Turning normal Images into pixel art

[paisleypug]

Hi, I’ve learned how to turn normal images into pixel art! I decided to make this post because I think some people would find it interesting/helpful.

Step one, picking an Image:
For this tutorial I’d recommend picking an Irl image, for this I picked an Image of the La Pietà sculpture.

Step two, resizing the image:
For this step I decided to resize it to 112x80

Step three, removing the background:
While you can not remove the background, removing the background will probably make it end up looking better.

Step 3.2, removing the background manually:


I opted to remove background manually by outlining the image and then deleting everything around the outline due to automatic background removal sites being pretty inaccurate.

Step four, choosing a palette and converting the image to it:

Personally I used the yellows and some blacks of the Pico 32 palette, I then changed the color mode of the image to indexed. If you’re not using Asesprite then you can use a site like ditherit.com. As you can see I also did a bit of cleanup.

Step five, cleaning up the image:

I don’t have many tips for this, it’s decently time consuming and my example isn’t perfect, the main thing I’d recommend is eliminating single pixels and instead clumping up pixels.

Step 6, finishing touches:
Personally I like adding an outline to make the image really POP!

Oh also, here’s another, much smaller example of me doing this.

[Bmarzi]

This looks great, you can also find sites that will pixelate an image to give you an easier starting off point. I really like the David statue.

[JUSTPLAINOP]

Yay! A catholic image! This is really cool!

[Baron_Wasteland]

This is neat, although when you harshly convert something into another medium chances are it’s not going to read very well. the sculpture captures their forms really nicely but all those fabric folds and organic shapes don’t carry across into pixel art very well so you’d have to draw those yourself to compensate. otherwise it’s just noise. If you want to go this route, I’d recommend following these steps up with drawing over it to polish up the bits of the design that are lost during the pixilation process, namely the face and bodies of jesus and mary, which are the parts that your brain notices first that aren’t really appearing in the pixilated version here.
sorry for being a party pooper haha it’s neat to use tools like these, but the tools are not going to get the job done on their own.