How do you make units' pixel art?

[Xara]

Art is always what hindered me from making some Wesnoth units. But I recently discovered that, with my current experience of Photoshop, maybe I can draw something not horrible. Well, not that horrible . So I have some questions here to ask.

Do you paint on a 72x72 canvas from the start or paint from a larger one and resize the image? How do you make sure the colors is recognized as "magenta for team color" by the game? And how do you make sure the shape is right on such a small image?

EDIT:

Thanks guys, your replies are very helpful!

[Mad_Hatter]

I just read are tutorias here:
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/Creating_Unit_Art
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/Art_Tutorials

But most important for me was tutorial by Zerovirus:
http://forums.wesnoth.org/download/file.php?id=56284
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/301 ... tstuff.PNG

About magenta:
http://wiki.wesnoth.org/Team_Color_Shifting

And more interesting stuff:
http://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=11299

When i create my stuff i work on 72x72 and i don't use resize because it make blur effect what is not good.
I am using the free Gimp which for this purpose is simply great.
About shape, well, I think that requires practice and comments from other.

[aquileia]

• Resizing would mean you don't have control over every single pixel, thus most people work on a 72x72 canvas.
• You can get the team color palette from the wiki: http://www.wesnoth.org/wiki-images/tuto ... swatch.png

Edit: Ninja'd

[SFault]

I usually work on larger canvas so I can edit certain things (e.g. weapons) separately. Then I combine the parts and copy-paste the sprite to proper canvas size. For magenta I use the color picker on the swatch linked above.

Some hints
-no transparent pixels (except on shadows, attack animations and some special light effects). So, make sure your brush is hard and you don't rotate things in non-90-degrees and don't use scaling feature.
-avoid pure black color
-use outlines also "inside" the sprite, for example, on belt or medallion
-don't use too many colors. 16 color palette should be enough
-no pillow shading. In wesnoth for unit facing right you can use light source coming from upper right.

pixel tutorials

[Iris]

On the subject of team color, if you want to be able to quickly preview the results when run through the game’s recoloring method with different team colors (red, blue, etc.), you might want to give Wesnoth RCX a try.

[Nikita_Sadkov]

I would recommend starting with some anatomy tutorial. Then some stylistics tutorial, describing proportions, so you can study and understand Wesnoth's animeish almost-superdeformed style.

Doing art without getting the direction correctly will produce art incompatible with the art already in the game.