Welcome to PixelCraft

Hello. This is the first post on a small studio site I keep for tutorials and process notes about pixel art and the code that makes it. I am Elena Kuznetsov; I draw at 32×32, write shaders that pretend to be CRTs, and ship occasional small games on Itch.

This page exists so I can stop explaining the same things twice.

What is here

The site has three kinds of post:

• Tutorials. Step-by-step pieces about specific things — building a bayer-dither shader, drawing 32×32 character sprites, writing a minimal CRT shader. These are the kind of post I wish more people wrote: short, specific, working code, and an honest list of what they don't cover.
• Process pieces. Less code, more thinking. The recent piece on switching from Photoshop to Aseprite is a good example. These are slower to read and (I hope) more interesting on a second pass.
• Gamedev logs. Notes from work on Quiet Frame, including the recent Steam port post-mortem.

None of these are reviews, opinion pieces, or industry-trend posts. There are good people doing that work elsewhere and I am not one of them.

Tools and influences

The bulk of the work here is made with Aseprite. Shader code is GLSL, usually running in Godot 4 or Shadertoy. I source palettes from Lospec more often than I make my own. The CRT-style shaders draw heavily on the libretro shader pack, and the dither maths comes from Bjorn Ottosson's colour notes.

For learning pixel art I recommend, in order: Pedro Medeiros' Pixel Art Class, Andrew Bado's tutorials on YouTube, and the r/PixelArt critique threads on Reddit, which are one of the kindest art-feedback communities I know.

How to follow along

There is no comments section. If you want to talk about a piece, I am @[email protected] on Mastodon, and that thread is the conversation. There is a small monthly newsletter on the home page if you want one summary email a month with what I shipped and one free palette.

If you find a bug, typo, or broken link, open an issue on the site repo and I will get to it within a week.

Thanks for reading. There's an index of work and a full archive if you want to keep clicking; otherwise, see you around.