Chapter 3.4 : Features in Piskel

My Piskel Profile

To summarize, Piskel contains features that looks like Microsoft Paint but works like Photoshop (Based on my opinion, don't judge lol). Anyways, In this post ill break it down the features in Piskel. Please check the highlighted red box as indicators. Also I will only explain the ones that uncommon found in Photoshop or Microsoft Paint.

Highlighted box (From Top to Bottom):

1. Pen Tool
2. Paint Bucket Tool
3. Eraser Tool
4. Rectangle Tool
5. Move
6. Rectangle Selection
7. Lighten
8. Colour Picker

1. Vertical Mirror Pen
2. Paint All
3. Stroke
4. Circle
5. Shape Selection
6. Lasso
7. Dithering

Pen size (small to big)

The highlighted section on the top right there has 3 functions :

1) The onion symbol lets you see in between two layers.
2) The bar and numbers there indicate the speed of the animation and for people to adjust it.
3) The sprites that are created in different layers will all be featured here.

The highlighted section on the bottom right there has 3 functions :

1) Layers - You can add or delete layers as well as adjust the position of which layer would come out first. The layers that are chosen will be shown on the middle big screen. However you need to click the onion symbol to see both layers overlapping one another. This is useful to follow references.

2) Transform - Basically you can invert, rotate, clone or align the sprite.

3) Palettes - This is where you choose the colors for the sprites. Normally when you drag in your reference into Piskel, it will automatically detect the colors of the sprites and will show it in the paletter. However you can also improvise by adding more colors or create your own palette.

By pressing on the hollow plus box there, you can add more colors into the palette. I did this when I designed my character sprite so that I can easily change in between colors rather than going into the gradient every time.

The highlighted box on the right side indicates the settings of the document.

The top Gear logo is the settings where you can adjust the opacity of the sprite, finalize the frame speed or change the background of the canvas. Grid allows you to see the boxes to measure or adjust where to paint. I didn't know what tile mode is to be honest.

Second logo would be the settings where you can resize the document. here you can adjust the width or height as well as what position would the canvas be like. 

Third logo lets you save the progress you have done. You can either save it in your gallery (basically your online profile), or you can save it through browser or as a file. I usually save it in my gallery just to increase the amount of sprite I have designed.

 Fourth logo would let you export the work you have done into either a PNG, JPEG or GIF format. you can also increase the resolution of the sprites. I did that because when I opened them in Photoshop, the resolution of the sprite is clear and not blurry, no matter how small the picture was.

 The final would be just for you to import the assets into the software to re-edit it.



 And that's all for the feature of Piskel that I am using. The next post will just give you a demonstration of how I did one of my sprites.