It's interesting to see how retro video game art is still so popular — you rarely see filmmakers presenting an entire movie in black and white just because that's how films used to be made. Perhaps due to nostalgia and the ease of creating game assets, pixel art continues to be popular in the indie game scene.
If you're interested in making some pixelated masterpieces of your own but don't know where to start, Pixel Paint on 3DS aims to help. More of an app than a game, Pixel Paint gives users the tools they need to create their favourite characters and landscapes from classic games, or come up with all-new assets on their own.
The app is easy to pick up even for those without an art background — a simple toolbar allows you to select a tool, insert shapes, cut/paste and fill empty spaces, and select a colour. The drawing grid makes it easy to be pixel-perfect, and if you've got a hankering to create something that looks like it could be at home on Game Boy or NES, Pixel Paint nicely includes several colour palettes to mimic those available on retro systems.
Of course, you can save creations in progress and pick them up later, and when you've completed your masterpiece you can export it to Miiverse so others can enjoy and comment on what you've made.
If all this sounds a bit familiar to you, it's because this game was actually released on Wii U nearly two years ago — thus, Pixel Paint on 3DS is essentially a port of its console brother. What's a shame is that the developers missed an opportunity to make this version even better.
The main feature upgrades in the 3DS version of Pixel Paint are an eraser tool (so you don't have to change your pencil or brush to white to erase), a set of shape tools to easily create circles, squares, triangles and straight lines, and the ability to export your drawings to your system's SD card (which is much appreciated since it doesn't lock your drawings to the system). This version also lets you view the controls without exiting to the main menu, which helps reduce having to save and leave your drawing while starting out.
While these additions are welcome and certainly improve the package, it's the things that were left out here that keep Pixel Paint on 3DS from being a must-own. The 3D effect is sadly limited to a graphic on the game's title screen — it could have been awesome to see your pixel creations pop in 3D. In addition, the app lacks any sort of tutorials, guides, or stencils to help novices along.
Another eyebrow-raising aspect of this port is that the Cut and Copy functions perform exactly the same as each other. You'd expect the Cut function to remove the selection after pasting it; since this was an issue in the Wii U version, we wonder why it wasn't fixed here.
The game includes background music, which is fine but nothing you'd want to listen to for an hour while working on your art. You'll definitely want to have an audiobook or some other music at the ready when working in Pixel Paint.
In the end, whether this app is worth the cost comes down to your artistic drive. For just a few dollars, it's custom-made software that makes creating retro art easier than in, say, Microsoft Paint. However, if you don't know much about creating pixel art and are looking to start, Pixel Paint doesn't provide anything to keep you going other than your own creativity, so you might get bored quickly.
If the idea of creating your own art doesn't appeal to you, you won't find much to love here. Considering that this is a port of a two-year old app, we expected some more features to be added or at the very least not have issues present in the original release (copy and cut being duplicated), but this is a fine tool to sink your teeth into if you think you'd enjoy working with it; with that said if you own the Wii U version you need not double dip on this one.
Conclusion
Pixel Paint 3DS is a fine tool for creating pixel art, but as a port it doesn't improve on its predecessor enough to make it great. Creative types will find a lot to love here, but beginners looking for tutorials or some help along the way won't benefit a great deal. Whether you'll enjoy what Pixel Paint 3DS has to offer comes down to your artistic abilities; we just wish that this could have been considered a definitive edition.
Comments 13
Would have been cool if they added camera support too, so you could draw over image you've taken a photo of. If they updated this I might be interested.
Looks interesting... I'll have to think about picking it up.
It's a fine app, if you ask me. A bit barebones - sure - and it kinda looks homebrew-y - but I like it. The overall interface is good, nothing confusing and easy to learn, althrough I would change the way you can pick the colors, as holding-sliding seems a bit awkward, at first at least.
I really miss fliping/mirroring the canvas. Zoom out option and few more palettes would be appreciated as well. But aside those notes, the simplicity of the app gives it a specific charm.
It would probably be more fitting to use this on a 3DS than the Wii U, but that isn't really enough to warrant a second purchase of this game. Maybe if the cut issue was fixed, you could manually pick a specific colour via code or a simple eyedropper tool was added into this version then I'd probably pick this up again since while it was very limited, it was fun doing pixel art.
Ughh yeah... Maybe I've been spoiled by good softwares like GraphicsGale, but that one was a waste of money for me.
I'm not sure about it's 3ds counterpart, but the wiiu's...
Glitches, broken undo/redo, saving bugs, severe lack of tools and function.. And if you manage to do something nice on it, it'll just get distorted and blurry pixels on Miiverse since it only supports jpeg images of a specific resolution.
https://miiverse.nintendo.net/posts/AYMHAAACAAADVHkQt1h_WQ
@Iggly I don't own Wii U, but on 3DS if you hold a shoulder button, and then touch a color on your canvas, you will pick the color, so colorpicker is in this version.
