GrafX2 tutorial videos

PixelOutlaw is making a series of video tutorial on getting started with GrafX2 and mastering all the features. You can watch it on his Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVdf9_UoHmPkioUcFA-UAMHrEttg66kua

News of Made

Carlos 'Made' Pardo is the demoscene artist who contributed the original "splash screen" logo for Grafx2, back in '95/ '96 (this one). Nowadays, he's a freelance artist and consultant, but he recently had demoscene activity again : Teaming with a coder and a musician, their group (Deadliners) just released a browser demo which won first place in the Demodays compo :
- 68000 reasons in your browser
- video, in case your browser can't handle the javascript/webgl


Made also worked on the game Elementa, created for the LudumDare game jam.
- Concepts, logo, gameplay video and logo making of (in Made's new gallery. It must have been a really busy summer!)

And now for something completely different

Nonexistent Computer Games: Dark Shadows in the Style of a LucasArts Adventure Game
An impressive piece by Espen Terjesen. With a color count of 160, you'd think it's scanned or 3D rendered, but it's not : Zoom in, and you'll see how the dither patterns were painstakingly crafted. It's a technique that's often called "index painting" nowadays, but in the days of 256-color displays, it was not considered an art form different from pixel art. The palette of this one is basically made of 14 linear ranges of colors, each one going from nearly-black to nearly-white but through a different tint. After an area is painted with any color, the artist can darken/lighten it, and it will stay in the same range. Even with the right tools and photographic reference, it's huge work, and I'm not surprised to see Espen has practiced for years in order to get such results : Here's the gallery of his older demoscene works on ArtCity.

Elements of Green by Prowler

And another masterpiece by Prowler.
Final piece here.

TwistedCoverLogo by Prowler

Time-lapse of TwistedCoverLogo, by Prowler.
It shows the image is made 1/3 with pencil&paper, 1/3 in grafx2, and then 1/3 in Photoshop for further digital work.
Bonus: the working step images (including the final cover).

8 november 2012

The "collection of 8-bit font" for GrafX2 was just updated. You can use these as drawing fonts for all your pixel works. http://opengameart.org/content/the-new-collection-of-8-bit-fonts-for-grafx2

19 October 2012

A rather nasty bug has been identified in the 2.4 release : Unless you're in Layers mode, the palette operations X-Inv, X-Swap, Reduce and Sort are not undoable (issue 514)
I've uploaded new builds that fix this problem as well two others much less severe. Sorry for the inconvenience.