The Pixel Art Compendiumthe free reference on low-resolution art technique

Dithering

Technique · Last revised 3 August 2026 · 47 revisions

Dithering is the practice of interleaving pixels of two colors to suggest an intermediate shade the palette does not contain. Where a painter would mix pigment, the pixel artist mixes optically: at viewing distance, an alternating checkerboard of dark and mid blue reads as a smooth third tone. The technique descends from halftone printing and became essential on hardware with brutal palette limits — the Game Boy's four shades of green, the ZX Spectrum's two colors per 8×8 cell, EGA's fixed sixteen.

The most common patterns are the 50% checkerboard, sparser 25%/75% "brick" patterns for gentler transitions, and freehand stylized dither where the pattern itself becomes texture — bark, denim, static. Modern pixel artists dither by choice rather than necessity, and restraint is the mark of skill: over-dithered work acquires a noisy, "melted" look, and most contemporary styles reserve dithering for large soft gradients such as skies.

See also: § Palette construction · Ordered dithering · Error diffusion

Palette construction

Color theory · Last revised 28 July 2026 · 61 revisions

A pixel art palette is not merely a set of colors but a set of ramps: ordered runs from shadow to highlight that the artist walks up and down while shading. A naive ramp darkens a color by lowering its value; an experienced one also hue-shifts, pushing shadows toward blue or violet and highlights toward yellow, which mimics how colored light behaves and keeps flat areas alive.

Good palettes are small and hard-working. Classic sizes are 4 (Game Boy), 16 (PICO-8, EGA-likes) and 32; shared "pivot" colors let two ramps borrow each other's tones, so a 16-color palette can shade skin, brass and stone without repetition. Widely studied community palettes include DB16 and DB32 (Dawnbringer), SLSO8, and the PICO-8 system palette, each a compact lesson in hue-shifting.

See also: Color ramp · Hue shifting · Palette swap · § Dithering

Sub-pixel animation

Animation · Last revised 1 August 2026 · 29 revisions

Sub-pixel animation is the illusion of movement smaller than one pixel. Since nothing can literally move half a pixel, the artist instead animates color: shifting the balance of tones along an edge — darkening the leading edge of a shape while lightening its trailing edge — makes the eye read a glide finer than the grid allows. It is the low-resolution cousin of motion blur.

The technique is most visible in idle animations: a chest rising a "half pixel" with breath, a candle flame leaning, hair settling. Executed frame by frame it lets an 8-frame walk cycle at 16px feel weighty rather than clicky. The rule of thumb passed between animators: if a movement looks like teleporting, you need either an in-between frame or a sub-pixel edge — and the sub-pixel edge is cheaper.

See also: Idle animation · Frame timing · Secondary motion

Anti-aliasing (manual)

Technique · Last revised 19 July 2026 · 33 revisions

Manual anti-aliasing (AA) softens the staircase of a low-resolution curve by hand-placing intermediate tones at the corners of each "jaggy". Unlike automatic AA — which pixel artists uniformly disable — manual AA is selective: a few carefully chosen buffer pixels at the sharpest steps, using colors already in the ramp, never new ones.

Two schools coexist. Heavy AA, associated with 1990s Japanese PC and console art, smooths nearly every edge and suits large, painterly sprites. No-AA or selective AA dominates the modern indie aesthetic, where crisp edges are the point and AA is applied only inside a sprite, never against a transparent background (where it produces halos on unknown backdrops). The consensus advice for beginners is blunt: learn clean lines first; AA hides nothing.

See also: Jaggies · Line weight · Banding (the fault, not the technique)

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The Compendium is written and reviewed by working pixel artists. Articles must cite released games or published artist writeups, prefer diagrams drawn at true resolution, and avoid tool-specific instructions where a technique is universal. To propose an article or correction, write to the editors — include sources and, ideally, a 1× example image.