Pixel art illustration
Every pixel
put there
on purpose.
Commissioned 8-bit and 16-bit illustration for books, games and brands — characters, environments, icon sets and the whole retro interface around them. Drawn on a real grid, at a fixed palette, the way the art of that era was actually made.
Not a filter. A grid.
Built to be reused: one character, one source, identical on page 7 and page 480 — and quoted per project, never off a rate card.
A 320×176 pixel scene, shown enlarged. The sky is dithered rather than blended — the era's answer to a gradient, and still the reason this style reads as genuine rather than nostalgic.
N° 01What the studio makes in pixels
Sprites, scenes, and the system around them.
Most pixel art commissions fail on the second half of the list. Anyone can draw one good sprite; what a long project needs is a cast that stays consistent, an icon set that obeys one logic, and an interface that still makes sense four hundred pages later.
Character Sprites
The part that has to survive the whole series.
Leads, supporting cast and background figures, drawn at a size that keeps expressions readable. Delivered with the costume held separately from the body, so the same character can walk through five centuries without being redrawn once.
- Cast line-ups & height charts
- Expression and pose sets
- Costume and era variants
Environments & Scenes
Somewhere for the cast to stand.
Landscapes, interiors and establishing scenes built from a shared palette so a whole chapter reads as one place. Dithered skies, layered depth and a consistent light direction — the craft an era of hardware limits forced people to invent.
- Full-bleed scene illustration
- Repeatable location sets
- Day, night and season variants
Icons, Items & Interfaces
The system around the picture.
Inventory icons, item and skill unlocks, window frames, dialogue panels, status displays and cursors — designed as one kit with a documented colour code, so page 400 still obeys the rules set on page 1.
- Icon and item sets
- Window and panel systems
- Documented colour codes
Bitmap Display Type
Headings that belong to the world.
A display face drawn pixel by pixel for your project, so headings and labels sit on the same grid as the art instead of borrowing a font that nearly matches. Paired with a proper reading face for body copy, which is never pixelated.
- Custom bitmap display face
- Reading-face pairing
- Heading and label kits
Retro-Styled Book Interiors
Art and typesetting from one studio.
Whole pages, not loose assets: the illustration, the interface furniture and the typesetting laid out together on a grid that holds for hundreds of pages, exported print-ready to your printer's trim, bleed and colour spec.
- Page grid & layout system
- Print-ready interior files
- Reflows to A4, B5 or US trim
Brand & Product Characters
A mascot with a long life.
Characters for apps, games, packaging and educational products, delivered as sprite sheets and scalable exports. Because the source is data, the same character re-exports for a favicon, a print panel and a title screen without any of them being a redraw.
- Sprite sheets for engines
- Any-size export from one source
- Animation-ready pose sets
N° 02Why it holds up close
Enlarge it and the squares stay square.
The same sprite at 16×. Nothing blurs, because nothing was ever scaled by anything but a whole number.
A pixel sprite is not stored the way a drawing is stored. It is a palette and a map — a list of which colour sits at every position on a grid. That sounds like a technicality until a project runs long, and then it turns into the whole reason this medium suits a series.
Because the sprite is data, a character does not have to be redrawn to appear again. Page 7 and page 480 are the same source rendered twice, so there is no drift to catch in proofing — the problem simply does not arise. It is the opposite of the usual long-book failure, where a face quietly changes over a hundred pages and nobody notices until the printer has it.
The same property makes changes cheap in the places clients normally dread. Costume is held separately from the body, so moving a cast from Bronze Age dress to Victorian dress is an edit rather than a commission. A night palette, a seasonal variant or a brand recolour is a swap of the colour list. And because scaling is done by whole numbers, one source exports cleanly to a favicon, a title screen and a 300 dpi print panel without any of them being a separate piece of artwork.
None of that is a shortcut on craft. The palette ramps, the dithering, the silhouette tests and the light direction are all decided deliberately, pixel by pixel, exactly as the era required. What the data gives you is not speed at the drawing stage — it is consistency at the four-hundredth page.
One body. Four characters.
The same underlying sprite, re-costumed and recoloured. At the size these actually print, the silhouette does the identifying — which is why hats, hoods and proportions get designed before faces do.
Icons that obey one logic.
An item set is a language, not a pile of drawings. Every icon here shares a grid size, a light direction and a palette, so a reader learns the rules once and then reads the rest without being taught. The same discipline carries the colour code: a hue that means “optional bonus” on page 12 still means it on page 480.
