The Oldschool Self-Portrait pixel art challenge is complete and we have three new champions. This week's challenge awards go to the following pieces:

Thanks so much to all who took the time to vote and participate in the challenge! Check out the Oldschool Self-Portrait forum thread for more information.

Tamagotchi was introduced a quarter of a century ago. Not every "vintage" toy with LCD screen included pixel art, but this one did. This week we are going to honour that viral toy of the late 90's.

Using the provided template, pick a character, enemy, etc... from an existing, modern video game and make it fitting the 32x32 screen only. On the screen, only use the 3 LCD colors from the provided palette.

Some form of animation is required. Design the enclosure paint, buttons and logo using any other colours you like. You may not alter the shape of the toy.

Example of a finished product:

Canvas size: Exactly 64x64, use the template
Colours: Max 16 (including the 3 LCD colors and transparency)
Transparency: Required
Animation: Required

Yes, it is an another RPG party challenge but with a twist (pun intended). This time we want you to choose an existing musical group and draw sprites of it's members.

It doesn't matter if it is a rock band, jazz group, hip-hop squad or a string quartet. You can make them into standard RPG classes (ex.: James Hetfield - Barbarian, Kirk Hammet - Wizard, Lars Urlich - Thief) or into different races (ex.: Paul McCartney - Wood Elf, John Lennon - High Elf, George Harrison - Dark Elf, Ringo Star - Dwarf), or completely made-up classes (ex.: Scary, Sporty, Baby, Ginger, Posh).

If you don't want to draw all of the members, because you want to portray only those important ones and skip the bass player, or you have chosen Slipknot, please consider a minimum number of three sprites. No single performers allowed.

The challenge thread will have all the challenge updates. The thread is also a great place to post your WIPs.

Medical staff are constantly sharing their most incredible (anonymous) X-ray findings to our shock and amusement. This week we will pixel some. You can use an existing viral image as refference (link optional) or imagine your own. Anything counts, from top Darwin Awards and strange objects insterted into random body openings to aliens growing inside human bodies or humans growing inside alien bodies. The only limitations to your fantasy, besides canvas size and the palette, are that it needs to include some form of a skeleton or bones and there has to be something at least slightly unusual about that X-ray photo. And remember to give NSFW warning if necessary.

X-ray palette

Canvas Size - Exactly 100x100.

Colours - Max 6 (use the provided X-ray palette, and use the darkest colour as background).

Transparency - No.

Animation - No.

Let's make a sock puppet 64x64 icon. It may look like a famous character or just have a simple, generic sock puppet appearance. If you want, you can make it resemble yourself and use it as your Pixel Joint avatar.

Colors: max 32

Canvas: exactly 64x64

Transparency: none

Animation: none

Happy new year pixel-heads! Have you missed a challenge from the past year? Did you start but couldn't find the time to finish? This week, we want you to pick any weekly challenge from 2021 and make an entry (check the ALL CHALLENGES column on the right. The first challenge of 2021 was Unexpected Visitor).
Please make sure you write in the description which challenge you chose and make sure you follow it's rules and limitations. Have fun!

Canvas Size - see the corresponding challenge
Colours - see the corresponding challenge
Transparency - see the corresponding challenge
Animation - see the corresponding challenge

The challenge thread will have all the challenge updates. The thread is also a great place to post your WIPs.

This challenge comes from previous challenge winner specialmin64

This week we want you to pixel your own RTS faction. Draw at least one building and at least one unit in the style of classic real time strategy games (Starcraft, Age of Empires, Command & Conquer, etc.) Choose any of popular themes (history, s-f, fantasy etc.) or invent your own. It doesn't have to be war related. Use top-down or isometric perspective.

Canvas: Max 256 x 128 (horizontal)
Colors: Max 32
Transparency: Optional
Animation: Optional

Bonus challenge: Make your assets look like those old school prerendered 3d assets, for example like in starcraft.

The challenge thread will have all the challenge updates. The thread is also a great place to post your WIPs.

This week we want you to draw a character and make 3 different animations of it, and then present them in a row, next to eachother. The required animations need to portray 3 different wind forces, using only moves of the character garments, hair, facial expressions, eventually objects held by the charatcer. No backround or background items are allowed (like rain, snow, falling leaves, flags, bending trees, etc.). The 3 stages are as follows:

 

The challenge thread will have all the challenge updates. The thread is also a great place to post your WIPs.

Another year has passed since the last April Fool's Challenge: it was not the best year ever, and the present one is already competing to become even less best. So we could use some fun, right?

