In the sea of tutorials called “How to draw X” where X can be very specific thing such as “gems” or “produce”, it’s nice to see the other end of the spectrum where you go as bold as explaining how to draw “anything”.
What is great about Saultoons’ tutorial How To Draw Anything… is that it highlights an important point: you don’t need a specific tutorial to figure out how to draw something. If you know your basic elements of art (line, shape, form, space) and the fundamentals deriving from them (perspective, anatomy), you can indeed draw anything, especially with a reference to know the subject’s 3D shape and materials.
(Also, don’t get me wrong, Saint11 and Slynyrd have done plenty of tutorials explaining fundamentals and overarching concepts, so it took them a while before they came down to the nitty-gritty of individual subjects. Plus, it’s nice to see how they apply their techniques to specific examples. It’s nice to have the whole range covered.)
It’s not too often I get to write about a new old-school tool for making lo-fi graphics. Both because I haven’t written a news article in ages (sorry!), but also since everything today is either a mobile app, a cloud service, or powered by generative AI. Who am I kidding, it’s all 3 at once!
Lester, developed by Ruben Tous, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, is a classic, offline program that fills you with nostalgia just as much as the beloved animation technique it’s built for. And I’m not just saying that because it has the ZX Spectrum palette built in!
The algorithms packed in the tool speed up production significantly as all you have to do is click on the areas of the input video you want to create clusters for and it can propagate them to all future frames. The magic is all open-sourced and described in Ruben’s research article Rotoscope Animation through Video Object Segmentation and Tracking.
It takes a bunch of time to process the frames and the results aren’t (always) perfect, but I’d rather get some extra work done while it’s silently purring in the background and then clean up the base animation than manually color over each individual frame myself.
Good luck getting these 167 frames done by hand (although I do miss all the TV shows I managed to watch when doing repetitive tasks like that).
If you’d like to add Lester to your own toolchain and stand next to classics such as Prince of Persia and Another World, get it here (free, macOS/Windows).
I did two studies of clouds all the way back in March and April 2018. Now that I’ve been looking at all the amazing skies during sunsets in Tahiti, I had to get back to it.
This time it’s painted from my own reference with colors mostly picked plein air at a different sunset with similar conditions (Atari 2600 palette, as always).
First artwork of 2025. I tried to retain the expressiveness of my pixel paintings but also clean it up and make the clusters at the edges reminiscent of impressionistic painting where there are abstract blobs of color that slowly get representational towards the center.
After the exceptionally long PixElated Festival episode we’re back with a more chill look at the upcoming and newly released pixel art games (lots of cozy stuff in there this time).
9 years ago (minus 2 days), I posted this image to announce the launch of my Kickstarter for a game called Pixel Art Academy, an adventure where you would become an art student and learn how to draw.
While the path hasn’t led all the way to the city of Retropolis yet, 2 days from now, on the 9th anniversary of the Kickstarter launch, the game’s Learn Mode will launch into Early Access on Steam. It’s a smaller version of the full game I imagined, but the good part is that you will be able to start learning with it straight away.
Check the trailer below and wishlist on Steam to be notified when it launches on August 5.
my friend made a game about learning pixel art that will go into early access this August! I want to check it out on stream! let’s play, chill and chat 🐸
This has been amazing and nerve-wracking to watch! Luckily, the game didn’t break and only one tutorial lesson was really bad (as I already knew), so I think it was a success?
This is it! I can officially announce that my game Pixel Art Academy: Learn Mode will launch into Steam Early Access on August 5!
It’ll be the 9th anniversary of the Pixel Art Academy Kickstarter that day and about 1.5 years since I decided to take the educational core of my adventure game and release it as a standalone, downloadable Learn Mode that focuses just on the educational parts without the story elements.
The reception of Learn Mode has been great so far and people seem to enjoy learning digital drawing and pixel art fundamentals through a video game. Whew! I’m far from done though, but the first chapter focusing on lines will be getting released now before I finish the other 6 out of 7 elements of art throughout Early Access.
