Pixel Art — the Essence of Retro Electronic Entertainment

• Having recently talked about Studio Pixel’s Cave Story, I thought: why not talk about pixel art?

• From Wikipedia ,

Pixel art is a form of digital art, created through the use of raster graphics software, where images are edited on the pixel level. Graphics in most old (or relatively limited) computer and video games, graphing calculator games, and many mobile phone games are mostly pixel art. Pixel art is distinguished from other forms of digital art by an insistence upon manual, pixel-level editing of an image (without the application of image filters, automatic anti-aliasing or special rendering modes), often at close magnification. In this form, it is commonly said that “each pixel was placed carefully” to achieve a desired result.

• Pixel art, while not aware of it at the time, constituted a major part of the art I perceived as a child. Evident in retro video games, graphics drawn in such way was to me instantly related to high technology. It looked unique and inspired. The precision put behind each tiny image is more than that of a large modern image, which is amazing. Today, as an adult, pixel art is still interesting to me. Video games with retro-style, in which pixel art is heavily utilized, still bring a warm nostalgia to time passed. I think only those who have witnessed pixel art as children grow up to appreciate it.

Read on for examples of this type of art and how to create it yourself.

• You cannot know whether if an image was drawn pixel by pixel or not, but sometimes the low-res ones of them are kind of blocky in appearance.

• There are artists who are specialized in pixel art. The larger image below is a great example of this kind of art. The image is colorful, detailed, and laid in an isometric view. It’s also big, so you can imagine it took the artist a lot of time to finish it. The smaller image is a cropped part from the original one, enlarged 10 times. This lets you see how each pixel looks like.

Click to see the original-sized images.
The smaller image is a cropped part from the first.
image source

• So, I thought I’d try my luck drawing something, and the image below is the result. Aside from its poor quality (I know, it was just a random piece), you can notice each pixel in its place. I had to magnify the image 8 times the original size to work on each pixel independently.

Original 50×50 px image.

The same image enlarged 8 times.

I used mtPaint 3.21 — it’s designed for pixel art. It’s free.

• So what do you think about pixel art? Thinking about making your own? or have your already made some? Let us know in either case!