Avatar Clothing

This tutorial is intended to help those who are unfamiliar with digital graphics editing and pixel art make items for their avatars. If you only want to know the basic requirements for items, scroll down to the tutorial summary.

You can make your own custom clothing and accessories for your avatar. All you need is some raster graphics software, preferably one that can do pixel art (which is most graphics software), and a machine to run it on. Drawing your items pixel by pixel with an aliased brush will make them fit in nicely with the base artwork for a cohesive look. Pixel art has the added bonus of precision and control; you don't need to buy a fancy graphics tablet to draw dot by dot.

In this tutorial I will be using Aseprite, a paid graphics program specifically meant for making pixel art. However, you don't need to use this one as there are many free alternatives available. I personally used FireAlpaca as my free program before switching to Aseprite. This thread has some software recommendations.

Your program of choice must be able to export your image with transparency, otherwise your avatar will just be a clothing item with a white background, and the base will be invisible.

Your program should also support layers. This will make it much easier for you to draw clothing that aligns to the base artwork

Open your graphics program of choice and create a new canvas. The site standard for avatar bases is 64×64 pixels. Your canvas must be this size so that any clothing items you make will align properly with your chosen base.

Make sure that the background of your canvas is transparent. Some programs will provide this option in the canvas creation window. Others automatically create a white background layer for you each time a new canvas is made. To remove this white background layer, you usually need to make an additional layer and then delete the white one. Sometimes the background layer is locked; you may have to unlock it first before you can delete it. Graphics programs often represent a transparent background with a grey checkerboard pattern, so if your canvas looks like that, you should be okay to move forward.

Choose a base body and add it to your canvas either by saving it to your computer and importing it as a new layer, or by copying it and pasting it onto the canvas. I'm using the standard human base for this tutorial, but the instructions outlined here will work for any base.

Tip: If you want to make sure that your item layers well with other items that you use, you can import all of the items to the same canvas on different layers. That way you can play with the layering to see how it'll look once you upload to the site.

Make a new layer above the layer containing your chosen base. On this layer, we'll make a sketch or plan for the final item.

Naming your layers like I have here is a good way to make sure that you don't get mixed up while drawing. It can be frustrating to find out that you've been drawing on the wrong layer. To name your layer, you might have to right click the layer to find the option, or double click it to open a properties window. It varies from program to program.

Also take note of the eye icons to the left. Most programs have these. Clicking on one will allow you to hide or show the artwork for that particular layer.

Make sure your new layer is selected before you start drawing (clicking on the layer's name to highlight it will achieve this in most programs).

I like to use a bright colour, like red or green, when sketching so that my sketch stands out from any artwork on layers underneath or above.

Zooming in or out while drawing can help you draw with more precision. You can also draw by laying each pixel down individually for ultimate control over pixel placement.

Draw the basic outline of your desired item. I'm choosing to draw a cap. Let's use a 1 pixel-wide aliased brush. Don't worry if it's a little messy; just make sure it's clear enough for you to work with.

Pay attention to the contours of the base you're using and the angle at which it is facing. The human base is facing slightly to the right, so I'll draw the bill of the cap facing that way as well. I've also made sure that all of my lines either overlap or surround the pixels of the base, so that when I colour in my cap, there aren't any stray bits of head sticking out underneath.

Okay, that looks like a good enough cap. Once you're satisfied with your sketch, it's time to move on to the next step.

Make another new layer above your sketch layer for your lineart. This will be the final outline for your item. We will base it on the sketch you've just made.

Make sure your lineart layer is selected so that things don't get messy.

At this point I usually use black to draw over my sketch. You can hide the body/base layer for clarity if you find that it helps.

Use this step to refine your outline. Make it neat and make sure that it's easy to identify what you've chosen to depict.

Here I've temporarily hidden the body layer and kept the lines and sketch visible to illustrate the difference between the two. You can see that there are little pixels from the red sketch poking out under the black outline of the cap.

