Hi! I'm still new here but I want to ask people... why do you love pixel art? I ask this assuming you love pixel art... if you don't LOVE it, you can say why you marginally like it, or why you hate/dislike it. I hope I don't see many of those though...

For me, I LOVE pixel art for several reasons...

1. I consider myself an off and on amateur artist, but my style is very messy and chaotic. I can skribble lines in a continuous pattern on paper with increasing pressure and out pops a drawing that looks decent. You can't do that with pixels (or I should say that I can't...) and the precision that is required of good pixel art increases both my patience and understanding of why careful placement is important.

2. Colors. I am a pencil man, black'n'white, monochrome all the way. I can paint, but I don't enjoy it for some reason. Shading is usually not an issue for me because I don't have to swap instruments in a 1 color piece. Therefor I sometimes feel like I have little experience with color selection. Since I've been creating little 32x32 graphics I have a much better understanding of which colors to use to create certain characteristics in a piece. This is something I'm still, and probably will always be, working on.

3. Beauty. For some reason or another, I miss the simple beauty found in old pixel games. Maybe its nostalgia or childhood joy that instills this, but I dare say that I enjoy a low res well made pixel game over a 3 bajillion polygon super-particle effect 1080p HD game. I don't know why.

Being a part of this community makes me feel like i'm becoming a better person, very very slowly, and that's why I love pixel art.

Heh. Nice question.
I have my answer ready for years, yet no one asked me.

Why I got into it

I was born, quite a few years ago as a creative person. People around me realized, but I did not myself.
I was also born as a logic person. In more than just one way.

So, one day, I do not remember how anymore, I introduced myself to isometric pixel art. I believed it was simple, as it followed logical rules, and required no creativity or much skill. Of course I was wrong, but that does not matter. Thing is, I was able to create nice things by using the line tool right.

A year later, a more important thing happened. I found a community. And any community that would have adopted me could have formed me in any way they would have wanted, but it happens to be this pixel community. At the right time.
So that is the reason I kept going on and on.

Why I love it
But you asked me, why do I love pixel art?

I could have fallen in love with many different hobbies, and I might will someday, but I will keep liking this for ever on. And thats just for one thing: Control!
If I draw by pencil, I can never ever remove a line properly after I drew it. Same goes for traditional painting. If I would paint digitally, I would not get the time to do every little pixel of my image right, and I would always be able to spot infinite correctable things I dislike on my image. On a 32x32 pixel canvas, there are no infinite possibilities! Never!

Why I like it

• Great community
• Retro
• Game fans
• Programmers
• Logic
• Impressive
• Gallery
• MSpaint doable
• Iconic
• Skills being learnt valuable for everything
• Palettes
• Animations
• Isometric stylized stuff

I have much more to say, but I simply don't want to write more/want to waste your reading time more ;)

I dont LOVE pixel art. :P

I like pixel art as much as I like other kinds of art. Maybe a little more, because when using pixels, I feel like I have more control on the piece than when I am drawing with a pencil or my tablet pen. If you screw something up, its easier to fix without having  to redo the whole thing.

Why I love art though, is because even though I am not actually good at it, I am still better at it than most of the other stuff I do. Something I can actually do better than someone else... It feels good when you are drawing, pixeling, or whatever.

Good reasons all! I forgot about the control and challenge factors, but I've definitely felt the same way about those two before. Thanks for sharing!

I don't know exactly why I love pixel art (and yes,I do LOVE it, even though I have just started making pixel art myself). I suspect that it mostly has to do with nostalgia. As a kid I was hooked on the Monkey Island games, Indiana Jones games, and all the other great games from Lucasfilm.

I never realized that pixel art was its own specific genre until recently, and imagine my delight when I found an entire community dedicated to its creation. As a (self-proclaimed) artist, I naturally felt an urge to investigate this new art form. Once I saw the mind-blowing works of the masters like Fool and Snake, I knew I had to try it myself.

i have to agree with vampire slug, all the games i played when i was young were pixilated games, like faxanadu, definitely in my top 3 games of all time.

that doesn't make it pixel art. digital photography is made of pixels, but it takes much more than that to be pixel art.



Edited by ThereIsNoCure - 09 June 2009 at 4:01pm

i would disagree with that. with ttechniques such as oil on canvas a similair level of detail can absolutly be achieved, with this medium you can also erase and redo every part of your painting as much as you want, so long as it's not dried. and as with pixelart ech stroke is pone for a reason. in fact the french pointilists where basically the inventors of pixelart (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5d/Seurat-La_Parade_detail.jpg). I'd argue that oil on canvas is atleast as anal as pixelart. and anyone with patience (and or the bob ross dvd colection) can do well.  

i hate pixel art with every fiber of my being