First impressions are important and to make your game stand out from the crowd, decent visuals are a must. There are more freely available game assets than ever, but sometimes you want (or need) something custom. Not to worry! It's quite easy to get decent looking art using free software and minimal art skills.

In this post, I'll show you how to create a few basic vector sprites, pixel art drawings, and even some 3D modeling. We'll only use free software available for all operating systems. Let's get started!

Colors

No matter which of the available art styles or tools you’ll be using, you need a proper color palette. Creating one without inspiration or a sample can be really difficult, especially if you’re less artistically talented.

Luckily, there are some great websites like Flat UI Colors, which is often used for web design, but also works for game art. If you’d like a more retro selection of colors, check out Lospec’s palette list. I’ve crafted my own color palette below, which you’re free to use in your own projects:







Vector art

The main advantage of using vector art as opposed to bitmap art is that it scales up indefinitely. If you’d like to support retina displays or larger DPI displays in the future, vector can save a lot of time. Inkscape is free software that allows you to do just that. Its workflow is similar to software used by professionals and it's a great tool to get started with.

Open up Inkscape and you'll be greeted by a blank canvas. On the left, you'll see a range of tools including a rectangle tool, a circle tool, pen, and text tools. Let's start by creating a basic character for our game!

Character

In order to keep things simple, we're not going to worry about limbs, posing, or animation. A slime character is good choice to start with. Select the circle tool, hold CTRL / CMD, and click and drag to create a perfectly round circle. In the menu bar select "Path" and then "Object to Path" to change the circle object to an editable shape, this way we can change the circle to have a flat bottom.

Select the node select tool, click the circle, and drag the bottom handle up (hold CTRL / CMD to move only on a single axis). While you've got the circle selected, click any color on the bottom to change its color, in this case we'll go for a green color.



Using the “node select tool” you can easily change shapes

Click the circle tool again and create a new, smaller circle. Make the circle white and move it over the shape we created before, not perfectly in the middle, but slightly shifted to the right. Create a new circle again (even smaller), make it brown, and drag it into the white circle. Now we've got an eye! Select both the pupil and eye ball, copy and paste it, and move it to the left. Make sure to drag the pupil of the copied eye to the right to give it a cute, cross-eyed look.

Creating multiple circles and combine them to create eyes.

Create a new circle and change it to an editable shape. Using the node select tool, move the upper handle down to create a laughing mouth shape. Move the mouth between the eyes and then down a bit. Add details to the sprite by adding randomly placed lighter colored spheres. If you'd like even more detail, you can add teeth or lighting to the top of the sprite. Add a highlight by copying the original slime shape, arrange it behind and move up.

Tiles