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Holy cow, this is gorgeous... your use of light is nothing short of amazing.
absolutely amazing. Anyone who says this is bad is incredibly ignorant.
Luther I would just like to say this is spectacular! And I just love the logo in the bottom right 
anyway...I see people arguing over the fact that to many colors were used. In this case I think it is very acceptable...Let me show you why.
I looked at this image for a while. You see where the sun is in the water? and the light rays are pouring in....well in the top left of that there is a very very white shade of blue. you can barely see it without zooming in 6x or 8x on MSpaint. if you took the white right next to it and filled it in, it would ruin the feel. it needs those extra colors to make it feel more realistic. I'm kind of getting tired of people who have been doing pixel art for a while and think they are gods saying that more than a set number of colors is no longer professional work. I know almost nothing technical about pixel art, so i apologize if i'm making some bad points here. I just think that if you really look at the picture and see it for true art and not a car someone is working on or something...you can really see why the extra colors are needed.
give it a try, color reduce this and show how it can look just as beautiful.
6/6 good work luther, someday i hope to be this good..
Helm,
You seem to have a beef with the demo scene in general and it was those derogatory comments that lead me to write an essay of a post in reply. I've already stated that I don't have the source photo from this, it was from a magazine at an old work place and has probably now been decomposing happily on a compost heap somewhere in Japan for five years, or has been recycled to make 'Hello Kitty' stationary.
Please, by all means crit the hell out of my work. Also note that, of the pictures I've submitted so far, only two used photo references. The rest are original works, some inspired by the style of other artists but none copied from their work. I do not pass of the artistic work of others as my own.
For the Hawaiian picture, I again used photo references for the girl but the rest is from my own head (I'm good at clouds :) I can also draw fairly realistic looking people without the need of reference but I only got to that level by copying from life!
If you want non skill-builder pieces then just look at my gallery. I challenge you to find the 'originals' of those. Actually, you won't have to look far as they are the originals.
Do you see me shouting 'burn this?' anywhere. Please do not make a strawman out of my argument. As with AndyOaks back then I am making a sensible argument, without trying to insult anyone. He got all uppity about it back then, then calmed down and apologized, regardless of his sarcastic rants now. It will be better for all involved if you treat me with the politeness I'm treating you. The issue is not personal.
A lot of people use reference for their artwork. It's frowned upon to depend on them as a crutch in any artistic field, not just pixel art. It's one thing to use reference as a guide and for confidence, and another to copygrid everything. It's sadly a bit of a more pronounced problem in the pixelling world than in other places and I'll explain why later on.
You mention Renaissance painting. A lot was commissioned work like 'paint me and my bride' and since there was no photography, painting served as a very practical service for those with the money to afford. We do not discredit their work because it is valuable in many, many ways in terms of art-history, sociology, and finally for the advancement of the 'craft' aspect of painting ( that is, brush-strokes and color usage and such). In a relevant way, I can understand - and I've done a few 'copies' myself for such reasons - technical reproduction in pixel art, it is indeed useful for learning the craft. The 'copy' problem wouldn't be an issue for me for this piece if you had supplied the reference image and b) I could see no-copy pieces of yours submitted for comparison. The reason I commented on this was mostly about the index painting thing.
Personally, no I don't count any of that period's artwork as my favourite pieces, and those that I do enjoy I enjoy more for secondary reasons ( from a historical standpoint ) than because they speak to me on any visceral level. The more a piece is based on imagination and not on photographical realism, the more interested I tend to be. My favourite painter is Max Ernst, for example.
In the demoscene, a lot of young folks with nothing but time on their hands sat down and said "I'll be the most popular scenester in the scene!". To do this, since they lacked amazingly in traditional drawing skills, they pulled out their dnd books and copied the covers. This created a scene full of meticulously-detailed and often tasteless reinterpretations of muscley Boris barbarians and dragons and babes. Most original work lost in the demoparties to them, and when legends of the scene world like Lazur did no-copy pieces they were so disappointly worse than their copies that basically the scene tries to avoid the issue of copying all-together, instead prefferring the illusionary level that the scene graphicians seem to be than their actual skill level and ability to create evocative pieces on their own merits. This demoscene mentality flourished in the hands of 15-18 year-old scenesters, but it prevails still, and there's people claiming bragging rights as pixel gods for their copied artwork.