@Smokingspoon This software can export your pixel art as jpg (I was suprised seeing jpg, but so far the smallest pixel canvas gave me astonishingly clear results - gotta try this with bigger images/more colors and see how the compression goes).
I guess 3DS can only do and can only show [via Camera app] jpgs, while png is a more exlusive file format; I have only seen a possibility to save a screenshot as png in a homebrew program - never used that one tho. Posting a painting in Colors! Gallery turns it to png as well, when you want to download it from the site. Exporting it to SD card makes it jpg.
Pixel Paint has a disclaimer in the manual that Miiverse images will be upscaled for a better viewing, so that's kinda exused here.
I got it because I thought the price was more than reasonable and I'd heard good things about the Wii U version. I'm mostly happy with it, except for a few tiny things (picking colours from the full palette isn't easy since you can't see what your previous colour was).
The Cut tool does work for me though. It's just that every time you make a transformation, you have to tap elsewhere to confirm it. It'll leave behind the colour you have selected at the moment.
EDIT: Okay, I hadn't tried exporting yet, and I'm not thrilled with the results.
I tried the three possible methods with one picture.
First, the SD card export function. It's the right resolution at least (though the huge white border is a bit weird) but the jpeg compression completely ruins the picture. Absolutely unusable for even moderately complex stuff.
Posting to Miiverse using the in game menu leads to a big, muddy drawing with tons of artifacts.
Posting to the Miiverse screenshot album seems to result in less compression, but it's still not what I'd call "good".
So in the end, your art is stuck on the system. If we could export it as uncompressed JPG files, it would have been fine, but if that wasn't possible, they should have gone with a PNG or GIF option. Flipnote lets you export your images as GIFs and for indexed colours stuff, it works well. Inchworm even lets you save bitmaps!
Pixel art is a special case where you really don't want any artifacts, and I wish the devs had realised that.
@Waann Thanks for the input. I had been busy with the work and I haven't touched the app since. Looks like you saved me some time with image-export experimenting. As I mentioned earlier, the smallest possible canvas size gave me really good results, but you proved my assumption right: more complex artworks will have lots of compression artifacts. That's a shame, actualy...
Edit: I just thought about not so convinient way around. If you really, like really, wanted to export the file, you could use a separate digital art program to clear the artifacts and save the file as png. Yeah, sounds dumb, but maybe you could use that as a last resort?
@KTT Yeah, it's too bad really.
That might work as a workaround, using one of the big files then (since 1-pixel details tend to become gray or brown in jpeg, regardless of the original color). I'll give it a try and post the results here.
@KTT I did it! Though it is a little tedious. http://i.cubeupload.com/koNWDl.png
Here's how I did it using the GIMP:
Using the screenshot album export, I made myself a custom palette that included all the colors I'd used (had to pick the colors in the middle of the largest areas, otherwise they get muddy). Then I scaled the picture down to its actual resolution (80x60 in my case, no interpolation) and I converted the drawing to indexed colors, using my palette from earlier. After that the picture can be converted back to RGB (to tweak the colors) and scaled to whatever size you want.
So for small-ish pictures, it works. It wouldn't be that great for 320x240 drawings though, there's just too much detail lost.
@Waann I was thinking of manually [re]coloring with Select by Color tool help and then turn the art into indexed colors and scale it down but the process you did sounds like it's working as well, for smaller images. Good try.
GIMP can detect the colors from RGB image, so you may want the creating-a-custom-palette step removed, if you recolor all the artifacts manually first (two hotkeys and two mouse click inbetween per color basically), before you index the image. Perhaps it may even work without re-coloring, if you restrict the number the colors on the picture, in the convert to index window (there is a risk the color will change tho)
Obviously, complex paintings with gradiens looks horrible when indexed, but the pixel art with somewhat limited palette should end untouched. However, for that 320px pixel art, the custom color palette may be a must, depending on how many colors were used in the art...
The colors shouldn't be the biggest problem, it is scalling the image down what bugs me the most :/
I will try make some export tests as well, and also do something bigger in the next week and experiment with the 'converting' process. I need the time for that tho. And I'm not that good at pixel art, so bare with the art, if I manage to make one ^^'
@Waann Hello! I'm sorry for so long time to reply, but as you probably figured out, I couldn't find the time to finish the test thing :/
But there's another pixelart tool: PixelMaker out now and I heard it supports png! Seems like the better choice here
@KTT Hi! Oops, sorry, I forgot to reply last time X(
Yeah, Pixel Maker does support PNG I 've already got it for that reason, actually. The interface is easy to use, and it has layers, which is a nice bonus. Now I wish I hadn't bought Pixel Paint, but oh well.
Another alternative might be Butterfly Animation, if they still allow high quality exports like they did in Inchworm. Inchworm was confusing to use though… But with the higher resolution of the 3DS, maybe the GUI is better this time around.
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