Scaling Pixel art

Be sure to start with the right size of your pixel art illustration; try to prevent scaling pixel art, or it will ruin your carefully made illustration.
If you really need to scale your pixel art illustration, you have a number of options. Your pixel art illustration can be scaled by hand, in Adobe Photoshop, or in MS Paint.

In this chapter, the pixel art illustration with the road worker is reduced by 50%.

Scaling your illustration by hand is the most time-consuming option.
First carefully remove every even (or uneven) horizontal line. The result has to be compressed vertically, to get rid of removed lines. The height of the illustration is now reduced to the required size.
This process is repeated for the vertical lines. Remove either the even or uneven vertical lines. To get rid of the lines you just removed, compress the result again.
The result of this process is an illustration that is reduced in size by 50%.
The result is far from ideal, so you need to do some fine-tuning by hand.

Depending on the scale, the interval of the lines that are removed can be increased or decreased.

If you have Adobe Photoshop installed, the above process can be done much more easily.
If you use a fixed pallet of colors for your pixel art illustration, be sure that the illustration in Photoshop is an indexed colored image and not a true color (RGB) image.
To check which type of image you use and/or change it, choose 'image > mode' in the menu.
The type of image can also be found in the window of the illustration to the right of the name.

You can find more information about indexed colored images and true color images in the chapter 'True Colors / Index Colors' chapter.

To scale your image, select 'Image > Image size'; the image size window appears. The width and height can be found in the image size window. In case you don't use pixels as your unit, select 'pixels', next to width or height.
The pixel art illustration has to be scaled down by half, so divide the width by 2. In this example 120 becomes 60, and the height will be adjusted automatically by Adobe Photoshop.

Like scaling a pixel art illustration by hand, the result is still far from ideal. Fine-tuning by hand needs to be done as well.

As long as the illustration is an indexed color image and scaling is done, the colors will not change.
However, if true color (RGB) illustrations are scaled, the amount of colors will change.

The original road worker illustration is made with seven colors. By scaling the illustration as a true color image, the amount of unique colors will increase. This is the result of the technique Adobe Photoshop (and other image manipulation programs) uses to calculate the new smaller image.
If you take a close look at the image on the left, you will see a smaller, less crisp version of the original.

If the scaled down illustration is saved as a gif - an indexed color image - the amount of colors exceeds the maximum available 256 colors, and dithering is used to fit all colors into these 256 most frequently used colors.
Instead of GIF, PNG is in this case a better option as the file format.

MS Paint offers an easy option to scale your pixel art illustration.
First select the illustration with the selection tool. Then choose 'Image' in the menu and select 'Stretch/Skew'. The Stretch and Skew window appears.
Choose the required scale horizontally and vertically, press OK, and the selection is scaled to the preferred percentages.

Scaling by hand is done without the Stretch and Skew window.
Select the part of the illustration you want to scale, move the mouse to the dot on the right lower side of the selection (the four-sides cursor changes into a two-sides cursor). Click and drag until your are satisfied with the result.