Despite the fact that Oekaki has it's own sections/galleries throughout deviantART, we are finding that more and more people continue to incorrectly place their Oekaki artwork into Pixel Art, which generally results in hours of gallery clean-up.

Despite their similarities, these two styles of art are really quite distinct from each other and that is why deviantART has separated the two.

Oekaki, being the Japanese word for 'doodle', is more of a technical style than a genre. It's often created with specific oekaki software, such as oekakiBBS, paintchat and opencanvas, although it can be created using anything; msPaint and Photoshop are used just as often.

Pixel art and oekaki have the tendancy to be often similar, but they both have their distinct characteristics:

* Pixel Art is a form of digital art, in which images are edited on the pixel level. This does not necessarily mean that every single pixel must be placed by hand, but instead only for the most part, depending on what is considered pure pixel art. The use of things like the fill tool and brush tools are (arguably) valid tools for pixel art as they only speed up the process of creating pixel art. Use of filters such as anti-aliasing and such, however, are not considered valid. You can, however, manually simulate anti-aliasing.

A common misconception is that any drawing done with the pencil tool in a small drawing space can be considered pixel art. Pixel art is categorized by the method of drawing, not the results.


* Oekaki is an image which is usually drawn first using an antialiased line tool as a pencil or marker and then filling in the drawing with colors that may or may not be blended. This type of art is derived from services that provide simple drawing tools to accomplish this, like online whiteboards.



While we will continue to clean out the galleries, we ask your help (the artists) in ensuring your artwork is in the proper categories.

Thank you