ArtRage for Pixel art?

[jman0war]

Tried to setup ArtRage for pixel painting, but the Snap to Grid settings don't seem to work.
I'm painting with Technical Pen - Square Head.
But i find that when I brush around, or just click to paint one square, it's not really snapping at all.
There's another setting under Grid for "Snap Distance" but dragging the slider up isn't doing what i expect.

The goal is to use the Technical Pen - Square Head, and when painting the strokes conform and constrain to the Grid.

Any advice?

[markw]

I think you are on the right track there…
The attached image shows the settings I just tried.
The things you can’t see in the snapshot are;
Just for reference my Canvas was 500px x 500px
Pen size is 3%.
And AR’s preferences Advanced tab, Force Whole Pixel Alignment was selected.
Is this close to what you were aiming for?
101293

[Somerset]

If your goal is to draw absolutely straight and clean strokes, then hold the Ctrl-key and start drawing the stroke. You can even do this related to a guideline, if you want. If you want to have it absolutely horizontal, vertical or diagonal (in steps of 15°), you can additionally hold the Shift-key.

[jman0war]

Close MarkW but your strokes are still outside the Grid lines.
I suppose i was hoping to find a happy place between brush size, grid size and grid snap settings whereby brush strokes were all contained fully within the grid cells.
Maybe what I am looking for is a vector based graphics program.

[markw]

With regard to the Grid lines and snapping, AR’s snap function uses the point where two grid lines cross as the point to snap too, so it is shaping correctly.
As it’s currently designed it can’t “fill” individual grid squares.
In my example with the Pen head at 3% it is pretty much the same size as one of the small grid squares, so once the grid is turned off, I would think visually there is no way to tell if the ink was put down in a square or at the crossing points.

[Somerset]

You could also use the Ruler (Stecils). Let it snap to the grid or a guideline and draw along it's edge. Or create selections in the size you like and fill it with colour. Selections also snap to grids and guides, if you want them to.

[nekomata]

I probably wouldn't use artrage for pixel art, it's a specialty painting application dedicated for the exact opposite of what pixel art implies.

all of its tools are designed to simulate real media with an array of imperfections and randomness inherent to that.

imo it's a waste of artrage tools' potential, and inneficient use of time given there're freeware alternatives (i.e. krita) out there that will do the job much faster.