Hello there, my name’s Brandon and I make pictures out of tiny squares,
and I wanted to share a fun pixel art tool that I’ve seen making the rounds on Twitter this week.
It’s called “Pixel Scaler” and was developed by Iro Karu - and what this does is it
converts and smoothes over a pixel art image to generate this cartoony illustrative effect.
This is hosted through the GitHub link seen here, and I’ll leave that down below - and
how it works is that you want to select your image file - and this is most effective if
you upload the original version at it’s native pixel sizing rather than trying
to upscale it first yourself - so for example if you designed some pixel art at 256 by 224,
just save and upload a PNG at that original size.
Before we convert it, we’ll set the scale factor - and this affects the size of the image that you’ll
receive as an output and also gives more resolution for the effect to work within,
so I set most of mine to the max of 400 to get a nice large image. Then you click convert, and
just like that we’ve got our upsized image with the illustrative effect. You can save it with the
ZIP button, or you can just right-click and save the image that way too. Oh and most importantly
don’t forget Step 6 - HAPPY! And I certainly am; it’s kind of a neat tool to play with, and just to
kind of view your art through this new lens for - sort of it’s just a refreshing take, y’know?
It’s kind of this interesting cartoony, almost like a vectorized type of art style,
and if we zoom in on a portion here you can see how it’s interpreting a lot of the cornering into
these rounded shapes - like how the awning of the shop here becomes this circular pattern -
then for other things here like the foliage, there’s still a pointy-ness to it, and those
smaller details are appearing as sharp diamonds, so there’s an interesting mix of things happening.
Another cool example was this conversion of my Grim Girl Hana mock-up,
where those 45-degree lines of pixels get perfectly recreated as these sharp lines for
that really clean zig-zag pattern there. And then the other neat thing in this piece is what it did
to the dithered pattern around the skull there - again we’ve got a lot of angled connectivity
happening, but because the dithering was a bit spotty in the original, it actually comes out
as this cool partially-connecting angular pattern that I thought was really neat.
And when looking at sprite work, the effect was a little bit limiting just because it’s this
smoothed-over interpretation, so I found they’re a bit like gestural thumbnail drawings in a sense,
but it’s still fun to compare the changes. And I mean,
these sprites are around 30 or 40 pixels tall so there’s really not a ton to go on
to begin with I guess - but for larger scenes and things with more structure,
and particularly for angles and corners, we do see some really nice translations happening.
When it comes to things with more curvature in them, or stuff where the original has partial or
anti-aliased linework already there, there can be some wobbly-ness to it,
but you get an idea of where the effect was going, and it’s still fun to compare the two.
And just in case you’re wondering, I did try to convert an animated GIF but it didn’t result in
a full animation with that illustrated effect; rather it was just a static image of the first
frame only - perhaps this is beyond the scope of the tool at the moment since I believe it
is fairly new - although I did see some animated work on the developer’s Twitter account, so it’s
entirely possible maybe it’s something they’re working on, or it’s just something I missed for
the time being, I’m not quite sure. Either way, big thanks Iro for making this; I had a lot of fun
playing around and I recommend you check it out as well if you’re interested in this kind of effect.
I’m kind of curious what the resulting artwork will look like on the CRT; it’s not usually the
kind of thing I use this for, but we’ll close this out with a CRT Time to explore that,
and thank you for watching and take care and keep it square!