Silhouette and form

Fill the sprite with a single flat colour. Can you still tell what it is? If not, no amount of shading will save it.

This is the highest-leverage check in pixel art and it takes one call: look op preview after a recolor op replace on a copy, or just squint at the preview. Do it before you shade, not after.

Silhouettes fail because of:

• Symmetry. A perfectly symmetrical pose reads as a statue. Break it: one arm forward, weapon on one side, head turned.
• Tangents. An arm whose outline touches the torso outline fuses into one blob. Leave a gap, or overlap clearly.
• Uniform limb width. Everything the same thickness reads as a stick figure.

Game characters are usually stylised shorter than life. Common ratios, measured in head-heights:

Style	Heads tall	Reads as
2	Chibi / cute	Toy, mascot
3–4	Classic JRPG / action	The default; safe
5–6	Realistic-ish	Needs 48px+ to work

At 16×16 you are at 2–3 heads whether you planned it or not. Plan it.

Most top-down and isometric games want 3⁄4: the character faces the camera but is seen slightly from above. In practice:

• The head shows the face and a little of the top of the skull.
• The shoulders are wider than a pure front view suggests.
• Feet are visible as separate shapes, not a single base.
• The far-side limb is partly hidden by the torso — that is what sells depth.

A 4-direction set is down / up / left / right; 8 adds the diagonals. Rules:

• Left and right are mirrors — draw one, use transform op flip on a copied layer. Mirror asymmetric details (a scar, a shoulder pad) back by hand if the character has any, or accept the flip and say so.
• Up shows the back of the head and no face. This is the frame agents most often get wrong by drawing a face on the back of a head.
• Keep the same pixel height and centre of mass across all directions, or the character appears to bob when the player turns.

Across an animation, a limb must stay the same number of pixels thick unless it is foreshortened on purpose. Volume drift — an arm that quietly gains two pixels by frame four — is very visible in motion and invisible frame by frame. Review with look op filmstrip, which is exactly what it is for.