This week we will design our pixel tarot cards. First they were used for gaming, and later got esoteric and other aplicatons, but we will be focusing on the art here.

Choose a "Major Arcana" card from the list:

0    The Fool
I    The Magician
II    The High Priestess
III    The Empress
IV     The Emperor
V    The Hierophant
VI    The Lovers
VII    The Chariot
VIII    Justice
IX    The Hermit
X     Wheel of Fortune
XI     Strength
XII    The Hanged Man
XIII    Death
XIV    Temperance
XV    The Devil
XVI    The Tower
XVII    The Star
XVIII    The Moon
XIX    The Sun
XX    Judgement
XXI    The World

Use the provided palette:

And the template with three sections:

Add the number in the top section (The Fool usually has this space empty), the artwork in the middle, and the name of the card in the bottom. You are free to design your font and numeration however you like..

Canvas size: Exactly 100x186 (use the template).
Colours: Max 8 (7 from the palette +1 of transparency only on the corners).
Transparency: Required. (There are round corners cutted from the template, which need to stay, but you are not allowed to add transparency on the card surface).
Animation: No.

The challenge thread will have all the challenge updates. The thread is also a great place to post your WIPs.

It's time to vote for the latest pixel art challenge: Light and dark.

VOTE NOW!

Let's draw some philosophers but with puns.

The idea is to choose a famous philosopher, historical or contemporary (you are not restricted to antiquity only, as the name of the challenge could suggest), create a word play with their name, and draw the result. Depending on the period it should be a sculpture, a painting or a photo, but we can be flexible if you get creative.

If you have no ideas for philosophers, names, or puns you can use one of these basic examples:

Sockrates
Planto
Aristurtle

Canvas: Max 100x200 (vertical)
Colours: Max 32
Transparency: Optional (probably necessary for a sculpture and can be used for irregullar frames of painting or photo)
Animation: No

This week we want you to depict fire in movement. You can go for a sole flame sprite, or include the source of fire, or animate a whole scene with surounding environment. You are not limited to a typical fire colour palette. You can go for cold flame, chemical flame or magical flame, and be creative with your palette. The flame needs to be at least recognisable. The most important aspect in this challenge is animation and it have to consist at least 8 different frames.

Canvas: Max 100x100;

Colours: Max 9 (including transparency);

Transparency: Optional;

Animation: Required, (min. frames 8).

The challenge thread will have all the challenge updates. The thread is also a great place to post your WIPs.

Today we celebrate the second anniversary of PJ discord. A lot of time had passed and many characters were typed. For the current challenge we will go back in time, long before we could type, to medieval iluminated initials.
 

Choose one letter from the alphabet and paint an initial using colours from the Rich14 Palette that Christoballs has made from illuminated manuscripts:

We also share this example of a person counting pixels, just to be sure we are on the same page:

The medieval period is our inspiration, but we are not limited to it. If you want to use a letter from an other alphabet than latin, go for it. If you are not interested in medieval aesthetics or themes, you can go with gothic horror, cyberpunk, anime, postapocalyptic, superhero comic books, stone age or whatever your imagination will surprise us with. Just remember that there have to be one large, recognisable letter and it have to be wildly decorated with a character or characters, animals, monsters, flowers, skulls, computers, clockwork mechanisms, elemental magic spells... and the list goes on ad infinitum.
 

Canvas: Exactly 100x100.
Colours: Max 14 (use the provided palette).
Transparency: No.
Animation: No.

 

We as pixel artists have a very small rate of influence on world economics, but we can interpret our surrounding reality and express it in pixel art.

Let's imagine a game protagonist suffering the effects of inflation, and let's help them by making coin powerups, or money bills, or - if you find yourself very inspired and creative - any other physical means of payment, historical or fictional.

It need to be recognisable as a game powerup/collectible item; it needs to be recognisable as a physical currency, and it need to be at least delicately animated, whenever it is just levitating, spinning, shining, or dissaperaing after being picked up.

 

Canvas: Exactly 32x32.

Colours: Max 7 (including transparency).

Transparency: Required.

Animation: Required.

Let's imagine a paralel world where vegetation has skeletons.

This week's task is to draw a skeleton (or some form of a cross-section where bones are visible) of a plant or fungus. There are no boundaries in style. It can be a sprite, a scene or a "portrait". It can be very cartoonish or hiperrealistic, and it can be anthropomorphic or zoomorphic, but it needs to have at least a skull and a spine. Limbs are diserable, but not necessary if you will go for something like a snake liana for example. For your bones you can take inspiration from animals existing in real world or fiction, or invent your own, but the owner of the skeleton needs to at least somehow resemble something from our Plantae or Fungi Kingdoms (this limitation is only to exclude hacking the challenge like drawing a human and saying "in my fictional world this is a plant"). Go for something like a flower with arms and legs, a mushroom with strange shaped skull, a tree with large chest, and have fun.

