I've grown up around art my entire life. Art history, traditional media, new media, photography...it's in my blood. As computers became popular I adopted the things technology could provide for we artists. But with the swell in new media that has occurred in the past 10, 15 years, it's impossible to know everything about everything.

Though you know I try

One of what digital media brought along was something I had never considered nor understood how to do: pixel art. Sure, it seems straight forward. Art made of pixels. Kind of like the stippling technique that developed out of Impressionism, kind of like mosaic, and kind of something all its own.

This week I "swapped" fetish for Pixel Art by talking to ^ShoneGold about the basics of this tedious but surprisingly impressive artform.

By writing this article, which will hopefully exceed the length of its introduction (oops), I hope to educate my watchers--mostly photographers--about how Pixel Art is made and categorized.


I'd also like to note that we've all done this, so keep an eye on your favorite gallery directors (and your not-so-favorites! all of us!) to see how "outsiders" have learned about other media and brought that understanding to those of you who also may not have been exposed.

So! Pixel Art...

The first aspect of Pixel Art I was delighted to learn is that it's an art for the expecially anal retentive. OCD? Try Pixel Art to assuage your symptoms! The process is painstaking and tedious, but quite rewarding, as the artist lays each pixel manually, one at a time, to create the tiny masterpiece.

It is this process of application that takes as much focus as the aesthetics of the final product. The application of the pixels can be seen when the piece if magnified in a program like Photoshop or any image viewer.

Evidence of the manually laid pixels can also be seen in the way the piece is shaded, which is called dithering.

With your pencil tool set at 1 pixel in size, you would individually lay each shade of color in your decided pattern to create the texture, shading, and depth in your pixelwork.

There are even rules about the colors you can use, which is one of those kind of rules that actually forces you to be more creative and skilled as you try to force your way through the rules to create the desired outcome. That was my impression, anyway! The color palette is restricted to 256 colors *or less* and there are a number of other rules that force the pixel artist to become a master of dithering:
No computer generated text can be used--any text must be created pixel by pixel just like the rest of the piece
No shading tools, gradients, or brushes can be used--again, the pencil tool set at 1 pixel is the only method of application
No auto anti aliasing or reduced opacities, and only a limited amount of flood fill--remember, dithering is your friend if you are a pixel artist!

You might be wondering how the hell you can see what you're doing if you're working 1 by 1...by 1...by 1 by 1, etc. Magnification of 600-1200% is used in order to lay each pixel precisely. As you can imagine, it takes a long time to create a finished artwork in this manner, anywhere from 5 to 50 hours or more.


The thing that got me most confused was when I went to browse the galleries. Isometric and Nonisometric. What? What the heck is that.


So I asked, and I learned. And now I unravel the mystery for you other pixel-illiterate artists!

Nonisometric

Nonisometric pixel art is your head-on, straight forward composition. It can have a great amount of depth and perspective using the same techniques as drawing and painting, but this is all created through the dithering and color of the pixels selected. Nonisometric follows all the rules described above.

Here are some examples:




Now if you want to get a little MORE complicated...

Isometric

Isometric pixel art is a way of simulating a 3D look in a pixel artwork. Genuine isometric 3D art is created at a 30 degree angle, but this is not possible with pixel art while still maintaining a straight line, so it is created at an angle of 26.565 degrees. This is achieved by drawing across 2 pixels, up 1, across 2, up 1, at a 1:2 ratio throughout the entire piece.

Here are some examples:





If this has piqued your interest, I highly suggest that you not only browse the Pixel Art galleries, but check out ^ShoneGold's journal tutorial about Isometric Pixel Art.


and I'm spent! Hope you learned as much as I did and found out what the deal is with this digital, yet surprisingly traditionally created, art medium.