Pixel Art in Photo Impact

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Pixels Art. What kind of Art is that? Well Pixels Art exist since the computer was born, everything you see on your computer screen are pixels put together to compose an image and that you see on screen. The pixels art we are going to talk about is now been accept as an art by itself along with the other type of art. I'm not going to enter in all the details here so let's get cracking.
First let's have a look at the tools in PhotoImpact and the setting we are going to use, these will always be the same and will never change, cool hey, once we learn the tool and setting it is a piece of cake.
Let's have a look at the painting brush, this is the painting tool we use for painting our pixels art. We are always going to use the paint brush. Since a pixel is a square that is 1 pixel by 1 pixel, we need to have our paint brush set at a square shape with the size 1; Transparency always set 0; Same for the Soft edge always 0; Preset; None. You disable your tablet if you have one. Lines, you could use free hand or straight line, actually we are going to use both of these feature. These setting is never going to change for pixels art painting.
We are always going to paint in mode, painting in mode means that we are going to paint on a layer as an object and it will not be merge on the background. So always be sure you are on mode before you start painting.	This is the icon for your layer manager, you just need to click on it to open it.
This is what my layer manager look like after I did paint these balloons. Each colors do have it's own layer.
While you are painting in mode, you may want to erase the some of the paint you just did, so you just need to click the eraser icon next to it while keeping the mode select.	There is time, you may need to use the regular eraser. The setting for all the eraser are the same as the paint brush.
One more thing, either that you use the paint brush or the eraser tools, always check your panel, under the advance tab: Pressure Options: None Spacing: 1
There will be time when you have a few layers in your layer manager and you want to work on one in particular, by clicking on the Edit Mode it will fade out all the other layer except for the one you need to work on. Example below.
For the selection tool, we always use the Magic Wand Tool. The Similarity is always set to 0. Search connected pixels may be check or uncheck depending of the color and the area we want to select. The + or the - sign depending if you want to add a second selection or more with the precious one with the plus sign as for the minus if you want to deselect a selection. Under the option, make sure your anti-aliasing is uncheck, we don't want any soft edge.	We will use the bucket fill for large area we need to paint, it will be lots faster than painting those pixels one by one. Similarity: 0 Transparency: 0 Merge: Always Anti-Aliasing: Uncheck.
The only Transform tool we are going to use are those you see on the left here. Why aren't we going to use the resize tools? Well since our objects is not a path shape (vector) and is an image, when resizing up or down doesn't matter, PI threat it as an image and add extra pixels around the object to fill in the pixel missing or taking out some pixels if we resize down and adjust them. So we end up with softness and jaggies around and in our object and we sure do not want that.	In Pixels Art, you may want to use some text, we are not going to paint the text since we could use our tool text for it. One thing to make sure in your panel text before you start typing for pixels art under the tab options: Anti-aliasing: Uncheck. OK, why do we need to always uncheck Anti-aliasing everywhere for pixels art. The reason is that pixels Art, has no soft edge and no transparencies. When Anti-aliasing is check, it produce a soft edge and gives us extra pixels around our objects and makes jaggies that we don't want when saving our object as a transparent gift or even on a background, we would see other pixels color from the softness and it will look messy.
For all the path (Vector) panel in under the tab options, always uncheck the anti-aliasing. Why? Cause we don't want any softness around our object. Lolll I bet you knew the answer.	As you know 1 pixel x 1 pixel and is awfully small to work on. Don't worry, we don't need special glasses, we work in zoom, myself I mostly use 800%, you may want to zoom in higher or lower what ever you are comfortable with. This is the actual view.
This view is zoom at 800%. as you could see a lot easier to work with.
One more thing, when we want to save our pixels art object, even if it is a background, always save as a transparent .gif object. Important: Always make sure the SOFT = None. We don't want any softness why? We want a nice clean object that will fit any background we are going to use and of course no jaggies that will make it look messy. Great!
Don't and Never do! Resize your Pixels Art object. Never use Transparencies Never use Soft Edge Never use round shape for erasing or painting Never and Never use the Retouch tool Never use any effect or filter effect. Never use any other paint tool than the paint brush Never save your final project other than .gif format for the web.
Check out the Pixels Art Workshop section the Pixels Art Section, to try them out and don't forget to grab your award.

Pixels Art.

Don't and Never do!