The mandatory palette is Forest-16 by Eclipse89
 

Canvas: Max 200x200.
Colours: Max 16 + transparency (use the palette).
Transparency: Optional.
Animation: No.

 

In dominating culture we are used to divide the year into four seasons, but this is not an universal experience. In ancient Egypt there were only 3 seasons: Inundation/Flood (which was a good thing), Emergence/Growth and Low Water/Harvest. Today, 15th august the celebration of the Flood of the Nile starts, and becasue of that we will depict 3 Egyptian seasons.

Draw an isometric scene from egyptian life including architecture or agriculture, animals, crops, people etc. 3 times - in 3 different egyptian seasons.

If for example you will choose a house, draw the same house during each egyptian season.

Canvas: Exactly 300x100 horizontal (100x100 for each season).
Colours: Max 32.
Transparency: Optional.
Animation: Optional.
 

The challenge thread will have all the challenge updates. The thread is also a great place to post your WIPs.

This week we want you to make a mockup of a game sequel that never happened.

You can interpret it literally, and imagine a nonexistent sequel, or take a sequel that was made, but overlooked for a variety of reasons (atrocious 3D, or simply a terrible game).

If you are going for 1:1 continuation with same type/genre/style of the game, try to mimic the artstyle or other essential characteristics, but invent your own assets, or add some other form of orginality to it, so it will definitely look like a sequel, not an addon or mission pack for the same game.

But if you feel very corageous, go wild and turn a platformer into an FPS, an RTS into a board game or a farming simulator into a Soulslike.

The challenge thread will have all the challenge updates. The thread is also a great place to post your WIPs.

This week we want you to make an animated furniture enemy.

Choose one item like a closet, chair, dresser, table, bookshelf, coat hanger or a desk (by the rule of cool we will accept also a large home appliance equipment like a fridge, washing mashine or a stove), and create a cool, "gamey" sprite design of it and animate it as an enemy in a game.

The animation needs to be something typical we can recognise like idle, walk, run, hit or fire a projectile, and it needs to have at least 8 frames. If it will be something like super fast hit, try adding few frames of a windup or/and a cooldown. If your walk, run or jump design demands to have less frames in a cycle, add another cycle with a variation.

 

The challenge thread will have all the challenge updates. The thread is also a great place to post your WIPs.

We are going to build our own pixel personal computers this time, but you are allowed to interpret the title of this challenge however it it possible.

You can draw a technical scheme or a realistic drawing of all the components you would like to have in your PC in all the right places. You can imagine how PC intestines would look like in near future, or entirely science fiction, using alien technology. You can create a fantastic computer using a steampunk, dieselpunk, clockpunk, stonepunk, atompunk, elfpunk... or whatever else punk there is. Or maybe go for Rube Goldberg machine kind of thing with dominoes, and hamster wheels? Or you love your current computer setup or are satisfied with it enouigh to call it your dream PC and you will just draw what you have on your desk right now? And finally, if some painterly, abstract or dreamy impression of a PC interior is your thing, go for it!

All you need is a 100x90px PC case (vertical or horizontal - you choose, it is your build) and max 64 colours, becasue dreams are supposed to be colourful. Animation is not necessary, but If you want to add some blinking LED lights, rotating gears or a cobweb weaving spider, you are allowed to.

The WARdobe pixel art challenge is complete and we have three new champions. This week's challenge awards go to the following pieces:

Thanks so much to all who took the time to vote and participate in the challenge! Check out the WARdobe forum thread for more information.

All weekly challenges until October 23th are part of Pixelween 2022, a contest with prizes.

You will be drawing a splash screen for your own horror video game. Pick a name for your game and draw its logotype along with a thematic illustration and/or a character selection/creation interface (this may hint the genre of your game but don't feel limited by your choice here in the coming weeks).

In upcoming challenges you will be drawing more mockups for this game.

Technical requirements for this week:

Canvas Size - exactly 160 (horizontal) x 90 (vertical) pixels.
Colors - Max 16, use Vampire-16 palette by polyphrog:

Transparency - No.
Animation - No.

We're excited to hear who will be joining, let us know in the comments with an "I'm in"!

This is the second challenge out of four Pixelween 2022 challenges, a contest with prizes.

