Art Dump

I use photoshop for most of my spriting and gale for animation.

@smilesythe: Pixel art has existed since before DOS and you'd be foolish for saying MSPaint has done much good for pixel art let along suggesting that it's some godfather. Deluxe paint from the amiga days and the programs that came before that for the preceeding systems, sure. MSpaint, not so much.

To me, your claim is in the same vein as claiming windows notepad has done wonderful things for the world of programming. One level of undo, no syntax highlighting, no indentation, no line counter, copying with word wrap on gives borked newlines, so on so forth and none of that has been fixed since forever ago. It's a larger binary than nano with fewer features than vanilla vi. Extending this analogy and criticism, CMD happens to be bash's retarded cousin.

MSPaint is an abortion and the fact that your workflow now involves workarounds to emulate features that have been implemented ergonomically in other programs for years is indicative of how limited the tool you're using is.

Open your mind. The fact that you're used to using something to the point where you've developed habitual workarounds would make migration difficult, sure, but to claim that mspaint is fundamental to the medium is completely incorrect. If it works for you, fine. That doesn't change the fact that it's a severely limited tool for pixel art.

 

I use GIMP 2.6 :D

 

*looks at average awesomenes of pixel art there* *looks at own attempts* Damn... Would help if different tutorials didn't require different things...

 

But... I never learnt how to ride a bike... :(

 

Needs more highlights

 

Grafx2 is the modern project afaik. http://code.google.com/p/grafx2/

@Chosen: its alright, needs more texture on the skin and more attention to how the colours of an apple work - get a reference and pixel from that. Feedback isn't usually instant, either, fwiw.

 

GIMP is free. grafx2 is free. Gale is cheap, and the only reason you use the non-free version is to save animated .gifs.
"Free" is an invalid argument.

MSPaint is terrible for non pixel art, and bad for pixel art.

You cannot colour pick with alt or right click in MSPaint, you must use a tool.
There are no hotkeys in MSPaint.
Customised palettes don't stick around in MSPaint.
You require an enlarged canvas and must re-copy large sections of the canvas to emulate layers in MSPaint.
You cannot edit selections in any way in MSPaint.
Undo with copied transparent surfaces leaves artifacting at times in MSPaint (many headaches ~zombies09 era)
Your undo depth is limited and unchangeable in MSPaint.
You cannot have multiple viewports in MSPaint (ctrl+f provides easy access to 1x, but what of 2x or higher zooms, or for large sheets?)
You cannot animate in MSPaint.
You cannot palette swap easily with MSPaint (it requires use of the colour replace eraser trick, which is hardly optimal) -> your colour choices are more or less locked in from the get-go.
You have no control over indexing in MSPaint.
No layers, reordering, alpha, etc as we've already discussed.
MSPaint uses terrible algorithms for compressed files leading to very messy jpegs and larger than optimal pngs.

Extending to non-pixel art specific stuff:
MSPaint's antialiased brushes are crap in the new version and nonexistant in the older ones.
MSPaint doesn't have any filtering capabilities.
MSPaint has no pressure sensitivity (nor any other form of tablet compatibility) and is thus extremely limited for digital painting.
MSPaint doesn't have semitransparent brushes so GG for painting
MSPaint can't work with vectors or gradients.
MSPaint has no tools for photo touchups (colour management etc)
MSPaint cannot do soft selection.
MSPaint is not hardware accelerated or multithreaded -> good luck handling large images.

MSPaint is fine for 4chan/reddit art.

Now, some specific replies.
"What's up with this lot of random smart"? You told me to "suck on it". You're wrong and were impolite, I feel that I'm being fairly reasonable in my tone by comparison. Any harsh criticism has been aimed at the program, not you.

"its not even that hard or slow" - sounds like denial to me. No hotkeys means swapping tools results in moving your cursor completely away from whatever you were doing even when you want to do something as simple as colour picking.

"beginner friendliest" - the problem is that it's too beginner friendly and accessible (part of windows which many people use), and a lot of artists get trapped using it because: "it's not worth my time to get buy/download/learn and habbit another software".

Seriously: it really, really is worth your time. Unless you're getting paid $100 per hour every hour of the day, the ~2 days it'll take you to start working efficiently in a new tool is barely a setback. It'd take you a week tops to get back to your normal workflow proficiency in gale or GIMP, both of which are free, fairly small downloads, and much better adapted to pixel work and faster work in general - hotkeys and layers speed up otherwise intensive processes a lot.

Wait what: "notepad is the only and the real trusty tool"
...lost cause? probably. Notepad is almost by definition not the real trusty tool. You sure as hell can't trust it to keep more than one undo buffer, that's for sure.

This isn't meant to be a criticism of you, and if you're happy to keep working in MSPaint then be my guest (same as with Contrary), however from the point of view of me and many other artists (Helm especially, if my memory serves correctly) MSPaint carries many intrinsic limitations - at least be aware that you're working around them and that that's costing you time and reducing your productivity.

If you're convinced it's a gem, please provide reasons. Like, a large list of reasons MSPaint is better than "ok".


1 hour painting to wind down.


Some recent non-KAG pixel work that might become playable at some point, or might just gather dust.

 

@chosen: depends how your workflow is. I prefer working with a tablet enormously but for very lofi stuff I can bear to go without.