is pixel art, art?

**Gr8t100** · December 22nd, 2005, 09:41 PM

Weird question, but I'm working on a project which requires that particular style and while I am not an frequent poster on the forum, I thought at one point I could go ahead and post a WIP of it for feedback.

But then the thought of "is it considered art?" came to my mind. I personally do, being it involves the placement and use of color to portray an image, similiar to knitting/threading.

What do you guys think?

**Chingwa** · December 22nd, 2005, 09:43 PM

Of Course it's art! Let's see it!

**waronmars** · December 22nd, 2005, 09:47 PM

call the redundancy department of redundancy!

**stoph** · December 22nd, 2005, 10:33 PM

waronmars, that was completely redundant

**Noah Bradley** · December 22nd, 2005, 10:44 PM

If you're really interested in getting critique from the people that know, love, and are dang good at pixel art, here's the place to check out:

http://pixel-arts.org/pixelopolis/

A lot of good people there. Tell 'em silvir sent ya.

**Gr8t100** · December 22nd, 2005, 10:53 PM

Thanks for the replies.

I'll definently post my WIP of the piece that I am working on when I feel that it is at a stage in which it can get a fair and complete critique, don't wanna make it too much of a WIP.

Silvir: Thanks for the link, I never knew of the site, I'm checking it out as we speak, and there is some pretty cool work along with some avid pixel art fanatics.

**Blue** · December 23rd, 2005, 03:19 PM

Pixel art is pretty mind numbing.. i worked on a few games for handhelds and did a lot of it...i can safely tell you that it killed my inner child and left its corpse to rot.

But yea, its still art. Its just a pain to draw by simply arranging squares.

**Qitsune** · December 23rd, 2005, 03:46 PM

It's like digital mosaics...it's a very old art

**egerie** · December 23rd, 2005, 03:59 PM

Originally Posted by Lord Blue

Pixel art is pretty mind numbing.. i worked on a few games for handhelds and did a lot of it...i can safely tell you that it killed my inner child and left its corpse to rot.

But yea, its still art. Its just a pain to draw by simply arranging squares.

That's a shame

I LOVE pixel art. It has it's own unique challenge especially in terms of organisations when it comes to good balanced palettes. The technical side of things is also what I like about it. You have to make something look good and be fun with an extremely restricted amount of disk space, colours, tiles, memory, etc. It's gratifying when you manage to do both because not every pixel weilder can achieve that. You can also have a certain freedom in terms of style with it.
Of course you get ridiculous demands sometimes such as : "This character is off model. Can you move that pixel half a pixel up ?". That's the kind of stuff you hear when being flown to L.A. just to sit down with some Warner Brothers reps & artists. Makes for great jokes

I find pixel art absolutely underated. Not everyone can do it properly, thus when the HUGE fad in graphic design caught on this form of art a few years back, there was a large amount of crap hitting every possible media.

**Number_6** · December 23rd, 2005, 06:21 PM

I like pixel art. I remeber reading an article a few years ago in Computer Gaming World (might have been PC gamer) about someone who was drawing famous historical scenes as pixel art to give it a new impact. It worked for me.