Posts Tagged ‘deviantART’

How to Make an 8-Bit World

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

deviantART is host to quite the thriving comics community; you’ll find everything from one-panel cartoons to comic strips to pages from full comics, as well as a plethora of fan art and original art. The art includes pencil sketches, paintings in watercolor and acrylic, photography, and even more modern media such as tablet drawings and computer-generated artwork.

Anyone can create an account and anyone can upload artwork (even written materials), but it’s still easy to be intimidated. Which is why Metal Shadow X has posted this handy guide to making sprite comics. Sprite comics are comics that take the character pixel art from various video games and rearrange them into new situations. A popular example is 8-Bit Theater.

The instructions are simple and contain the occasional typo, but he does his best to illustrate every step of his process, and it doesn’t seem too hard. The comic really only covers placing the characters and creating the dialog bubbles, and doesn’t cover creating the actual panel framework or obtaining the sprites in the first place, but I suppose it’s a start.

Metal Shadow X does venture into actual drawn artwork as well, but it’s very rough and beginner-level, and a lot of it is very NSFW.