Why Pixel Art?

[Jetrel]

Eleazar - please leave this discussion if you're going to argue. Neither you, nor I, can give anything better than anecdotal evidence for our claims. Because we only have anecdotal evidence, this degenerates into just "your expertise versus mine"; the only way we can prove our point is to accuse the other person of incompetence. It already has, and that is, in no way, constructive - that's little better than trolling. The intention of this thread was to be a brainstorm, not an argument. Brainstorming does not work unless the ideas presented can be provided without contest. That's the entire point; to tolerate stuff one would normally shoot down immediately. Saying "actually ur wrong, C++ sucks" would be equally unwelcome in a "great things about C++" thread; even if the person had a provable point.

Anecdotally:
I've spent a few thousand manhours making sprites for videogames which were NPA; in fact, virtually all of my early work on wesnoth was NPA, even though they looked loosely like actual pixel art. During all of that time, I really thought all of the claims about pixel art were complete BS, and railed against it myself; you can probably find some nice long sermons of mine, on this very forum, cutting down pixel art as a working method with nothing to recommend it. However - because I have an open-minded, engineering mindset, I gave it a chance, and I found that when I was working with pixel art, it made my small-scale sprite and tile work faster and cleaner. It does NOT deliver that benefit in other domains of art - portraits, landscapes, and such would be agonizingly slow to make in pixel-art, and actually would look grainier; simply because precise control of individual pixels backfires when you have so incredibly many to push.


Like any "sum of life experiences", I can't defend that empirically. If you disagree, please don't insult me by saying I'm wrong.


Edit: To play to the crowd, this definitely illustrates why John Gruber doesn't have comments on his site.

[Eleazar]

The intention of this thread was to be a brainstorm, not an argument. Brainstorming does not work unless the ideas presented can be provided without contest.

In the future, when you have specific intentions for what type of discussion a thread should have, please try to state them clearly from the beginning. Looking back i still don't see any clues that this was supposed to be brainstorming only-- if i had i would have respected your intention.

[Jetrel]

The intention of this thread was to be a brainstorm, not an argument. Brainstorming does not work unless the ideas presented can be provided without contest.

In the future, when you have specific intentions for what type of discussion a thread should have, please try to state them clearly from the beginning. Looking back i still don't see any clues that this was supposed to be brainstorming only-- if i had i would have respected your intention.

Indeed - I didn't note that at all. Thank you for the civil response.

[wayfarer]

Anecdotally:
I've spent a few thousand manhours making sprites for videogames which were NPA; in fact, virtually all of my early work on wesnoth was NPA, even though they looked loosely like actual pixel art. During all of that time, I really thought all of the claims about pixel art were complete BS, and railed against it myself; you can probably find some nice long sermons of mine, on this very forum, cutting down pixel art as a working method with nothing to recommend it. However - because I have an open-minded, engineering mindset, I gave it a chance, and I found that when I was working with pixel art, it made my small-scale sprite and tile work faster and cleaner. It does NOT deliver that benefit in other domains of art - portraits, landscapes, and such would be agonizingly slow to make in pixel-art, and actually would look grainier; simply because precise control of individual pixels backfires when you have so incredibly many to push.


Like any "sum of life experiences", I can't defend that empirically. If you disagree, please don't insult me by saying I'm wrong.

Slightly Off Topic.
But yeah pixel pushing itself has some points, still I prefer some brush strokes in certain areas of pixel art.

[wayfarer]

Elobarating a bit. Art is random the trick is to know what to keep and what not.
laying every pixel carefully planed before hand is not random.
I still stand to my opinion that for example hair, textile and other by nature random features are better threaded with a brushstroke than a careful laid out pixel structure.

[thespaceinvader]

Who says you can't sling hard-edged pixels at random? That's what I do when shading appropriately random things, particularly hair or fur.

[wayfarer]

Well you spread it out but a brush is never as exact as a pencil. You will have artefacts and that is the one thing I always want. Just a small slipp and you'll get unexpetced results.

You'll have some further work afterwards cleaning it up but in my opinion the effect is worth it.

[Sgt. Groovy]

But if you can make it look "random" by exact pixel placement, isn't that good enough. Isn't the end result what counts?

[wayfarer]

Heavens I would love to know what I am doing sometimes.
As I don't when I look at some of my older sprites.
I know one or the other trick but I made some very nice textures by "accident". (or learned a new one or the other)
I just have anectotical evidences.

[Sgt. Groovy]

Getting good stuff out by accident is nice, but oftentimes the process isn't repeatable.

[wayfarer]

Yeah but sometimes it is.

[dipseydoodle]

It's more (may I say, unneeded)work, that is if you randomly place pixels.

If you now how a brush stroke will look, why not use it? It is better then trial then error. IMO.

EDIT: With that said. I won't add more unless TSI has anything else to say. Would you like an example by chance?