In this first episode of a new series, we dive into the early years of commercial pixel art, from its origins in monochrome arcade games to the launch of the NES!
Pixel art confuses me Pixels were a necessity of the technological limitations of the time and people who copy that "style" are either nostalgic people, hipsters, or people taking advantage of the other two. It just looks real lame to me.
Limitations can be a good thing. There are certain things you can do with pixel art that are impossible in other mediums; it's superficially similar to mosaic art, except that mosaic has obvious clear divisions between the color units with no potential for color bleed, and the units can have irregular shapes. Consequently, in pixel art a row of pixels can act as both contour line and shading simultaneously, and the entire shape of the piece as a whole can be adjusted through palette-cycling, "animating" it without actually drawing any frames. Embracing the limitations of pixel art compels the artist to be more creative inside those limitations, which is what allows mastery to exist in the first place. Much of the terrible art direction of today stems from artists having no opportunity to master their tools, because of industry standards changing too rapidly for anyone to achieve mastery. Deliberately stepping back and learning from a more limited medium is actually to the benefit of more "advanced" art--I think of how the art director on Vagrant Story was himself an experienced pixel artist. It was that industry background that lead him to do things like use 2D textures simulate 3D lighting, without actually having a lighting engine to work with. I would recommend watching Mark Ferrari's GDC lecture on pixel art. He was one of the original masters that pioneered western 8-bit PC art, approaching it from the perspective of a traditional artist trying to express something in a digital medium and (in his own words) "doing things with Deluxe Paint that EA never thought [he] would do with Deluxe Paint." The man actually invented dithering, of all things: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-aMcJ1Jvtef0.html
@@lost-worlds i know stuff like the pc98 had amazing pixel art but what I'm talking about is idiots on social media drawing characters like "pickle rick" in pixel style, like thats anything meaningful or difficult, it just seems so cheap to appeal to pop culture and consumerism.
I agree. Pixel art had a real charm but they were really trying to push the limits with what they had back then. And it's difficult to separate pixel art from CRT technology. Modern pixel art can be a bit uninspired but there's still a lot of great stuff, although modern display technologies are not kind to pixel art, showing all the magic behind the pixels as they don't have the CRT effect. Some of the best pixel art ever is Metal Slug in my opinion, and a good modern example is Owl Boy.