Those sneaky ghosts of Halloween have captured four belowed colors of our vampiric palette! (which were voted out by PJ discord users).

This week, you will be drawing a gameplay screen of the first level of your original thriller video game. If you also participated last week's challenge, you are supposed to somehow continue the same game concept (of course change of ideas are welcome). If this is your first week, you can start with a fresh idea here.

Technical requirements for this week:

Canvas Size - exactly 160 (horizontal) x 90 (vertical) pixels.
Colors - Max 12 only colors from the palette below:

Transparency - No.
Animation - No.

Welcome to the third challenge out of four Pixelween 2022 challenges, a contest with prizes.

Malicious ghosts of the Halloween striked again and snatched another four colors of our vampiric palette.
 

This time, you will be focusing on a main/final boss of the game. It can be a gameplay screen of a boss fight, a mockup of a boss level, a boss introduction cutscene, a boss battle cinematic or a boss death scene still, in your original thriller video game. If you also participated last week's challenge, you are supposed to somehow continue the same game concept (of course change of ideas are welcome). If this is your first week, you can start with a fresh idea here.

Technical requirements for this week:

Canvas Size - exactly 160 (horizontal) x 90 (vertical) pixels.
Colors - Max 8 only colors from the palette below:

Transparency - No.
Animation - No.

4th week out of four Pixelween 2022 challenges, a contest with prizes, starts now.

Ghostly tricksters had different idea to confuse and scare you. This time they turn all their wicked deeds upside down, take away all the colours left in our vampiric palette, and leave all the colours they took before. You will be using all 8 colours previously voted out on discord, and none of the 8 colours we were using last week.

The topic of the 4th week is "Game Over", and that includes any possible way of ending a game, a run in a game, a main story in a game, or any other circumstances that makes you start over or load a save, or rage quit, or simply, turn off a finished game. You can make a mockup of your game in the moment of death of the player, or loosing all the lives, hearts, tries, etc, with a classic "game over" writing, or go for a more fancy death screen, or a still of a death animation. You can paint an end game screen, or a part of a clipshow expalining all the outcomes of player's choices, or a still of an ending game animation, or even ending credits with concept art showoff. There are countless ways of ending a video game and if none of known to you are satisfying you can even invent a new one. The one thing that have to be clear about it is that this is the end.

Technical requirements for this week:

Canvas Size - exactly 160 (horizontal) x 90 (vertical) pixels.
Colors - Max 8 only colors from the palette below:

Transparency - No.
Animation - No.

The challenge thread will have all the challenge updates. The thread is also a great place to post your WIPs.

This week we want you to draw 5 or more 16x16px icons of game items. What kind of items or game genre are entirely up to your imagination. The icons themselves have to be 16x16, but how big will be your canvas and what will you do to the rest of it, to present your icons, is not our bussines.

Canvas Size - open, (depends on how many 16x16px icons you will draw, and how you arrange them).
Colors - Max 20, use Mazzical 20 Palette by yedamameday.

Transparency - No.
Animation - No.

The challenge thread will have all the challenge updates. The thread is also a great place to post your WIPs.

This week we are creating a collection of postal stamps representative for our Pixel Joint community and our love for pixel art.

You can choose any  theme you like, whenever it is related to pixel art, or not. Beautiful landscapes, famous painting reproductions, architectural landmarks, classic video games, cute animals, historical figure portraits (Pixel Nerd included) - all are very welcome. Just remember to make sure it is a Pixel Joint stamp by adding some form of a logo or writing at least the "PJ" letters. If you want to add the price of the stamp, use the imaginary pixel currency (for example 10px).

We will be using mail24 palette created by Hyohnoo.

And for the canvas you can choose one from the examples or create your own by using the provided frame tilesset of 16x16 tiles (so the canvas dimensions have to be a multiple of 16px).
 

 

The challenge thread will have all the challenge updates. The thread is also a great place to post your WIPs.

This week's challenge is simple. Draw 3 sprites of different autumnal leaves using the Autumn Glow palette made by Sonnenstein. Leaves have to differ by colour and shape.

https://lospec.com/palette-list/autumn-glow




Canvas Size - Max 200x200.
Colors - Max 21, only colors from the provided palette + transparency.
Transparency - Yes.
Animation - No.

Red Planet Day is observed annually on November 28, so we are going to observe it in pixel art.

Use our canvas, and add 8 colours of your choosing (as the number of planets in our system), and your imagination.