When I hide the sketch layer, you can see that the lineart is more crisp and refined than the sketch we based it on. This is achieved by carefully choosing which pixels make it to the final lineart and avoiding the “staircase” pixel placement shown in the sketch.

Left: unrefined “staircase” style line. Right: cleaned-up, sharp pixel art line.

This is just a guideline that will help your item to look more cohesive with the site's standard bases. You can feel free to use the unrefined line style as a stylistic choice if you purposely want your pixel art to look loose and messy.

Keep the sketch and base hidden for the next step.

Now comes a point where you should make a choice. You can either make a new layer for your colours, or you can fill in the gaps in the lineart layer with colour instead. Making a new layer for colours allows you to edit the infill of your item without affecting the lines. This means you won't accidentally go over your lines when you're colouring in your item.

If you choose to colour on a separate layer, you can usually easily fill in your lineart with the paint bucket tool even if you're not painting on the same layer. Different programs have different settings that allow for this. In aseprite, the associated setting is called “refer visible layers”, and it's located in your toolbar when you have the paint bucket tool selected:

In other programs, this setting may have other names. For example, in FireAlpaca, it's called Reference Canvas:

Now we can fill in the item automatically with the paint bucket tool, even on a separate layer.

Alternatively, you can just use the paint bucket tool directly on the line layer if you don't care about keeping it separate. You can also colour it in manually on a separate layer using the brush tool if you don't want to use / can't find this setting.

To make the best use of the avatar workshop's tint feature, make sure all your artwork is grayscale with 0 saturation. Darker greys will absorb less tint but darken more, while lighter greys might appear to absorb more tint, but won't appear as dark. Keep this in mind when working on your artwork.

Next, let's add any details we might want our item to have. For my cap, I've added seams and ventilation eyelets, along with an embroidered heart on the front.

Make sure you zoom out often and check the contrast of your piece. Is it obvious what's going on even at 100% zoom?

I realized that my fine details weren't shining through, so I decided to darken the seams and the eyelets, while lightening the main colours of the cap.

That's better.

We're in the home stretch now! At this point, if you wish, you can add some shading to your piece and colour in the lineart.

You may choose to create a new layer for your shading or to do it on an existing layer. I normally shade on my colour layer.

Here I've added some subtle shadows to the hat, along with highlights. This avatar base's light source comes vaguely from the top left corner, so you can keep that in mind when you're shading if you'd like.

Next, I'll lighten part of the lineart to enhance the sense of shading. I switch to my lineart layer and choose a shade of grey that's slightly lighter than black. This is a subtle detail but I find that it does make a difference. Notice how the human avatar base uses the same technique.

I also lightened the part of the bill that touches the rest of the cap to reduce the contrast between them and make it more obvious that the two parts are part of the same object.

Here's how it looks after being shaded and having its lineart coloured in a bit. Subtly different, but I think it's an improvement.

Once you're happy with your item, it's time to save.

Before you save, either delete or hide the sketch and base layers so they don't appear in your final export.

Do not crop your canvas down or move your item around the canvas. It needs to remain in its spot on the 64×64 pixel canvas so that it will be positioned properly over the base when you upload it to the site.

Save your image as a PNG file or a transparency-respecting GIF format to maintain its transparent background. You may need to use the “save as” or “export” options in your program in order to choose the image format. This file will be the one you upload to the site.

Tip: Saving an editable version of the file with all of the layers intact will allow you to more easily iterate on your item in the future. File types like PSD and .aseprite allow you to keep your layer information.

• Your item's canvas dimensions must be 64×64 pixels.
• Your item image must have a transparent background. (Supported by PNG and GIF file types.)
• Your item must be entirely grayscale, with 0 saturation, if you want it to work best with the avatar workshop's tint feature.
• Crisp, aliased pixel art style artwork matches best with the style of provided bases, but you can go for whatever look you want; it's your avatar.
• Adding your base of choice to your canvas as a separate layer and drawing your item on a layer over top of it will help you to better fit your item to the base.