A Rough Guide to ‘How I Animate Pixel Art’

A question I’ve been asked more than a couple times online is along the lines of ‘how do you draw and animate pixel art like you did for the ‘We Come Together’ video by Goldfish?’.

I’ve answered it a couple times in forums and by email, so figured if you arrived here by Google search, hopefully this may be of use to you. Here’s my answer to a guy called ‘Maxwell’:

Hi Maxwell. The way I did it, after numerous tests, was to first do a rough with pencil and paper, scan that in, resize it down to 200 x 113 pixels in Photoshop using Bilinear or Bicubic Interpolation, then create a new layer, get the Pencil tool (not the Brush) and get the pencil size to 1 pixel, draw a rough pixel shape over the pencil sketch, then on another layer, do a clean-up version, clicking pixel by pixel for the black overall outline. To create colour fills, I’d get the pain bucket tool, uncheck ‘Anti-Alias’, check ‘Contiguous’, uncheck ‘All Layers’ and set the tolerance to ‘0’. Then you can add fill colours.

Also of importance is not having too many (or none preferably sometimes) black lines within the shape. Rather use darker coloured lines of the surrounding colours. In other words, if you had a pink fill, choose a dark pink for the line within the overall shape. Otherwise, your pixel object ends up becoming very ‘heavy’.

Once that’s done, resize up to ten times that size (2000 x 1130) using ‘Nearest Neighbor’ interpolation – very important that interpolation selection. Otherwise the images is upsized and blurred as the computer looks at surrounding pixel information with Bilinear or Bicubic interpolation. ‘Nearest Neighbor’ keeps the pixels looking like square pixels.

Save the PSD, import it into Anime Studio and animate away.

That’s the technical part of it in a nutshell. I did the pixel section for ‘Anamanguchi – Meow‘ slightly differently. For that, I drew at 512 x 288 instead of 200 x 113 pixels, and animated it in After Effects instead of Anime Studio.

I explain it a bit here:

The end result for the Goldfish video: