a lot of these REC's this weekend. Sweet

To do both vector & bitmap image I'm using Fireworks which also provide animation feature, frame by frame or tween. The good side is when you exporting the image/animation there are some option to optimize file size.

I just love the simple layer and state functionality.

Other software I considered useful for advance imaging is Krita (free). It intended as painting tool, but also nice filters and basic image manipulation.

I'd strongly suggest Inkscape and GIMP for free software, I would also recommend taking a look at this site: 2dgameartforprogrammers.blogspot.com

It's literally saved my butt since I can't afford to contract an artist.

Well, I would agree with people commenting about Pickle and Pyxel I hope that's right, I use them from time to time but they tend to be a little buggy and crash on me, however they are a good place to start.

I would like to offer a more efficient workflow though! I would recommend Paint.net and Graphics Gale. Both of which are FREE!

I say Paint.net as it faster and better for working with still or static pixel art, like tiles and other such level assets. Where as Graphics Gale would be your go to for the animation of characters which offers a real time preview of the animations. Although there is another application you could use which is also completely FREE, I believe it's called AeSpriter.

Here, I wrote a tutorial a while back and haven't had too much time to finish off the second part to it but it covers the different applications you could use for pixel art, or at least the most popular ones.

https://www.scirra.com/tutorials/582/creating-isometric-pixel-art-from-scratch-part-1-creating-templates/page-3

It will give you links as well as a rough idea for the application too... I hope this helps shed some light on where you may begin =]

Kind Regards

Patriick

InkScape is great for vector stuff and such but you won't have as much freedom or control as using something like GIMP or Paint.net for pixel art =]

InkScape is great for vector stuff and such but you won't have as much freedom or control as using something like GIMP or Paint.net for pixel art =]

Creating detailed sprites isn't inkscapes forte, but it is great for producing higher resolution images (imagine trying to create a 128x128 sprite pixel by pixel...)

>

> InkScape is great for vector stuff and such but you won't have as much freedom or control as using something like GIMP or Paint.net for pixel art =]

Creating detailed sprites isn't inkscapes forte, but it is great for producing higher resolution images (imagine trying to create a 128x128 sprite pixel by pixel...)

Well in all honesty you wouldn't usually unless tiling tiles or using filters within Paint.net to help with that =]

I agree though with the use of Inkscape for higher res images, it makes more sense in most cases :P

In my studio I use Inkscape, Gimp, Blender, and Zbrush to make 2D graphic tiles.

Most of my recent work has been only done in Blender, using Gimp for a small tweak here and there.

As far as Seamless tiles are concerned I have been using Neo-TExture Edit. It renders 100% seamless textures.

If you have a little bit of money you might want to replace NeoTextureEdit with Genetica.

neotextureedit.sourceforge.net/download.html

To use Inkscape for pixel art I make my sprites 256x256 and the pixels I make 32x32 squares with the grid turned on. Make sure you turn off Anti-Alias or you will have problems with colors bleeding. Then scale them in Gimp with the scaling mode set to NONE.

Recently I made my own in-house pixel editor. It has the cool features of GIMP and Inkscape , ,plus a couple I have never heard of before. My favorite is the ability to move the pixels around freely, and the way the color changes can always be recovered while animating.

You can find one version in the Scirra arcade, but the arcade does not seem to allow POP-ups... So i need to release a node-webkit version.

PyxelEdit just updated today with a decent update that includes some base marquee and animation support. Also exports it's XML level tilemap to a JSON format. A bunch of other stuff has been added too.

Of course to make up for time spent, the dev is charging a price of $8, or more if you want.

FireAlpaca

I've heard Inkscape is pretty good.

Both for pixelart and normal one.

It's what my artist uses.

Personally I stick to GIMP and do everything like a caveman :P

I'm certainly a noob when it comes to computer graphics and I have found Inkscape to be VERY user friendly.

I'm using Inkscape as it appears more user friendly to me.

I USE A PROGRAM CALLED anime studio by Smith Micro great for animation drawing tools weak but sufficient.

Inkscape (free) or Illustrator (paid) - Vector graphics is the way forward :)