Prints Are Available!!

ilta ✶ pixel artist

links • shop • personal blog

interests soft colors, high fantasy, cults, armor, technology, women, dragons, monsters, angels, elves, corvids, espresso, cozy stuff, cities

Oooooh my goodness your art is beautiful!!!! As an aspiring pixel artist (+indie game dev) may I ask the generic questions "what program do you use?" "Do you have any tips for beginners" and "What led you to this art form?"

also how do you make/ where do you get your beautiful colour pallettes? :0

sorry if you've already answered these!

thank you very much!! you have blessed me, i love answering questions 🥰 it will probably be Long but i'm nothing if not thorough 👌 good luck on your journey & i hope this helps!

"What program do you use?"

i use aseprite! i don't think there's anything that measures up to it, when considering both ease of use when starting + depth for later. sure, you can start with photoshop, or clip studio, or anything else... but you will regret not picking up aseprite at some point. ESPECIALLY for game dev.

add it to your steam wishlist, it's on sale often for as little as $5, and you will get an email when it goes on sale again!

"Do you have any tips for beginners?"

answered here!

"What led you to this art form?"

i think it can be boiled down to 3 things:

-nostalgia; specifically, for the old internet + forums, where pixel art reigned supreme

-i have loved art my whole life, but generally disliked traditional art mediums and found them frustrating

-i also tried digital art many times, but disliked the 'unlimited' feeling? if that makes sense... i find comfort in the constraints of pixels!

"Where do you get/How do you make your color palettes?"

i make them all myself! i have a basic palette i use, and i generally go into a piece with a palette in mind and adjust my 'starter' palette to accommodate to the specific feeling i want.

i've been thinking of making a tiktok to go more in depth about this as it's a bit too complicated for text!

my local ren faire increased their prices by 70% this year

it would literally cost me and my husband $400 to camp over 1 weekend... crying

i thought these banners i made looked pretty satisfying together

touching up old pieces is too much fun! 2 year difference ✶

tip jar • links

just a frog dressing for the weather ✶ tip jar • links

found a toad in the cat's water fountain 😭

COMMISSIONS open!

o/ im sorry i havnt been able to open my commissions all year with these seizures, but im opening some today. If you would like a GBA styled talk sprite, please purchase here!

if you have been waiting a long time for my commissions to open with a special idea, please email kael.pxl@gmail.com with your inquiry.

extremely sick and bedrotting but enjoy these curled up cat paws

I love your art so much!! It's inspiring me to get back into pixel art (I gave up quickly). A huge problem I had was I didn't know what size was best to set my canvas for specific projects. I always ended up overestimating and making it too big and then it looked less like pixel art and more like grainy digital art. Do you have a rough guide you stick to for landscapes/bedrooms/cities VS. things like animals and characters?

aw thank you i'm happy to hear that! i hope u stick with it ♥

with landscapes/bedrooms/cities i use 275x155. this provides a fair amount of detail while still keeping it pixely, plus it resizes to wallpaper size. for vertical i just reverse it at 155x275.

i've also recently started to use 215x215 (same amount of pixels as above) so that i can resize my art to easily fit both wallpapers, and mobile videos... since tiktok and instagram reels are everything nowadays 😒

for characters and animals, generally i will base the size of the canvas around how i stylize eyes.

so i'll draw the eyes first, then just draw everything else around that.

i also have a smaller resolution style with 2px dot eyes that i use for adding characters to landscapes, since my landscape resolution is too small for my regular style unless the character is close to the screen.

hope this helps!