Part of the secret to creating detailed pixel art quickly is using all kinds of tricks and techniques, weaponizing the full potential of your creative tools. And oh boy, does Photoshop have a massive hidden potential.

I've adopted and developed dozens of techniques for pixel art over the years. Use layer styles to create live pixel-perfect outlines. Load my MacBook's touch bar with shortcuts and gestures for animation and brush controls. Write a custom script that reads directives from layer names and exports sprites and animation sheets with a single button-press.

But one of my all-time favorites is Dan Fessler's HD Index Painting technique published back in 2014. Back when I first stumbled upon it, I played around with it for a while in an empty document, drew some scribbles, said “huh, cool” and moved on — and I know other artists who did the same. Back then I'd been mostly doing tiny pixel art assets at the scale of 16×16 pixels, and the potential of the technique went completely over my head. But then the style of my projects shifted, and everything changed.

This trick can't create art for you, it's not magic. But I swear, tricks don't get much closer to magic than this. With the right set-up it might take you an hour to create something that would normally take days.

There's so much to talk about here, so many sub-tricks and use cases, I could write a book just on using HD Index Painting. The idea is delightfully simple and insanely powerful. If you're using Photoshop for pixel art, do yourself a favor and check out this king of time-savers (here's the link again!).

And in the mean time, check out our LD50 entry that makes heavy use of the technique.