I'm wanting to work on assets/tilesets for my game. I'm not really good with drawing pixel art on my PC or tablet, but I'm pretty good with pen and paper. I was thinking of doing some hand-drawn art and editing it to create tilesets. Does anyone have any experience doing this or give me some advice that might help? If I go this route, should I use black and white images and color them on my PC or color them before scanning? To make them cohesive, I would mirror the image so both sides would come out even and match.

Any advice or opinions are greatly appreciated!

The big challenge in creating tilesets with pen and paper is getting them to tile correctly. I would not recommend using mirroring, as this creates very obvious and ugly lines of symmetry. Instead, I would recommend using one of the following techniques:

• You can use the same techniques that texture artists use to create seamless textures from photographs. This process is well understood (google “how to make seamless texture”), but requires a basic competency with digital art tools.
• You can use a scanner and printer to help you. Draw a tile without boundary, scan it, clone it on the canvas, print it, and draw the boundary between the two instances of the tile. This also requires basic competency with digital art tools, but may feel more natural to you if you prefer to work with pen and paper.

It's probably easier to get the colors to match correctly if you scan as pure black and white (not greyscale), and color digitally. Especially if you're going to scan and print the same image multiple times.

a light breeze said:

The big challenge in creating tilesets with pen and paper is getting them to tile correctly.

It's even harder to do a good job adjusting for tiling high resolution scanned artwork than textures or pixel art.

Can you transition to "painting" with a graphics tablet and adopting the traditional, dependable technique of shifting and copying the canvas in order to join opposite sides of the image and paint where the seams would end up? Using multiple levels (middle, borders, mere references…) to assemble your image would also be a great help.

I am no good with pixel art either, but its time and fun to learn! Tiles are pretty easy because you just grab a texture and zoom in and fiddle around until it looks good as a tile.

There are tutorials that can help you, so have fun and gain some new skills.

I do have digital editing skills. What if I scanned a drawn tile, added a layer in Photoshop, and then traced over it? Might be double working but I could use the drawing as a guide. Or would it just be simpler to Google a base and use that instead?

It's OK to use images found on Google for inspiration, but actually using them directly or tracing over them would be plagiarism (unless properly credited) and copyright violation (unless the image is published under a very liberal license, like CC0). So don't do that.

Tracing over your own artwork makes a lot of sense. It's very common for digital artists start with a rough sketch, then trace over that on a separate layer to create the final artwork.

I meant a base like the one found at OpenGameArt here and not using someone else's work. I don't want to do that for several reasons, plagiarism being a big one. I think my biggest problem is needing an outline to go off of. I started looking at pixel programs, but I still feel Photoshop would be my best bet because of the ability to add layers and draw over them.