How to draw a pixel art cake

Pixel Art is a style of digital art that uses close-ups of pixels. It's a common trait of older or stylized retro video games. Whether you plan to use your artwork in a game or not, drawing a pixel art cake is a lot of fun. It will look so delicious you'll wish you could eat the pixels right off your screen!

Draw a whole cake

1. Draw two parallel lines. These are the sides of the cake, so don't make them too close together or too far apart. They must be the same height as they will be the height of the cake.

2. Attach an ellipse to the top of the lines. It shouldn't be too thick or the cake won't look quite right, but if you make it super thin it won't look like a cake anymore.

3. Copy the curve from the ellipse above at the end of the lines. You can copy and paste if the editor you are using allows it. Otherwise just do it by hand, preferably with a tool that makes what you draw symmetrical so it appears on both sides.

4. Add some toppings. Draw some berries, circles, decorations or whatever you think would look good on the cylinder shape. These should go around the cake to make sure it actually looks like a cake and not just a cylinder with circles.

5. Sketch a squiggly line below the top ellipse. That's the icing on the cake. Some cakes will drip all the way to the bottom of the cake, so there's no limit to how big the curves should be for this cake.

6. Repeat the elliptical curve further up the cake. Do this twice so the cake can be filled. If you can try moving around these curved lines, you can choose the position that works best for your cake.

7. Choose a color palette. Using a paint bucket tool, fill in the cake with colors that you think would look the most delicious. You can try a few palettes if you like and then choose the one you'd rather keep.

• If using more than one color, try to match the colors in a way that makes them look appealing to eat. A brown, blue and yellow cake, for example, might not look very pretty to eat, although it might if you chose the right shades.

8. Highlight and shade the design. Now that the cake is colored you can add details and shading that will make it look a little more real or at least have more depth.

• Highlights and shadows should correlate with each other by not being in the same places. For example, you wouldn't see a light reflection on the shadow of a cherry, you would see it on the other side, so make sure you draw it that way.

Draw a piece of cake

1. Begin by drawing a parallelogram with two straight sides. You can do this by drawing two vertical lines of equal length but different heights and connecting them with two diagonal lines.

2. Add connected diagonal lines from two corners of the shape. Try to make it look like a three dimensional triangular prism. You don't have to make a point if it looks better without a sharp edge, but the point should look something like a triangle.

3. Draw a squiggly line under the triangle. Connect this to the bottom line with a straight vertical line. This will be the icing on the cake, so you might not want to overdo the curves.

4. Add two more diagonal lines between the two lines. These should be at the same angle as the bottom line and will be the filling of the cake.

• If you use a line drawing tool you can draw them full length like the one below but taller and then erase all the excess pixels.

5. Place a topping or two on top of the triangle. This can be berries, whipped cream, other fruit, or anything else of your choice.

6. Design the color palette for your drawing. Using a bucket tool, fill in the drawing with colors you like. Experiment with this one! Try out a few different color palettes and decide on the one you like the most.

7. Shade and highlight your design. Use slightly darker tones to draw shadows and make them rasterized for a less bubbly look. To make the drawing stand out, use lighter variants of the original colors. You can also use checks here so that the highlight not only looks like a patch of color, but also blends in a bit.