Pixel Art: Some Questions

As an assignment in my Quark Express class, I am to redesign a CD cover. This seems moreso a Photoshop exercise to me, and I wish to treat it as such.
I've picked the most recent Mini-bosses CD: The Brass LP. My idea was a pixelated trumpet head in the corner spewing forth various notes and famous NES mini-bosses (BoomBoom, ProtoMan, etc) ripped straight from emulators. Now, what is the best way to create pixel art like this? I would have to do the notes and the trumpet myself, but I can imagine there being much a problem with pixel size and importing images like that. Does anyone have any pointers?

I'm OCD, so I do everything the hard way (ie redrawing) I'm sure theres an easy way. I just don't know it.

I'm not really getting it. You want all of the pixels to be the same size? However you're doing it, just make sure when you resize them that you don't stretch and squish them. turn of the filtering or whatever the option is in Photoshop when you're resizing the individual sprites, though you may want to turn it back on if you plan on rotating any.

Emulator > run at native size in a window > printscreen > manually cut out the sprite (easy).

Am I missing anything?

And yeah, if you scale anything, do it without filters and only scale in powers of two. I don't think you can "Free Transform" in Photoshop without filters coming in to play, so you'll probably need to paste each sprite into its own image and resize the image.

Okay, that does it for the sprites, thanks.
For the time being with the rest of it, though, I'm trying to make a pixelated trumpet horn sticking out from the corner spewing these guys and some lines. It'd be a big one taking up a bit of the page. I've seen stuff on Diesel Sweeties saying he uses the Aliased Pencil tool in Photoshop. kidnemo seems silent on the issue on his site, as he is, assumedly, too busy kicking asses to make a tutorial. Is this the standard pencil with smoothness turned off?
Also, is there an easier way to make a 1-pixel line circle of a certain color?

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Originally Posted by ChaoofNee

Also, is there an easier way to make a 1-pixel line circle of a certain color?

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from the select menu you can create a boarder.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ChaoofNee

Is this the standard pencil with smoothness turned off?

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Probably.

Draw it pixel by pixel in photoshop. You can use the line tool or the brush tool with a thickness of 1 and anti-aliasing turned off. You can also get software like Graphics Gale to do pixel art (it "specializes" in it), but because it's a very obscure piece of software it's not compatible with every export file format you may require (especially tif and eps usually linked with printing).

You should probably private message Kidnemo since, you know, he's the king of pixel art at TNL.

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Originally Posted by Josh

from the select menu you can create a boarder.

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Yeah. Make a selection with the circular marquee tool and then do the following:

Select Menu (at the top) >> Modify >> Border

Once you hit Border you'll be prompted by Photoshop to enter how large you want the border to be. Enter "1 px" (without the quotes). I always get in the habit of entering px when I'm dealing with pixels because as a print designer my settings are defaulted to inches (in).

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ChaoofNee

I've seen stuff on Diesel Sweeties saying he uses the Aliased Pencil tool in Photoshop. Is this the standard pencil with smoothness turned off?

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This is always how I've done it.

Also the size of the horn doesn't really matter, what matters is the resolution to make it at. You can always resize it, but you can't change the resolution. My suggestion is to find a base sprite you want to emulate the pixelation of (like an old Super Mario one, you want it to be big and blocky) and then make it from that size.