method to making pixel art from jpegs.

             making pixel art 

Here is my method to making pixel art from jpegs.

First off, I want to remind everyone that I’m using Adobe Photoshop CS4. You can use anything you would like, but I recommend something that has the layers function. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that is. I will be explaining later on how it fits into the pixilation process.

Now then, just look for a picture you want to use. It can be anything, whether you found it on your computer or you looked for in on the internet. I almost always use the Sankaku Channel. Warning:this site is not safe for the underage. You can also just use Google Images or any of your favorite websites. I do also recommend using a picture that has similar colors to the blocks in Minecraft because the end result will look much better.

I’m going to go with this (I’m going to get screwed over because of the colors on this one).

Now just crop it to only show what you’re going to need.

Open your picture up with whichever photo editing tool you prefer to use.

First before anything, you’re going to want to reduce the size of the picture to fit into the map you will be building it in. Go to Image and click on Image size.

A box should pop up like so.

If you’re using a similar photo editing tool to mine and you see the boxes like these at the bottom, make sure Constrain Proportions is checked. It will make it easier to scale down the image to the correct size. If not, then just mess around with the width until you’re happy with the proportions.

Focus on Pixel Dimensions and change the height to the right amount of pixels. You might want to check the height of the map you will be building on in Minecraft beforehand so you have an idea of how big you want your image to be.

My map is 92 blocks high so I will change the height here to 92. Remember to keep the dimension type as pixels. Also notice that the width changes on its own because I had Constrain Proportions checked.

Now that I have my image shrunken down its going to look like this.

Of course you are going to want to zoom in close enough to be able to actually see every single pixel; like I have shown below. Right here it is at 500% but this may differ for everyone else.

Add 2 layers to this. Keep the background layer as is and fill Layer 1 with any color you want, as long as you can still see all the pixels. I normally choose blue. You will see why later. (If you don’t know how to add layers then refer to my next post). You will be working on Layer 2 for the rest of this tutorial. Keep the blue layer checked off until the very end. You can, if you want, turn it on from time to time to check to see if you missed any spots or if you misplaced anything.

After you are done with the layers, the rest should be pretty self explanatory. Just trace over the picture with the corresponding color until you are done.

Note: You don’t have to color in the entire thing, Just the outlines for both the shading and the object or person which you are trying to pixilize.

Here is an example from my Nia picture and of what the blue layer is used for. Once zoomed in it is easier to count the pixels with a darker background other than when you have the default background you see below. Having a colored background is better because the blocks you see with the default background makes counting the pixels very confusing and I had a really hard time with making Nia. I only learned until after that they were bigger and 1 pixel…

A lot pictures have a black outline, which makes building it in Minecraft easier because you won’t have to switch blocks when making the outline. This one did not, unfortunately, so I’m not going have a harder time making it :(. Although some people may argue that this makes it easier because you are able to see when the hair, skin, or clothing parts end. An example would be the Nia I made above. She didn’t have a black outline which helped me determine which parts would be different colors.