Seeing how this is the recent history of the medium, do you understand why it's doubly an issue if people copy (not just use reference)? It's wholey redundant since one can - and oh man, how the scene did - convert photos now and repixel bits for 'pixel cred' and pass it like you're awesome. PASSING AS IF YOU'RE AWESOME IS THE POINT OF THE SCENE. Do you see why it's important for many of us these days that pixel art is more honest than that? I'd rather see people doing their own work and having flaws in anatomy and such, but showing their pieces for critique and trying to get better, than people copying Boris in 30 hours. In your benefit you did say this is a copy, you just didn't supply the original piece. You'd be suprised how less amazed the commenters would be if they could see the original. It's a sin of ommiss>*** Message truncated (4000 chars max) ***
Hi guys,
I wasn't really expecting all the controversy- I'll try and use less colours with any new pics I post here, not because I'm trying to save on disk space (although I have done things in fewer colours for that same reason) but because it's less likely to boil blood.
I often use more closely packed colours in the brighter ranges as the eye is more sensitive to changes of intensity in bright colours than dark ones, which is why I can get away with those large areas of stippled colour in the rocks on the left. It's the same reasoning behind gamma correction - that packs more colour detail for bright shades and less for dark ones to avoid banding and as a kind of colour space lossy compression.
The kind of blurred effect is fairly easy, if a bit laborious, to achieve using standard tools. Just set up your ramped palette in dpaint, get the fingers over the '[' and ']' keys for cycling the colours and get to work with progressively smaller brushes. Then go back and tidy, adding stippling where needed. Anti-aliasing by hand is one of those skills that is now almost totally redundant in professional CG but which took me an age to get right. I can now anti-alias as well as the best rotated grid, edge enhancing 128 sample AA routine but not as quickly. The AA in this image was all done by hand.
One of these days, when I've finished my other programming projects and probably in my advanced dotage, I'll write a bloody dpaint clone that does record every pixel you drew and can save the results out to an animation.
Also, where on this site is the FAQ that defines exactly what is considered 'pixel art' these days?
Helm:
Yes, I can see the difference but you're probably right, I could have used less colours. I could also have decided to do it in photoshop, ega mode, as a 3D model or not to do it at all. However, I did it as I did it and I'm afraid those are the breaks. Please feel free to remove duplicate colours if you like. Whilst this was indeed a technical piece, using a photo for reference, I can, infact, draw freehand as well!
Haash:
Crap, don't say that! I sometimes feel that way when I see what I consider to be awesome work and sometimes it inspires me to improve my own work, depending on what side of the bed I got out of. This image was the culmination of around 15 years experience in pushing pixels and also, probably more importantly, results from actually having the time to create it. It took a week working 9-5 whilst I was criminally underemployed at a web design department - they really should have found something useful for me to do.
I`ve experienced this first hand and saw red when I saw it happen to another newly joined artist.
Ok... If this is indeed pixer art, I think I'm going to give up the whole pixel thing!
I mean... Man... Your work is simply awesome in every aspect! 
Dude, if you're dropping down them pixels by hand, you're a pixel artist, fullstop. I do get the impression though that it's the style, and not the technique ,that is always up for scrutiny.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the kings horse are all the kings men.
Couldn't put poor ol' Humpty together again.
p.s. Love the shading!
Mary had a little lamb.
Her fleace was white as snow.
and everywhere that Mary went.
The lamb should surely go!
p.s. Great work!
Hi,
Wow, thanks for the nice comments. I made sure when I did this one that I had the history and I've got it on an old machine at home. I'll dig it up and post it here. What's the best way to post image histories given that the rules state that they don't like users posting partially finished work? If on the boards, which thread's the best?
As for the amount of colours, I know it's pushing the boundaries of what has become considered pixel art. I appreciate that there are aesthetics in this medium that favour as small a palette as possible: I spent my teens honing my skills on 16 and 32 colour machines (Atari ST and Amiga).
With this image, I wanted to push myself a bit further than I'd previously done and wanted to capture the subtle hues of the source image using 8bit colour, rather than aiming to go for as absolutely few colours as possible. It was kind of my DPaint swan song and although it probably lacks artistic merit as I used a photo for reference (which, unfortunately, I no longer have), I did put my heart into it. It's the best pixel pushing image I've ever made.
I've got a bunch of stuff at home that's more unambiguously pixel art and I hope you guys enjoy them.
Amazing :O