Here’s the release date announcement trailer and don’t forget to wishlist the game—or play the demo—on Steam if it looks interesting to you!
Those of you who have been around the block for a while now—in particular in 2017—will remember my monthly YouTube show where I covered upcoming and newly released games along with random pixel art bits and pieces and a DIY section.
I’m not committing to reviving it, but I will create a few episodes this Summer, calling it #SummerOfPixelArt (it’s not really a thing, I just made it up). On the plus side, I record it weekly now on Twitch and you can even catch individual news as shorts on places like TikTok and Instagram.
In the latest episode, among other things, I give recommendations of important pixel art games for their art direction + they are 50% off or cheaper on Steam Summer Sale. This includes tumblr folks such as @dpadstudio, @thimbleweedpark, @danfessler, and @johanvinet!
I’ve done 4 episodes so far, here are the other 3 you have missed if you don’t follow me on YouTube, X, or Facebook where I also upload them.
Also, here is the episode cover again, featuring key art from Pathway, as otherwise this post won’t appear on my front page. Whoops!
When I was watching the trailer for Arco at Summer Game Fest, I thought to myself, those trees sure look like something Franek would draw. Sure enough, the environment artist from Kingdom: Norse Lands is indeed one of the 4 developers behind this story-rich tactical turn-based RPG, mesmerizing us with breathtaking scenes of grandiosity.
I played the demo on Steam (macOS, Windows) and enjoyed the unique fighting system, a blend of turns and active pause. You plan your moves based on telegraphed actions and watch the turn play out in real-time. As for the full game—potentially coming out this year—I’m looking forward to experience the Tarantino-esque intertwining of the “3 tales forged in bloodshed, laced with magic, and united by revenge.”
Noah Cai, better known as Pixel Architect on YouTube, has been posting inspiring devlogs of Chef RPG to his channel for almost 4 years now. As a former architectural designer, he brings a specialized set of processes to his ever-improving pixel art skills.
Chef RPG is clearly inspired by Stardew Valley, expanding it with many activities such as hunting and cooking mini-games as you manage your very own restaurant in a quaint, seaside town.
We just received a new trailer for the game along with a September 12 release date (Early Access). You can wishlist the game on its Steam page.
It’s been a hot minute, I should really spend more time back here.
(Saying it today so if I fail, it’s a (bad) joke. 😬)
In the meantime, here’s some fan art I recently made.
…
Reflecting on it a bit more, I think I put my bar up quite high for what to post since everything appears on the front page as a newspaper article. But I really want to post more just casually. Maybe not everything needs to be a proper article/review/whatever. More like back in 2010 when this whole blog started.
Hello everyone, I am Matej Jan a.k.a. Retro. Welcome to Retronator—my blog and game development studio.
I started Retronator in 2007 with the goal of making video games focused on
creativity. Along the way I started writing about art and gaming, featuring artists and projects that
caught my attention. Nowadays this mostly includes pixel art, with occasional diversions into voxels,
low-poly 3D, low-res digital painting, and basically anything that makes me feel like a kid again
(text adventures, chiptune, LEGO …).
I'm also very nostalgic about 20th century games that didn't neglect their educational potential.
I expected titles like Sim Ant, Caesar II, and Sim City to continue into the future, expanding their
power to teach us something along the way. Games such as Kerbal Space Program and ECO continue to carry
the torch, but are far in between in the current gaming landscape. Expect Retronator to cover more
games like that in the future.
Finally, on these pages I document my own journey as an illustrator and game developer. I'm working
on an adventure game for learning how to draw called Pixel Art Academy. This newspaper lives
in the game world and I'll make that quite obvious soon. Thanks to backers of the game and supporters
on Patreon I can create this content full-time. Thank you for making this possible!
It's been 10 years since I started this journey and there is no doubt the next 10 will be
absolutely amazing. Stick around and I hope you will enjoy the ride.
Happy pixeling, —Retro
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