N° 03How a pixel project runs
Six stages, and the palette is decided first.
Test the silhouette before you spend on detail.
Palette & scale
Before anything is drawn we fix the two decisions everything else inherits: how many pixels tall a character is, and which colours exist. A limited palette with proper shadow-to-highlight ramps is what makes the finished set look like one world.
Silhouettes
Characters are tested as black shapes first. If the cast can't be told apart with the colour switched off, no amount of detail will save them at the size they actually print. Hats, hair and proportions do that work.
Cast sheet
Finished sprites for every recurring character, side by side on one sheet with a shared ground line. This is the document the rest of the project is checked against, and it is signed off before any page art begins.
Interface kit
Windows, panels, icons, cursors and the display face, built as a system with a colour code that assigns each hue a fixed job. Get this right once and hundreds of pages stay consistent almost for free.
Scenes & pages
Environments painted from the agreed palette, and — if we're typesetting too — pages assembled on the grid with the art placed and the copy flowed. Layouts are checked so nothing runs off the trim.
Export
Native-resolution PNGs, integer-scaled exports at print resolution, sprite sheets where an engine needs them, and the source data so the work can be re-rendered at any size later. Nothing is ever resampled.
N° 04Where this style earns its keep
"A textbook disguised as a game guide — and the disguise has to hold for five hundred pages."
Educational publishers come to this style for a specific reason: children who will not open a textbook will happily open a strategy guide. Pixel art carries that disguise better than any other medium, because it doesn't merely reference games — it is drawn under the same rules games were drawn under.
It suits long-form work generally. Workbook and activity series where the same cast reappears for hundreds of pages. Chapter books that want an illustrated world without a full-colour picture-book budget. Games and apps that need sprite sheets rather than flat artwork. Brand characters that must survive years of reuse at every size from a favicon to a shopfront.
And it is a genuinely economical medium at scale. The cost of the fiftieth spread is not the cost of the first, because the cast, the icon set and the interface already exist and the work becomes composition rather than redrawing — which is exactly the shape a multi-volume series needs its budget to take.
N° 05Questions we get asked
Before you commission a sprite.
What makes this different from an illustration that just looks pixelated?
A filter applied to a drawing produces soft, half-aligned pixels that never sit on a single grid — it reads as an effect, and anyone who grew up on 16-bit games spots it instantly. Everything here is placed on the grid deliberately: a fixed palette, a defined sprite size, and every pixel put where it is on purpose. Enlarge a piece and the squares stay square, because they were always squares.
Can the same character appear hundreds of times without drifting?
Yes, and this is the practical reason publishers commission pixel art for long series. A sprite is stored as data — a palette plus a map of which pixel is which colour — so the character on page 7 and the character on page 480 are not two drawings that resemble each other, they are the same source rendered twice. There is no drift to police because there is nothing to redraw.
Can you re-costume a character for a different setting?
That is one of the cheapest changes in the medium. Body and costume are kept as separate layers of the same sprite, so putting a cast into Roman dress for one chapter and medieval dress for the next is an edit to the costume data, not a new commission. Recolours — a night palette, a flashback palette, a seasonal variant — are cheaper still.
What sizes and formats do you deliver?
Sprites are authored at native resolution and exported at whatever integer scale you need, with nearest-neighbour scaling so nothing is ever softened. Standard delivery is transparent PNGs at native size plus print-ready exports at 300 dpi, and sprite sheets if the art is heading into a game engine. Print work is delivered as placed artwork inside the interior files, not as loose assets you have to position yourself.
Do you design the interface as well as the characters?
Usually, and the two are hard to separate. A retro-styled book or product needs a consistent system — window frames, dialogue panels, item slots, health and status indicators, cursors, an icon set, and a bitmap display face for headings and labels. We build that as a documented kit with a colour code, so the look holds across hundreds of pages rather than being reinvented per spread.
How is a pixel art project priced?
Quoted per project. What actually moves the number is the number of distinct characters, how many poses and expressions each needs, how many environments, the size of the icon and interface set, and whether we are also typesetting pages around the art. Send the brief or the manuscript and we come back with a written scope and a fixed quote.
Building an illustrated series rather than a single book?
See educational product designStart a pixel art project
Send the brief. We'll send back a scope.
Tell us how many characters, how many pages, and where the art is going — print, screen or an engine. We reply within two working days with a written scope and a fixed quote.