How to draw Space Invaders-style characters

Pixel Dude is an image editing app for the iPad. Like the name suggests, it's pixel based, and is good for drawing chunky graphics. The drawing area is a 32 by 32 grid of squares, which I find to be more than enough for my purposes.

I've always liked the look of the Space Invaders aliens, and by using Pixel Dude's symmetrical drawing tool, it's very easy to create characters that have that Space Invaders look. The application has a lot of other features, like layer support and unlimited undo and redo.

Once you are done drawing something you can email it or save it to Dropbox.

Eventually, I would like to use these patterns to silkscreen onto t-shirts. Keep an eye out for my how-to project on this!

Read more in Family at Boing Boing

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

TAGS:  family howto

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• [Craig Maher]

  I used to draw 48×48 pixel graphics for “The Kingdom of Drakkar” one of the first on-line multi-player  games. I wish I could get this program on my laptop. But 32×32 pixels is not enough, I am an arteest!