sub pixels are the individual Red, Green and Blue elements of a pixel.



You could enforce rules to try and imitate the sub-pixels, every 3x3 block of pixels must be shaded to imitate a single pixel.

For example something like this


or this

Edited by Unit-35 - 14 November 2014 at 10:49pm

Done it before. It's not very interesting from a creative standpoint though;



(and a few other experiments, these I already had online though)

The biggest issues are that you're working at too small a scale to be appreciated by the normal eye, and the fact that you're working with extremely distorted and colored pixels. It has marginal practical applications in regular pixel art as a form of AA¹, but nothing worthwhile enough to branch off into an entire new sub-form of art?

Don't get me wrong. I like digging in to the nature of pixels, but I think there are more interesting ways to get around to it. Here's two photos of mine (excuse the size): RGB|RYB, HD?. In my opinion, both show a more compelling relation between pixels and how we perceive them. One's about the irony of indicating HD with only a handful of pixels, the other explores the idea of 'primary colors'.

What precisely is your version doing? It doesn't convey what large pixels would. Lowres old monitors didn't have any fixed pixels but beams of moving light so those wouldn't show subpixels. And modern screens, well they either have small enough pixels not to notice subpixels, or you'd have to scale the bitmap and then you'd use multiple pixels and thus not notice the colors either. So I'm not sure what the point of it is?


1 - in fact it'd be quite lovely to have such a filter in photoshop etc, to see in realtime how subpixels would behave, when working at a magnified scale. Probably never gonna happen, though.