How to do...

I don't want to post a "tutorial" so much as give some ideas on how to do pixel art. There's always searching the web for weird & wonderful pictures of 8-bit game characters, and I'll admit, that's fun.

I tend to hand-build my pixel art (using sand to climb up, etc.) and it's hard to build when you can't zoom out and see what you're looking at. So what I do is I print out charts. There are a couple ways to get charts, and the ones I like to use are free.

Look up "free cross stitch patterns" online. There's only about a billion different websites you can go to to get just about anything you want to make. Pick simpler patterns as we are, of course, limited to the colours we can choose. The other option is to make your own cross-stitch pattern with a great, free program called KG-Chart. You can download it here. Just open any pic file into it and decide the "resolution" and you want and it will create a chart for you. It's also quite useful if you actually, you know, decide you want to cross-stitch. But who has the time, when you're playing MC all day?