I have a hard time wrapping my brain around how people manage to make pixel art look painterly, incredibly impressive

ayy, cool boxes

To correct myself, I suppose my Secret Santa piece for late 2023 has a technically more detailed tree, but if I'm going to be honest, that tree was mostly naturalistic greebles, where every bit of this art was intentional detail.

Every. Single. Bit.
 

I love how the light looks casting against the front wall! it's beautiful!

this is pretty cute, I appreciate the dedication to the requested theme!

I honestly can't stop thinking about this one, it's legitimately the most impressive pixel creation I've ever seen. I could see this playing in an art museum and have absolutely zero questions as to why. This is just, crazy quality and detail.

love the vibes of this one, I especially like the gift wrap, it's extremely cute!

the style is unique and interesting
 

honestly I'm going to be real, my workflow with my uses of colors is to pick a palette I think looks good and run with it. I'm glad you like it, but it's admittedly a bit lazy on my part I feel lol

I'm really glad you like it!! I kind of interpreted your reply to the original Secret Santa thread as "a piece that tells a story involving an ancient tree" so I feel like it was a really good opportunity to flex my composition muscles.

I hope the story of "an astronaut is exploring an alien planet and stumbles on an ancient tree" comes through well!
 

Thank you!! I worked really hard on the one on the left, whereas the right side one was more filler than anything

Thank you! I'm honestly on a big sci-fi art kick lately, so of course this was a fun one with the loose parameters! I worked the most on the left side tree there, I took heavy reference from images I've seen from what many to believe to be the real world oldest tree on Earth!

I'm going to be real, I didn't really think about the relation there, I kind of just wanted a bit more visual interest in the composition, but perhaps! Or, perhaps if we're thinking about the implications of it being an alien ecosystem, it could be some kind of creature's eggs which have been adapted to appear like the substance to prevent some predators from eating them. There's a number of ways to interpret them I think, though those weren't considerations at the time of creating the artwork
 

prettyyyy

the shading is really nice, there's a lot of detail present, and pretty women always have my heart aaaa
 

sharks are straight up my favorite animals, it was lovely to see this pop up in the hall of fame reel on the homepage

!!

it's defo worth a watch, it's a great movie, not the untouchable masterpiece many imply it to be, but it's still a wonderful experience
 

beautiful!

gives me Laputa vibes
 

looking at my pixel art improvements in the gallery rn is honestly a little wild. my most recent pixel art is so much prettier than my vtuber concept from a few months back

anyone else find art level-ups staggering sometimes?
 

I'm in!

I like:

- sci-fi
- modern style pixel art
- realistic proportions(realistic aesthetic at least, doesn't have to look like a real person, stylization is valid, and there's many an exception)
- anime, love anime
- character arts
- glossy texture

-very important note: I am in LOVE with Mobile Suit Gundam, it's my special interest

I dislike
- honestly not much of anything

foxo!!

they're very cute! very friend shaped!

*they

thank you though!!

you're right I defo need to experiment more with shading, a lot of it is that I end up scared of doing larger shadows, when maybe I should be more confident with it

Okay green. I'll be honest, I was trying to largely avoid engaging with you on why AI art is harmful to the art community at large and how it's negatively affecting artists' careers, especially independent artists. Frankly, I'm not emotionally invested in explaining this to you, so I won't be citing any sources, just explaining what I've encountered online. You can choose to consider my points invalid for that reason if that's what you wanna do, but I'm not just going to sit here and watch you continue this drama for I don't know how long over willful ignorance.

AI art is essentially training a neural network to generate images based on a collection of other images from a database. I'm sure you already know this, but I figured I would explain just in case. On its base, AI art seems like it could be an interesting tool if ethically trained, but it seems that it's been coopted by bad actors who just write bots to scrub the images off of sites and use artists' own works to generate derivative images, effectively using an algorithm to graft already made artworks together into a new image. It's admittedly more of an automatically generated edit than it is an original artwork.

I've seen this phenomena used by additional bad actors to start a commission process for an artwork, and save the sketch before they've actually paid for it, so they can just have an AI "complete" the artwork for them. This denies artists of what might very well be their primary source of income, and artists who live off of commissions have their lives put in jeopardy because of it. Believe me, I actually do live off of commissions at this point in time, and am already in a difficult position without people stealing progress images for an AI to produce a more derivative product for a cheaper price.

in response to the game question, I recently played through Signalis, and it honestly dethroned NieR Automata as my favorite game. EXCELLENT survival horror, and a beautiful story to top it all off. highly recommended

very pretty water animation!

between the subtle ink moving animation, the staying true to flat colors for a distinctive style, some of the cleanest lines I've seen, and the rhythmic flashing in the background to the implied music, I can definitively say, this art slaps.

I will say that I'm a bit unclear on what makes something traditional pixel art vs oekaki. I thought for a while that oekaki was just much higher resolution pixel art, but if that were the case, my first submission on this site would be considered oekaki, and I didn't even get chewed out by a mod for trying to post it, it was just approved without issue.

note: this is not me trying to troll or incite anything, I'm just kind of dumb

oh this, this is beautiful