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What does "pixel art" mean to you?
9 months ago
General
Gonna get a little into the weeds for this, since it's a question that I'm not sure has a right answer (though there are a few odd takes out there). With such a rapidly changing internet art landscape, this showerthought has been creeping back into my brain for a little reconsideration. What qualifies a piece as "pixel art" to you?
I suppose this will mostly depend on whether or not you're a pixel purist! Pixel art has a lot of manifestations out in the world, but at its most fundamental, it's dots on a canvas. You arrange those dots in a gridded pattern, and through the alchemy of sight and synapse, your brain recognizes that thing as a representation of its much more detailed counterpart. There's a general visual language used translate complex shapes with innumerable colors into compact approximations with creative dithering. You can't make a square round, but you can arrange a bunch of squares into a circle.
I'll be up front and say that I'm not entirely sure my own art counts, but I'll let you be the judge. I work almost exclusively at 72 dpi, I keep my lines aliased, and I generally draw with a color palette of around 10 values—though the colors in that palette vary wildly from picture to picture. This makes for some pretty tiny files, often under 100 kb. My more recent works have started introducing some gradients, halftones, and other blending effects, but I'm primarily using the pen, line, and bucket for everything. I use a lot of layers—between 20 and 50 based on picture complexity, if it's anything more than a black-and-white doodle. Most of the time spent on inking is shaving off jaggies to get the smoothest curves, sharpest points, and straightest lines. Working like this does place a pretty heavy focus on pixel placement for optimal results, but I'm still a little hesitant to call myself a pixel artist; I usually self-identify as a low-rez artist, to avoid confusion with the folks that I consider a little more firmly in the pixel art camp. But maybe I'm overthinking it and I should try to embrace it?
What say you, furfolk? Is it a certain aesthetic? Line width? Canvas size? Pixel size? Brush size? Palette size? File size? Chunky gradients? Similarity to a game sprite? All of the above? Something else entirely?
I'm all doglegged ears!
I suppose this will mostly depend on whether or not you're a pixel purist! Pixel art has a lot of manifestations out in the world, but at its most fundamental, it's dots on a canvas. You arrange those dots in a gridded pattern, and through the alchemy of sight and synapse, your brain recognizes that thing as a representation of its much more detailed counterpart. There's a general visual language used translate complex shapes with innumerable colors into compact approximations with creative dithering. You can't make a square round, but you can arrange a bunch of squares into a circle.
I'll be up front and say that I'm not entirely sure my own art counts, but I'll let you be the judge. I work almost exclusively at 72 dpi, I keep my lines aliased, and I generally draw with a color palette of around 10 values—though the colors in that palette vary wildly from picture to picture. This makes for some pretty tiny files, often under 100 kb. My more recent works have started introducing some gradients, halftones, and other blending effects, but I'm primarily using the pen, line, and bucket for everything. I use a lot of layers—between 20 and 50 based on picture complexity, if it's anything more than a black-and-white doodle. Most of the time spent on inking is shaving off jaggies to get the smoothest curves, sharpest points, and straightest lines. Working like this does place a pretty heavy focus on pixel placement for optimal results, but I'm still a little hesitant to call myself a pixel artist; I usually self-identify as a low-rez artist, to avoid confusion with the folks that I consider a little more firmly in the pixel art camp. But maybe I'm overthinking it and I should try to embrace it?
What say you, furfolk? Is it a certain aesthetic? Line width? Canvas size? Pixel size? Brush size? Palette size? File size? Chunky gradients? Similarity to a game sprite? All of the above? Something else entirely?
I'm all doglegged ears!
How large do the pixels have to be for it to fully register? As what point is the palette too large to qualify?
What would you call something like Street Fighter III, or Guilty Gear X? The palette limitations are mostly gone, making the color range pretty big, but there's still a heavy focus on pixels. The sprites themselves are also big, and there's a lot of detail put into character portraits and backgrounds that make them almost look like paintings, but...
"shaving off jaggies" just reminded me of an animator once telling me about working on a project run by the company's owner's son who adamantly thought you could just run the art on one layer through anti-aliasing over and over and it would somehow keep getting better, like an AI (this was the 90's, mind you), and couldn't be convinced otherwise. Needless to say, he ruined the artwork and wasted everyone's time and the show was shitcanned and never released. I imagined all the lines would just spread like leaving a texta on the paper too long, and every cel ended up looking like blotting paper.
It's kinda funny that digital artists have been looking for that magic "make better" button for over 30 years, now! I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same. Some of this obsession might be chasing the lush softness that scanlines introduce, especially since monitors and TVs have switched to HD resolutions with high pixel density.
But y'know, I've always preferred the pixels razor sharp at the lower resolutions, even when a little CRT-type blurriness might elevate the effect. I guess I like to see how the sausage is made!
i'm going to say it's MOSTLY defined by the intentionality of the pixels themselves
i feel like in """pixel art""" each pixel or at least grouping of pixels is more consciously chosen? if i'm reducing it down to a very narrow band of a definition i think it's an arbitrary definition of the intentionality of the pixels. the difference between drawing something with a brush that doesn't do aliasing, and being real conscious with the choice of pixels--but! that only really becomes obvious in smaller images like sprites, or in those big complex pixel background drawing styles, where it uses limited colors and resolution to still make something very impressive. in those cases you can SEE the intentionality of it and it's an easily expressed concept!
but in something at a higher resolution what if the pixels ARE all very intentional? what if the artist fidgeted over these five pixels here so the edge of this line has the shape they wanted, but you're just assuming that's a result of a brush's pen pressure width adjustment?
i guess it's something one could define as: if the pixels weren't Just So, it wouldn't look right. but... again that's an easy classification to mess up with reductivism because in basically any art if you change around some of the pixels willy-nilly you can make it not look right.
it's the problem with taxonomic definitions of things like this in the end. a whale is a mammal! a mouse is a mammal! they're both the same kind of guy but you can only invite one to your little forest stump tea-party and you can only invite one to go explore a reef with you (excepting the theoretical existence of a mouse submarine)
Rendering a vector drawing with aliasing produces an effect that's pretty similar to the untrained eye, but the unstructured noisiness of the pixels, and the random artifacts on curves and points usually give it away. You could clean one of these renderings up pretty easily once it was rasterized; when this process begins, does it become pixel art? The individual pixels are pretty important at this point for the effect to be convincing, but arguably, they weren't when the thing was being drawn.
If an artist uses pressure sensitivity to draw varied line weights, the computer is doing the individual pixel placement. But if that artist uses a fixed-size brush, draws the lines, then whittles them away with the eraser to achieve the same tapering effects, they've chosen the pixel placement. Is one "more" pixel art than the other? Once the intentionality gets blurred, does it automatically become The Other Thing, whether it was originally orthodox or not?
You could fill a book with this stuff!