farmville hay bale art tutorial

Some of you may be familiar with my farm, the Mona Lisa. You wonder how I could have made something like it. Well you can do it too! All you need to do is design what it'll look like in your farm beforehand by making pixel art. My Mona Lisa pixel art I used can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=30668339&id=1600860620

Make your own pixel art which you can use to make a cool Farmville farm!

Designing pixel art isn't terribly difficult, but there's a few things you need to do before you start:
1.) Figure out what program you are going to use. I used photoshop, it's layers and other features make it nice, but you could also use a free program like GIMP, or a free pixel art oriented program like GraphicsScale (found here: http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/ )v

2.) Figure out how much of your farm you'll be using to make the pixel art. The smallest farm is 12x12 tiles, plus half a tile of padding. Assuming you filled up the entire farm with hay bales to make your art, you would be able to portray pixel art (12.5*4)x(12.5*4) pixels (with one hay bale acting as each pixel), which is 50x50 pixels. You then know that the pixel art you are designing must be 50x50 pixels in size.

3.) Assuming your pixel art is a square, you're going to want use your image editing program, and it's crop tool to cut out a square in the image. I chose to focus on the Mona Lisa's face so I could bring out as much detail as possible.

4.) Once your image is a square, you will then go into the Edit menu and modify the Image Size. Set the units in the box that pops up to pixels, and then shrink it to the value you figured out in Step 2, 50 horizontal pixels by 50 vertical pixels, for example.

5.) Now the image is down to exact size of the pixel art. You're going to be limited to the colors of the hay bales (and the brown box, which is the same size as hay bales).

An image with the color palette you have available to you can be found here: http://i37.photobucket.com/albums/e92/CyberGlitch/Palette2.png
Put the image in as a layer in photoshop, and use the eyedropper tool to choose one of its colors to them pencil into the pixel art.

So from here on out you'll modify the photo so it only uses these colors available. This can be done with tracing, and by using a tool in Photoshop or GIMP to select all pixels of a certain color range, which you can then change to whatever hay bale color you want. The "polarize" filter in Photoshop can also help you reduce the image to a few colors.

With patience, and a little ingenuity, you should be able to come up with a decent pixel art.                                                                                 KEVIN JOHNSON