SkeleHarp :: Pixel Art Detail

my heart stop for a moment 

Amazing, Nothing like it.

Noh shit man, this is amazing.

The harp reads well; I find that most of the rest of the picture doesn't. I can make out a pocket and uh.. .75 + .33 + .25 of a skull, and can make out the neck clearly; Overall the vagueness does not seem strategic, employed for any particular effect, though.

AndyOaks: Please avoid confusing the issue: Antialiasing is the smoothing process applied to counteract the stair-step appearance of aliased shapes. Over-aliasing would be modifying the picture to look even more chunky :)

"Addtionally, any brush tools must only ever be round or square in shape."

'Brushes should only be convex' might be a simpler criteria. I assume your rule is designed to avoid the occurrence of 'incidental' noise with oddly-shaped brushes.

Wonderful piece of pixelart! Great one!

wow that would of taken me years...   literaly

fav and 5/5 simply wonderful

Blurring is one of those techniques that, I find, is all too easy to achieve if I fall into the trap of over aliasing.
On my Sarah Brightman piece I purposely over-aliased areas to create a blurred effect and sense of depth.

I don't see any blur in your pieces.

Helm, you said you've never seen anyone creating blur pixel by pixel, but you have, I've applied this to many pieces in my gallery including the Pixelator entry you judged. ;p

Anyway, I love this very much, it's quite an inspiration! The intricate crispness compliments the calm solitary feel and I think it's great.

BTW, I love this piece. It's shows great skill and some of the best results I`ve seen using range.

Good points there. I think it's fine to duplicate or move parts of an image as long as those parts were drawn by the artist using the pixel art rules.

Sounds good. Hmmmm. Guess range and dither are out then.
But what about picking a piece of your own image as a brush in order to move it 2 pixels to the left, for example? Or picking brushes to 'tile-out' a scene? Or to make a face symmetrical? You gotta be allowed to do that kinda stuff.
Seems that no single definition can handle the problem. If ppl are set to define the 'rules' in detail, maybe there should be a list of allowed tools, or better yet, a list of forbidden ones.

I`ve talked at length with Helm about this and it's a pretty tricky area as there are different personal opinions regarding what is and isn't pixel art.

To clarify , in my own head, what qualifies as pixel art I came up with my own rule in which I work by - see below;

The tools used must only ever place down a single given index colour from a palette of no more than 256 colours. Addtionally, any brush tools must only ever be round or square in shape.

no comment - 6/6

Eerie and brilliantly executed. Good work.

Awesomely Creepy!

OH MY GOD!!!!            

Hey I'm totally okay with that. And of course I was kidding about the dithering, hence the smiley. I just wanted to point out how it's sometimes makes no sense in arguing about things that are merely a matter of opinion.
As for the blurry parts, if you take a look at the WIP you'll see that the images started as a noisy mess. It was a matter of sharpening and defining the image by hand. The blurry parts are just the parts that I thought are in no need of redefining.It proved to be a good technique when you don't know in advance exactly what you want to draw, but turned out to be a very tedious method of pixelling in the end, so fear not, I will not be implementing this technique in the future, and I hope this will do away with all the controversy.
My aim is to be a part of this great community, not to challenge it's values.

There's just many places where there's many shades that are close which do not look as if layed down by hand. If you say you don't use dirty tools, cool. I've never seen anyone that works pixel by pixel create blur though, and blur is what you have in places. But I'm more interested in letting people know what Dpaint/Brilliance/ProMotion can do that they usually cannot with their mspaints and graphic gales so they're not confused as to how some effects are done, not argue with you specifically.

I've had similar discussions many, many times, with a lot of people.

Your range mode is just what promotion does with lighten/darken. If used carefully, the computer doesn't do any automatic work itself, I agree.

About dithering, if you're talking about a dither gradient in some piece of mine, I see no point to do it by hand. I know what I want to see on my screen, and I know exactly what tool to use it to get it on there, the computer doesn't make my choices, like it would if I used a 3-4 pixel radius soft-brush or smudge or something. Dithering generally isn't considered dirty at all, and I make 99% of the ditherings by using standard 50% mode then adding or substracting from it as I see fit.  But even if I did Indexpaint something, I wouldn't be ashamed of it. I'd just let people know - as I always do - what sort of tools I used to make my art.

Helm, that's exactly my point!
Actually none of the 'dirty' tools you describe are used. Not even darken or brighten or transparency. What I DID use is RANGE mode, which translates the pixels color to the next or previous color in gradient that you defined. In this case, the whole palette is the gradient. So you click left mouse button to get the next (say, brighter) color, and click right mouse button to get previous (darker) color. Nothing is decided by computer and the same workflow can be achieved using "[" and "]" keys to scroll to next/previous color in the palette and then clicking to place the pixel. The first method is twice faster but nothing is decided by computer. I picked the exact color for every single pixel.
I have no problem with people who think this is unorthodox, but I just want to make it clear that although my method was unusual, I used the usual tools.
At no point was it my intention to deceive anyone that I made this, say, using MSPaint. I am more than happy to share my experience with others and I hope it can help people focus more on the art itself than on wrestling the program's interface.

