Yeah just a little mockup

No man, that's the way it should be, it's not an export error, that many colours is due to my pipeline.

Thank you!

Hello, I hope you didn't find our previous correspondence offensive, if so, I apologize! I didn't mean to offend you.

Yes if I wanted to do it without noise, I would certainly do it, but I need a certain effect and to achieve it you need to experiment with this kind of things, maybe later the colors in the noise will be less, if there will be such a need. But to spoil the work and stack a certain amount of colors intentionally I do not want to, because I have done enough of this before.

Here I post the work because I think I do not violate the rules of PJ, because I consider the means convincing, you can call it rebellion, and I can control the palette and colors at work and it can be seen from the work: each individual color serves a purpose and expresses some spot, and noise always expresses a separate cluster of many unimportant colors.

I don't want to violate my own principles, so let's just agree that you will reject my work if you think that noise is used unconvincingly and accept it if you think otherwise.

Thank you for your work!
 

Long answer 2:

You completely misunderstood what I mean by "garbage" within pixel art and started accusing me of something again. Let me explain, stylistic peculiarities - there are stylistic peculiarities, but there are also things that are perfectly acceptable within the framework of pixel art, for example, properly applied banding, which you can see in the works of many pixel artists, but still newcomers are hammered into their heads that "banding is a mistake", I was talking about such traditions.

I'm afraid to disappoint you, but in the works of Valery Kim, whom you think I should unconditionally imitate, there are many colors that you call useless. They are present literally in the last work. In addition, your argument that I as protege should imitate my mentor is wrong and shows that you have absolutely no idea how the educational process works.

Once again you've wrapped my argument in such a way as to make me look wrong and elitist. Why would you do that? I absolutely did not say you can't learn anything without formal education, you made that up. I was talking about the fact that there are a lot of people in pixel art who have no formal education. I'll let you in on a secret, but without formal education you can learn anything. Only, if you don't have a teacher, it will take much more time and in the end you may know less than you would with formal education. These are the very gaps that affect pixel art. If you claim otherwise, then you are saying that teachers are a useless profession and schools, colleges and universities are unnecessary.

You also mentioned professionally qualified pixel artists, may I ask how you qualify them?

My thesis that certain stylistic features in the tradition are changing in no way goes against the thesis about the youth of pixel art. You see, certain things in the tradition change, but the skeleton remains. And the skeleton can be strong and aged, or it can be young and weak, not yet strong. I can reveal this idea if you need it, but I have the impression that you don't want to listen.

I see no further point in talking to you. I was hoping for a constructive and interesting dialog, where we would exchange opinions, listen to each other, you would learn something new, I would learn something new, but for some reason you started to engage in eristic, accuse me and prove me wrong in everything, interpret my arguments in an unfavorable way for me and make me look like a stupid rebel who does not understand what he is doing. It's really sad... 

But thanks for publishing the work anyway!

Long answer 1:

I don't know why you would think I have an aversion to PJ. I have a lot of respect for PJ, it's a very good place to share your work, participate in different activities. It's one of the few places just about pixelart, that's why people still sit on it. I don't really understand what PJ profile you're talking about, because in the PJ rules it's written that you can use a lot of colors if there's a compelling reason for it. You chose to ignore my explanation, but I already described why I use noise in my artwork, if you find that reason unconvincing, that's your opinion.

Noise is very common in traditional fine art, as well as in cg, as it is a powerful compositional technique. I use noise specifically in this work to separate the masses of light and shadow. The viewer immediately pays attention to the cleaner areas of the work - these are areas of light, so I compositionally emphasize them. And all the unlit details and shadows are written off and go into the canvas, which also has the texture of noise, which generalizes the shadow and background, further emphasizing the light areas. Besides, in life there is really less clarity in the shadows, because less light gets there.
and also the texture of the background resembles the texture of the sheet on which the sketch is drawn. That's why I wrote off the legs and they also go into the background as unimportant.
In addition, the noise creates materiality of the object, because a pure spot of light is no longer pure, and small shimmers appear inside it.
Lest you once again ignore my explanation. The two paragraphs above are specific purpose or why I can use noise in PJ.

Why are you accusing me of eristic loopholes, since I just wanted to know what you mean by traditions? If there is no document that establishes a list of these traditions, then each person can mean different things by traditions. So I don't understand what you are accusing me of: I didn't break PJ rules and I used a lot of colors for a specific purpose, I repeat, if you think it's not enough - that's your opinion and you are entitled to it, but your opinion and PJ profile are different things.

The PJ rules are quite old, but they are quite liberal and tolerant of everything. They allow any means of expression within the pixel canvas as long as the end justifies the means. Apparently, reading the PJ rules, you have decided that they are a guideline of some pixel art tradition and, as a pixel nazi, you accuse me of not following the rules.

 

Short answer:

You have chosen to ignore my arguments about noise. For some reason you started accusing me of some kind of rebellion, delitantism and rhetorical tricks. I don't understand why you are doing this, because I am just sharing my position with you and I am ready to listen to what you think about it. Why insult me and accuse me of gimmickry, of being mean to PJ and so on. You are apparently very offended that I use noise in my work and publish my work in PJ, which according to you is a "traditional" pixel art gallery with its own profile, but I have not violated the rules of PJ, which allow the use of a lot of colors for a certain purpose. You can't articulate what you consider traditional in pixel art and hence accuse me of sophistry. According to you noise is not a tradition, so it has no place on PJ, but PJ rules allow using noise for certain purposes, if you find them unconvincing, that's your opinion, not PJ rules.

