Obligatory inflammatory first post alert. Before I get into this, let me first repeat a little story about a bird...

A little bird fell out of it's warm nest into snow and was too young to fly and so it was really cold. "Brrrr! I'm so cold! Someone help warm me up!" A cow came by and pooped on the bird a huge steaming pile of cow poo and walked on. The bird was warm and would survive without hypothermia but it smelled so bad! "This is gross! HELP ME! GET THIS POO OFF ME!" cried the warm bird. A fox heard this cry and came over to dig the bird out. When the fox had dug the bird out of the cow poo, it ate it. The moral of the story is that no everyone who is sh*tting on you is trying to harm you and not everyone helping you is doing it in your best interest.

With that said, here comes a huge cow turd.



I'm a 'newcomer' here but an old guy who's into computer history and one thing that I've seen growing as the internet grows and retro-gaming continues to maintain it's momentum is bad information and misinformation posing as rule of law.

First off, we need to be absolutely objective about the aesthetic; it IS an aesthetic and aesthetics are sometimes dictated by the medium's limitations and advantages. One thing that digital art is great at doing is 'hiding the method and evidence'. If someone makes an oil painting, you know it was oil, you know they used brushes, etc. because you can examine the actual painting and see the evidence of the work's creation; you can even tell how likely what kinds of brushes were used and maybe even figure out the brands of paint used if you have the right tools of dissection. Digital graphics, on the other hand, do not have this; no matter whether it's a 3D render, you used a mouse and clicked a bunch of little squares or used a paintbucket tool or some high-end overpriced art-tool like Photoshop, in the end the only thing evident is that it's digital. We can always assume how it was made, but the only thing that can ever be proven was done was that a digital machine was intended to be the final display substrate. You CAN tell when digital art is done badly how it was made. I'm sure everyone's played some game that used bad scans that had terrible dithering, seen gifs with very bad borders, etc. But when it's GOOD, there's not much in the way of evidence of how the image was made except the pixels themselves which tell us nothing.

This leaves everyone to assume one thing: all 'good' pixel art is made the same way and we 'know' this because we can see the pixels. But what are you REALLY looking at?

As an aesthetic or style, the pixel art community needs step outside of itself, if only for a little bit, to get some objectivity into what constitutes good 'pixel art' and I would even suggest changing the name to something that can be taken seriously within the art-world itself especially if you're considering this an art-form. If we look at what the inspiration is for all of the submitted images here, they have three things in common: low resolution, low color usage, digital. So in real essence, pixel art is actually lo-fi digital graphics. You can argue with me all you want (and I look forward to having a real discussion on this so bring it!) but in the end, this is all you can deduce from a final work of this type.

So if that's the case, then why is there so much bad information and lack of historical research within the communities who claim to 'love pixel art'? Do you love looking at it only? Or do you want to learn how it was really made when it was the highest form of digital art you could find in games because there wasn't an option for 3D or super high resolutions? Do you think Konami could put out 20 games a year if their artists were drawing things with a mouse pixel by pixel? Or do you think they were approaching the medium detached from it, focusing on how to push the limits presented to them as artists? Do you think they used scanning and hand drawing techniques? Do you think they used special tools developed in-house to accent the average artists' expectations of what happens when they apply pressure to a stylus? YOU BET THEY DID and the longer the internet exists, the more evidence comes out that completely flies in the face of tutorials posted here about how to make 'pixel art' (again, it's lo-fi digital graphics).

So in closing I'm going to leave a link to this GDC talk about early game graphics by an artist at LucasFilm Games. There were no pixel artists back then, just regular artists struggling with lofi surroundings. The pixel art community today has no such exploratory tendencies and it's destroying the love of pixel art on the outside with lots of people making bad graphics on bad information which stifles their own natural tendencies to make good images (i.e. you're telling people to use a mouse and draw single colors one box at a time when they normally use their full arm and a pencil-shaped tool on a physical surface...what could possibly go wrong?) As a medium and aesthetic and style, the community and supporters really need to take a true, cultural and artistic and especially CRITICAL look at the history, techniques, success and failures of the early works which continue to inspire everyone to give this style a shot. Because if we keep telling people bad things, they're going to continue to make worse and worse art and completely kill the aesthetic off entirely with bad output that seems to exist solely to inhibit and shackle a person's real artistic tendencies.

Peace and I look forward to flaming and conversing with everyone in a civilized way and even if you make this stuff the 'hard way', do whatever leads to GOOD OUTPUT. That's the most important! Peace and I love you all for what you do and look forward to awesome graphics in the future!

SELECTED REFERENCES:
8 bit and 8bittish graphics GDC presentation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0
Quantel Paintbox 1981 Demo - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyCmIH06rQE
Deluxe Paint Training VHS - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KybIkyilCQI
etc. etc.