You are free to make a photorealistic, actual mars, but you can also make a very "artistic" interpretation with beautiful, exaggerated canyons, or in a style of a cute video game. It can be scientifically factual and contemporary, but also very fictional like including near or very, very far future colonisation, or fantastic alien live. It even don't have be literally a "red planet", you can go with green (after terraforming) or blue (filled with oceans, as some scientist suggest mars were in the past), or you can imagine mars going through a fire volcanic phase or ice globe phase or entirely urbanised by super technically advanced civilisation billion years in the future. Just make it obvious somehow that this is still a Mars we are looking at.

Of course the sky is also your canvas and you can fill it with moons, stars, nebulae, apocalyptical asteroid explosions, spaceships or gigatnic celestial beings, or science fiction megastructures sticking out from the planet surface. But if this is not somethig you want to do, or have no time this week, you can submitt a transparent version with a planet circle only (delete the black sky part of the canvas).

Canvas Size - Exactly 300x300 (use the provided file).
Colors - Max 11 (black and red from our canvas + 8 of your own, and transparency, but only if you decide to skip the sky).
Transparency - Optional.
Animation - No.

This time we are animating downhill sledding action. This is a slightly northern-hemisphere-centric, wintertime challenge (even if not many see any snow these times) so if you feel excluded, you can slide the sled on sand dunes, or go with a ponton sliding down on a huge water slide in waterpark, or even a some sort of a cart downhill ride?

The idea is that we want to see a character/charatcers sitting/lying/standing on some sort of a vehicle which is moving fast downhill. But we don't want to see the movement of the vehicle itself, but only the character and the suroundings (background, foreground - parallax animation very welcome). So animate things like clothing, hair or fur, trees passed by. Slight movements of the vehicle (like vibrating, bouncing, flattenig due to speed) are acceptable, but don't make it the main focus of the animation. Keep the vehicle in in the same position of the canvas.

Use the Quested Mountain Palette by polyphrog

Canvas Size - Max 130x100 (horizontal).
Colors - Max 12 (use the provided palette).
Transparency - No.
Animation - Required.
 

This week we do a folloup to a sport event, most are familiar with. Choose a football player (male or female) who is your hero, who you admire, who you like, or (if you are not a football fan, but still want to participate), one you think will look good in pixel art. It can be an active player, a retired one, or a historic figure. If you are really not into real people, you can choose a fictional character, but it have to be a football player (like Captain Tsubasa Oozora), not someone once seen standing next to a ball.

You are allowed to choose if you want it to be a portrait, or an action scene. Follow the apropriate canvas specs. You also have freedom in colour choice but you have to choose 11 colours, becasue that is the rule.

 

Canvas Size - 80x60 (vertical) for portrait or 100x60 (horizontal or vertical) for action scene.
Colors - exactly 11 (of course).
Transparency - No.
Animation - No.

Challengewise, the end of this pixel year was pretty darn exciting. After scary Pixelween and cheerful Secret Santa we are covered by splendid art, but we are not over yet. We still have the last annual event to go through so take a short, well deserved rest, and grab your mice, tablets or other tools.

You are going to either finish any unfinished and yet unsubmitted challenge entry from 2022 or make a new entry for a challenge from 2022 you wanted to participate in, but couldn't.

To refresh your memory and make your choice go to Weekly Challenges and check the ALL CHALLENGES column on the right. The first challenge of the 2022 was "The Wide West". Please make sure you write in the description which challenge you chose and make sure you follow it's rules and limitations.

You are not limited to one challenge only. If you can't decide which missed challenge you want to refill, choose no more and just make separate entries for different challenges ;)
 

Canvas Size - see the corresponding challenge
Colours - see the corresponding challenge
Transparency - see the corresponding challenge
Animation - see the corresponding challenge


 

New year's eve is behind us but we haven't got a pixel celebration yet.

Fireworks can look beautiful, but not everyone loves them. Excessive amounts launched in dense populated areas can lead to unnecessary stress and trauma in animals, so if you have decided to skip fireworks this year, you can pixel them now, and have that box checked.

Animate firework explosions in the sky, by using 4 CMYK colours only, while black have to be used as background.

Canvas Size - max 223x223.
Colours - max 4 (CMYK, black have to be used as background).
Transparency - no.
Animation - required.

Make a stereographic animated GIF of a scene, moving back and forth between two views of the scene to create a 3D effect, like this examples:

Example 1

Example 2

Canvas Size - Max 128 x 128.
Colors - Max 24.
Transparency - No.
Animation - required - (Min 2 frames Max 5 frames).

Challenge idea is a collaborative effort of eishiya and  Stickman

The challenge thread will have all the challenge updates. The thread is also a great place to post your WIPs.