5.

> I came up with an analogy to illustrate this. You are allowed to make calligraphy with a sharpie and it will be cool and may look good, but it will not be traditional calligraphy then. A gallery with a traditional calligraphy profile won't accept it not becasue it is wrong or bad, but just becasue they defined their profile. They won't accept a calligraphy made with a sharpie the same as an oil painting.

This analogy is incorrect, first of all, because calligraphy is also much older and has professional schools that are guardians of traditions. Pixel-art is quite young and people coming to pixel-art often have no artistic education, which also affects the quality of "traditions". Secondly, there is no declared traditional style in pixel art, and PJ rules are invalid because they are guidelines containing a "specific purpose" clause.

Thank you, for your reply, I would be glad if you supplement your position! I look forward to your response.
 

4.

> Pixel Joint aspires to not only store pixel art works and educate new pixel artists but also preserve the traditional style.

I'll say it again. No firm tradition is formed, it is a rather vague concept. If you call tradition what is written in PJ rules, then first of all PJ rules provide for "specific purpose", which already breaks tradition, and secondly they are simply outdated.

How is PJ meant to educate new pixel artists? A newbie who is going to open a Hall of Fame and see these horribly aged works containing a lot of not-so-great decisions is not going to be a good pixel artist. And new work by people who have outgrown those not-so-great decisions in the Hall of Fame doesn't get in for known reasons. Because Hall of Fame shows the works with the most likes and you get such a vicious circle in which only old works exist.

If there are certain traits of traditional style as you understand it, I also ask you to declare them.

3.

> People deconstruct those "rules" successfully if they know how, and have a good artistic or conceptual reason for it, so it is allowed to experiment and try to "break the boundaries and limitations", but having the background grain which is barely visible without any reason could be named sloppy, and does not look good. At least if it is not justified by any deliberate artistic decision.

No, the presence of barely noticeable grain cannot be called careless and it is not done for nothing. It is a conscious artistic decision.

It's from PJ's rules:

> Pieces must exhibit proper color palette control. Having too many similar / indistinguishable colors that serve no specific purpose may have a piece denied entry to the gallery. Use PJ Image Specs to analyze your piece for such issues.

You do realize that "specific purpose" can mean anything, so the rule itself is useless. I used noise in the piece we're commenting on for a reason. I had a specific purpose. It's not just the background that is noisy, but also a certain shadow part of the character, which creates a contrast to the cleaner light part, which gets more light, so it's cleaner. This is how it is done in traditional painting. It gives an extra separation of a large patch of light and shadow from each other and therefore a greater contrast of these masses.

Let me repeat again: this is a fully realized artistic decision, the noise was used for a "specific purpose".
 

2.

> This is not a rule but a stylistic characteristic, and it was not "made up" by any "dude", but emerged from decades of evolution of the style.

Pixel art is pretty young and most "traditions" (maybe you personally don't consider it a tradition, but I know a lot of people who think otherwise) are garbage that are set up as rules of "good taste" but are really just inappropriate uses of the technique itself, like "banding is a mistake", "line jaggies are a mistake" and so on. I can give you plenty of examples of when this works (with noise too).  So I would be very dubious about what is called "tradition" in the context of pixel art.  Still, there is a huge difference between a traditional school of painting that has been formed over centuries and pixel art that has survived a measly few decades.
Once again, I don't know what exactly you consider to be traditions, so I'd ask you to list them, if you don't mind.

In general, traditions are quite fluid: the academic school of painting 100 years ago and now are different things.

Thanks for your reply, I'll describe what I think about it.

1.

> Traditional pixel art requires the skill of palette control.

Palette management is a rather dubious concept and can be interpreted in different ways.
I think you are talking about a limited number of colors. This limitation has proven to be very convenient, as the artist works with patches of certain colors, what we call clusters. This makes it easier to interact with the canvas, helps generalize things (which is very useful in the work), forces the artist to find new solutions to the expression of the object, brings color to the work, and makes pixel art crisp in a big way. That is, palette management is just convenient, everyone uses it, which is why we can call it somewhat of a "tradition".
But nowadays there is no limited palette, artists just use some colors in their work for different things and most don't set themselves the need to fit into any palette. This causes an increase in the number of colors in the work, which in no way makes the work worse or better in itself. So even here the "tradition" has long since begun to erode.

Noise and a large number of colors when used correctly does not interfere with "palette management", because we still split the picture into certain spots and clusters, only now these clusters are not monochromatic, but have a dynamic color. This is the case both in traditional art, where noise is natural, and in cg, where noise is artificial, anyway noise is a good compositional tool that can be used to express many things.

Thank you so much again! But those colors are not useless in any way, they add a little texture to the fabric. The noise is quite an interesting technique that still needs to be developed. The number of colors doesn't make much difference, I don't know why you're counting them. It would be nice to hear your opinion why the number of colors plays such a big role in the selection of works.

Thank you! But why do I have to keep track of the number of colors in my work? Just because it's a rule some dude made up? Does it matter how many colors are in the work if the work looks good?

It's okay. Working with noise creates a large number of colors and there is nothing wrong with that. I advise you to forget about the rules of pixel-art, because it is unnecessary dogmatism, which slows down the development of the pixelart stream.

It's me.

Thanks a lot!

Thank you!

Thank you!

Awesome girl

And what does this beautiful knight position himself as?

Awesome work with double clasters!

Nice work

Thank you to comment

My thanks to you