By the way, Helm, I see that you use automatic dither mode in ProMotion. Guess the computer decides your pixels, after all? ;D

Wow, that's amazing. The style is really original and there's a great sense of depth and shape. Ilke might have used some tools offered by any decent pixel program (Dpaint, Grafx2, Promotion...) but that MS Paint lack, though I'm not even sure about that, as it might have been all placed by hand. I'd consider anyting produced by Dpaint and like being pixel art, though I can understand Pixeljoint may have another definition in mind. Great stuff anyway!

I can't discribe my feelings.
Sorry, by I can give you only 7\7 points.

This has a lot of pixel art detail of course, but things have changed since the Amiga scene. Nowdays 'pixel art' at least in my -and most of Pixelation's- opinion, is stuff where every single pixel has been attended to manually. What you're doing we nowdays classify as Index Painting.

Which is what it says. indexed palette, but cg painting. The 'dirty' tools are blurs, darken and brighten, smudge, soften, blend and such. When you let the computer make the choices, it's index painting.

Which doesn't mean it's not good, I rather like this, but it has to be appreciated for what it is.

I'll leave definitioms to purist's, I like it the way it is.=)

The Firefox spell checker didn't have a problem with it

Surt, there is no such word as "scening". And demoscene pixelstuff HAS quite an amount of pixelwork involved. But just as much indexpainting in most cases.

Great stuff for scening but scene != pixel.
Scene is low-colour low-res cging (compared to cg not pixel).

Brighten, darken paintmodes by any chance? Dpaint I reckon.

Everything can be done in MSPaint, only it takes much longer. The only tool I used on these images that PC pixelling programs don't have is 'contour fill' which is like a lasso and paintbucket rolled in one. I've uploaded the WIPs, so see for yourselves.

Not 100% pixelling, but enough for my liking. Some clever use of indexpainting in the beginning.
I have to say I like this one.

skeddles: You know that by your logic everything is pixel art?

as cool as this is, its hard to beleive its 100% pixel

in my opinion, if it cant be done in MSpaint, then it cant be pixel art.

the quality of blening in this is such a vast improvememtn over the quality your other work displays.  I like demoscene, and i like automatic smoothing and blending, but this really is not the place for the latter.

All Helm's pieces (Nearly all) are either 16 or 32 colours, never heard you complain about those.

jalonso: Your point being? You can't tell anything by some sort of magical "even" colour counts.

exactly 32 colors...hmmm

DPaint is a nice program. After you mentioned it, I went and found a Trial version of the program. It would definitly be a great tool for pixeling. Dpaint and Brilliant 2 both have some gradiant and AA features that I noticed. So that could be cause for the many different colors.

Regardless of what these people say, you used the tools you had well.

its cool but i  wonder just one thing - why the technical level of his mockup=////x100//= level of those works? im waiting for WIP's

Ye as he said, alot of those lines are obviously pixelart especialy the stuff around the eye and the hand.

Lol! Thanks for all the nice comments.
Regarding doubt that this is pixel art...
Those of you who don't think this is pixel probably are not familiar with the amiga demoscene. There are lots of styles of pixel art to see there over the years. I admit I was trying to be original but what I did here and on the other two pics form this 'batch' is not so different from work by, for example, Ra.
It is obviously pixel art cause theres all this crisp detail that is impossible to achieve otherwise. Look at all the diagonals, those are not possible to do in photoshop (well, theoretically they are, but then you'd have to be pixelling in photoshop).
All of this work was done on Amiga1200 in either Brilliance2 or Dpaint3. I can descibe the process in detail, and i think i also have several stages of WIP of this very picture.
I will be uploading them soon.
If you don't like that I left parts of the pictures messy, well you don't have to like it :D

Har, whats next, a mic stand and a gun that shoots fetuses?!
(Awesome work! XD)

I love how it looks at us with this lil "meh" expression. Lovely.

ooh FCUK! i can bet my life this is index painting but, even so, it makes an impression!

i doubt if that's pixelart but if it is you're god.

I've never seen anything like this in my life.  Pixellated or non.  The lines are so immaculate, the colours so amazingly blended, it's nigh impossible to tell that this is digital, save for the obvious preter-nature of the subject and by zooming in to pick the pixels out.

Fav'ed.  Well done.  Now give me my breath back, thief.

is there a reference?

This is the most beautifully abstract pixelart i have ever seen. fav and 7/7