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5x · Animals and creatures
Skills
- Take any Aseprite request end to end
- Plan a sprite before drawing it
- Design it first — concept sheet and storyboard
- Create a sprite document
- Choose, build and repair a palette
- Draw a sprite
- Shade a sprite
- Rig a character for animation
- Animate a cycle
- Build a tileset
- Review a sprite before calling it done
- Fix or iterate on existing art
- Export game-ready assets
- Submit a finished sprite to the community gallery
Rule
rules://04-outlines-and-edges Outlines and edges
Choose one outline style and hold it
#| Style | What it is | Use when |
|---|---|---|
| None | Shapes defined by colour alone | Backgrounds, high-colour art |
| Full black | Every edge outlined in one dark colour | Icons, high-contrast game art |
| Selective | Outline only where the shape meets the background | The usual choice for characters |
| Coloured | Outline is a dark version of the fill it borders | Soft, painterly look |
Selective outlining — outline on the outside, none between internal shapes — is what most sprites want. It keeps the silhouette crisp without turning the interior into a colouring book.
Pure black outlines on everything read as harsh and flatten the form. A very dark version of the sprite's own colours nearly always looks better.
transform op outline draws a whole silhouette's outline in one call.
side="outside" grows the shape by a pixel; side="inside" recolours its own
edge pixels and keeps the size — use it when the sprite already fills its
budget. By default only pixels touching the shape edge-on are outlined, which
leaves convex corners cut — a softer, rounder read. diagonals=true fills those
corner pixels too, for closed, square corners.
Clean lines
#A pixel line is clean when its segment lengths are consistent: 2,2,2,2 or 4,4,4,4 — not 3,2,4,1. Inconsistent runs produce the jagged look people call "jaggies", and they are the difference between a hand-drawn-looking curve and a computed one.
- A 45° line is one pixel per step.
- A shallow line is a run of N, then N, then N. Keep N the same.
- Never place a single pixel that breaks an otherwise even run.
draw op line uses Bresenham, which is even by construction. Hand-placed
pixels ops are where runs go wrong — check them with look op ascii.
Doubles and corners
#Avoid doubled pixels on a diagonal: two pixels side by side inside a line that is otherwise single-width. They read as a lump.
At a corner, one pixel is a sharp corner and two is a rounded one. Pick deliberately and be consistent across the sprite.
Banding
#Banding is when two ramp steps run parallel for a long stretch, creating a visible stripe that reads as a contour line rather than a curved surface. Break it by letting the boundary between steps wander, or by dithering a short section of it.