
Practice capturing the main design elements and creating a strong silhouette before designing pixel art characters. Focus on poses and essential parts to improve future pixel art.
Design a goblin character in pixel art by establishing a strong silhouette and clear personality, using a green color look and simple poses to convey story and originality.
Design a cozy, cute pixel art fox by focusing on the face, size, color, hue, and saturation, while developing a signature style that matches the game's vibe.
Design a creepy pixel art monster with a bean-like body, many eyes, and spider-like legs that can locate you anywhere; this larger boss should be killed on sight.
Design a berserker armor in pixel art, exploring stylistic choices, color palettes, and character silhouette techniques for impactful game-ready characters.
Export your pixel art animations from Aseprite for After Effects, choosing GIF, PNG frames, or sprite sheets, and save or export as to fit social media or video game workflows.
Create a looping idle animation for a pixel art spider, with a leading body and followers (head and legs) that follow, using squash and stretch while preserving volume.
Animate traps within pixel art character design, focusing on motion and timing to create readable, expressive trap animations.
Create a full dead hero animation using pixel art techniques, highlighting character design fundamentals and smooth motion for pixel art visuals.
The Ultimate Pixel Art Character Design Course
Pixel art character design can feel confusing when you don’t know where to start.
What size should you use?
How much detail is too much? Why do some characters look good even with very few pixels?
This course is built to answer those questions by actually designing characters together.
We don’t jump straight into drawing. First, you’ll learn what you should do before designing any character, how to think about shapes, proportions, and style, and how to avoid the mistakes that make beginner pixel art look messy or unclear.
After that, the course becomes very practical.
You’ll watch the full process of designing different pixel art characters from a blank canvas to a finished sprite. Nothing is skipped, and every character is made for a reason.
What you’ll work on in this course
Throughout the course, we design a variety of characters, each one focusing on a different idea:
A Goblin and an Orc to understand creature design and strong silhouettes
A Monkey King fan art to explore stylization and personality
Game Boy Advance–style sprites to learn how to work with limits
An Oryx-inspired character to practice darker fantasy designs
An Old Turtle character to show age, posture, and expression
A Cute Fox to focus on appeal and simplicity
A Chameleon to explore color and variation
An Ala Eddine–inspired character to work on human proportions and clothing
AND MORE
Each character teaches something different, so you slowly build real design skills instead of repeating the same exercise.
What you’ll learn.
By following along, you’ll learn how to:
Start a pixel character the right way
Design clear shapes that read well at small sizes
Use color and shading without overcomplicating things
Give characters personality and a sense of story
Adapt your style depending on the character or theme
This course is about learning how to think, not just copying what’s on screen.
Tools & experience needed
Any pixel art software is fine
No previous pixel art or drawing experience required
No animation — the focus is purely on character design
By the end of the course
You’ll have several finished pixel art characters and, more importantly, a process you can reuse for your own ideas, games, or personal projects.