Cat pixel art

Cat pixel art

Cats are the most drawn subject in pixel art and the most useful one to get right, because the shape is so familiar that every error is visible immediately.

Ears carry the whole sprite

Two triangles, and their proportion against the head is the entire read.

Too small and rounded gives you a bear. Too long and you have a fox. Set slightly to the sides rather than on top and the animal turns feline in a way that no other single change achieves.

At 16x16 the ears might be three pixels each. Those six pixels are doing more work than the rest of the sprite combined, so place them first and build the head around them.

Cats as props, not just characters

Most cats in games are not player characters. They sit on a windowsill, wander a village, or curl on a shop counter.

That changes what the sprite needs. A prop cat wants a sleeping or sitting pose, a silhouette that reads from a distance, and no animation beyond a small loop. A character cat needs a walk cycle, a facing set, and a consistent palette across all of them.

Draw the pose the cat will actually be in for ninety percent of the game. A standing side-view cat used as a sleeping decoration wastes most of its pixels on legs nobody sees.

The cheapest idle animation in games

A cat sitting still, with only the tail moving.

Two or three frames of tail flick on an otherwise static body reads as fully alive. It costs perhaps twenty pixels of change per frame against the several hundred a body-and-head idle would need, and in a village scene with six cats the saving is the difference between shipping it and not.

Ears twitching is the same trick at half the cost again, and works on any animal with visible ears.

Palette

Two tones for the fur plus one for the shadow is enough. Tabby stripes want a third, placed as short broken runs rather than continuous lines, because a clean stripe at this size looks painted on.

Eyes get the one saturated colour on the sprite. Green or amber against grey fur is the classic for a reason.