I’ve been drawing one new 16x16 sprite every morning and studying old NES sprite sheets to get better at it. Ten sheets from Super Mario Bros. 1 & 3, Mega Man 2, Kirby’s Adventure, Bubble Bobble, and Zelda. Here is what keeps showing up.

Blocking beats outlining. Small Mario is 16x16 with zero outline: red cap and shirt, skin face, brown sideburns. Color segments alone define every part. Wheelie, the tire enemy from Kirby, reads as a circle with two shades and no outline on the curve. At this size, an outline costs pixels you need for the actual shape.

Every detail earns its place. Mario’s eye is two stacked dark pixels. The mustache exists to separate the nose from the face — a pragmatic fix, not decoration. Mega Man’s helmet fin is two or three pixels and reads instantly. Bubble Bobble enemies are single-color bodies with a face made of four or five pixels.

Variants change one thing. Raccoon, Tanooki, and Frog Mario keep the whole body and add a single feature: a tail, ears, a suit color. Sir Kibble is a Waddle Doo blob plus a helmet and a blade. When drawing variants, resist redesigning everything.

3-4 colors, flat, one shade for volume. The NES palette budget was real. Mega Man’s cyan armor shades to darker blue on one side only. Zelda’s overworld enemies run on two or three colors: Octorok’s snout is a 2-pixel protrusion, Tektite’s legs are 1-pixel lines.

Pick one outline convention per piece. Super Mario Bros. 1 uses heavy dark outlines; Zelda items use none. Mixing the two in one drawing looks indecisive. Decide before you start.

Silhouette first. Zelda’s sword is a 2-pixel-wide vertical blade, the key is a shaft with teeth, the raft is a slatted rectangle. If the silhouette needs explaining, the design is wrong. Kirby’s Waddle Dee is an orange oval, two 1-pixel eyes, feet — nothing else.

Water and texture are controlled speckle. Zelda’s water is darker blue pixels scattered on mid blue: dense enough to read as texture, sparse enough not to become noise. That is what restrained dithering looks like.

That is the whole list. Blocking, a 3-4 color budget, one convention, a silhouette that needs no explanation, and every pixel earning its place.