Welcome to my little Pixel Art Tutorial – Bearded Dragon post

Hi everyone!

A friend of mine recently got a little lizard for her family to look after… it’s a super interesting little reptile, so inspired by her little guy, I thought I’d create a pixel art tutorial on my take on her cute little pet.

This is our finished pixel art:

And shamblingly animated:

Our little dude is eating crickets…
Here is our reference image, with a little information on our boy:

Alright, let’s get started… Create a box that is 5 pixels high by 15 pixels long

On the right hand side, create another box that is 2 pixels by 5 pixels… it should sit 1 pixel higher…

Bang on some legs for scurrying…

So, given that our friendly friend has a long tail that touches the ground, we’re going to gradually pixel down to the ground…

Alright, so when I went right down to the same level that the feet were, the tail looked too chunky… so I’ll leave it a level higher for the moment… we can always change it later.

Add in a 5 x 5 pixel box 2 pixels up on the right side… this will be the lizard’s head.

Remove 2 pixels from the right-most bottom corner…

Add 2 pixels for the nose on the very right side…

Add a pixel on both the top and the bottom of the neck to pad it out a bit…

With the bucket tool, choose the colour #e17808 as the base colour…

Use #f78d0d as the lighter underbelly colour…

Basically we’re painting the underside of our lizard to give it some texture. The lighter colour also helps define the length of the closest legs.
Let’s give the little guy an eye with the colour #512b03:

Our little lizard has stripes, so I’ve added them in with the colour #b46006…

So now you can add in a background colour and remove the grid-lines. I’ve chosen the colour #2660A4 to really offset the orange of our lizard:

So to animate, I had to increase the document size… from a single cell document (50 pixels by 50 pixels) to effectively something 10 times the size:

I don’t think I’ll use all these frames… but I do like having plenty of room, and with Pyxel Edit, you can make different animations in the same document. When you export, you export just the animation you care about… even if there are others on the same document.

I find this super handy and it lets me keep reference images on a page while I’m animating.

70 trillion hours later…

I honestly found the legs super hard… I think in hindsight, I should have put each leg on a separate layer, and done them all individually… but still, it was fun and this is the final result:

If you’re interested in a couple of my other Pixel Art tutorials, just click on through:

PXLPET Unicorn – a pixel art tutorial
Splinterslands Goblin Sorcerer Pixel Art Tutorial

Thanks for reading my little Pixel Art Tutorial – Bearded Dragon post.