What is cute?

Pardon me for getting philosophical, but in order to design cute, you have to know what it is. Is there a formula for cuteness? It’s called ‘Pixel art’, not ‘Pixel science’, so there’s never going to be an exact formula for making cute stuff, but there are a few guidelines.

Hello Kitty is a great example of cuteness, the character is a baby animal, both cute things, and the proportions of the drawing make you want to hug her.

We want to make cute pixels, so we have to think about what makes a drawing cute. Here's my short list:

Small things are cute – Mini-muffins, dollhouses, and miniatures, pretty much any small version of something… all cute. Taking something and making a smaller version is a recipe for cute. Pixels are almost always small, ans almost always cute. So there you go.

Baby-like things are cute –The large head and eye proportions, shorter limbs, and rounded features that babies and domesticated animals have trigger a nurturing response in humans. Babies are the quintessential cuteness, so making things shorter, and giving them larger heads and eyes, shorter limbs, and softer features makes them cute.

Personification is cute - To personify something means 'to make a person'.  When you assign human features to a non-human object, whether literally, or in your mind, you personify them. A dog with a sweater, singing cartoon fish, or cars with faces are examples of this. Think about all of the pixels and drawings that are basically just a food item with eyes drawn onto it. Anthropomorphization of everyday objects is cute for a lot of the same reasons that baby-like things are cute. It makes us feel more empathy for the object.

Coming up with an idea for your original pixel

So, now you know three ways to make something cute.

• Make it small
• Use cute proportions
•  Make it seem alive, even if it is not

So here’s a sliding scale of cute from top to bottom:

1. Pixel versions of real items (Realistic)
2. People and animals with baby-like proportions
3. Anthropomorphasized things
4. Anthropomorphasized things with baby-like proportions

You don't always have to make anthropomorphasized things with baby-like proportions every time you pixel. Mix it up. With that said, let's start our original pixel. Original here doesn’t mean that you have to come up with an idea whole-cloth, that no one has ever approached before. People have been pixeling since paint programs were invented (There were even paint programs for DOS, and pixeling was the only way to draw), so pretty much every item has been pixeled. But people have been writing for 1000 times as long, and writers can still come up with some original ideas. Like, you may not be the first person to ever pixel a piece of toast, but you will be original if your toast doesn't look exactly like some other person's toast.

Here are some examples of things that you can pixel:
Veggies and fruit
Band-aids, first aid kits, and needles.
Fish
Cats
Dogs
Bunnies
Lizards
Money
Bonbons
Baboons
Balloons
Macaroons

Pick anything and let's get started and apply our theory of using baby-like proportions, and anthropomorphization to make a cute pixel of our own. I'm gointg to be making a cute pixel iPod for this example. I just thought of an iPod because I last did an iPhone, and I was thinking of making one for a while. Sometimes things just pop into your head, other times you can ask your friends or people on message boards for inspiration.

Proportions of cute Faces

To get a feel for what proportions are cute, let’s try an experiment with a square. I put a tic to make the center of the square, and now, I’m going to mark the eyes and mouth. The eyes are 1px by 1px, and the mouth is 3px by 1px. I’m going to experiment with eye every possible position for the eyes. I'll start in the top, left corner with the eyes as far apart and high as they can go without touching the edges, and move them closer together as I go right along the grid, and lower as I go down.

Now which ones are cuter? Notice that the eyes didn't move around that much, but there are big changes in the face. Do you feel like you could assign personalities to some of these faces, like dorky, sweet, dumb, normal?

You should not only think of the position of the eyes in relation to the edges of the face, but the relation of the eyes to each other and the mouth. This is especially important for pixels that don’t have a well-defined face area.
 
Here’s the same image with the outlines erased.

Notice which ones are cuter now? Your answers for cutest may not be the same as some one else's, but most people prefer the pixels with the eyes and mouth in one of the tighter groupings. Eyes lower and closer to the mouth make the face look more babyish and cuter. Putting the eyes too close to each other makes the face look kind of dumb, like the pixel is cross-eyed.

Here are the ones I like the most

All of this experimentation is just the position of the eyes. You can also change the mouth shape or make the eyes slightly bigger, or change the shape. Go ahead and try some different mouth sizes in your image editor and see what you come up with.

Small mouths are cute because they make the eyes look bigger by comparison. The mouth is very expressive, and you can do so much just by changing a few pixels on the mouth. You have to be careful to keep it simple, because if you try to make a pixel mouth on a small face look too realistic it looks overdone and it's hard to see the expression.
 

Putting it together
I've made a little outline for an iPod to put one of the faces constructed in the last tutorial onto, in order to make it cuter by making it more like a person. I'll talk about the shading in another tutorial, but notice that the outline is very simple. Just a rectangle with a circle for the dial and a square for the screen. Also notice that the iPod is a little bit squat. This brings us back to using baby-like proportions. 

We're a bit constrained in choosing cute proportions by having to represent our object. People should be able to know what we're trying to draw, even though iPods aren't really that shiny and pink, with huge dials and faces.

So let's try some of my favorite faces on the iPods. I'll add some different colors, just to mix it up more, too.

There we go.

 Adding Cuteness

Now the iPod has a face, making it seem more like a person, but there are still ways to make it cuter. It could be doing other things to make it seem more like a real person by giving it identifiable qualities. Personality, if you will.

I tried a few different headphone styles. I thought that I'd show you the process. You don't always have to use your first idea. Don't be scared to throw some out. I actually drew the bottom one first. I didn't really like the srting going in front of the iPod, and my BF didn't like that the earbuds were so small. But I ultimatly went with the first one. 

Now our pixel has a little more personality, making it slightly cuter. What you should remember is that a character doing something is cuter than a character just standing there. Another thing to remember is that animation can really make a pixel come alive. In this case, we'll use animation to literally make the pixel seem more alive. The iPod is already listening to some tunes, so I thought that I'd make it dance.

Here'a a 4 frame animation that I came up with. It's kind of rough. I decided to do the black one too. I think that adding animation is a great way to add personality and life to a pixel, even if it takes a lot of time. even a simple blink or smile goes a long way in making a pixel look lively and cute.

Defining the face on any object

Before I end the tutorial I'd like to make some more examples for you and point out some ideas about where to put the face on something that represents cute proportions. The iPod example had a screen to represent the edges of the face, so it was easy to tell where to put the eyes and mouth in relation to each other and the edges to represent a cute face. But what if we have a really long object, or really wide object? Or an object with separate distinct parts?
My tips for defining the face on any object is to keep the face basically the same, even though the shape may be longer or wider. Take this piece of bamboo. I think it's pretty cute already, but I'm going to put a face on it. The bamboo is pretty long, and it's in two separate parts. There are literally about 60 possible places for me just to put the eyes that make some sense. Let's try out some places. 

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