16 Facts About Pixel art

Pixel art is a form of digital art drawn with graphical software where images are built using pixels as the only building block.

Older forms of pixel art tend to employ smaller palettes, with some video games being made using just two colors .

Precise definition of pixel art is a subject of debate, but an artwork is usually considered as such if deliberate thought was put into each individual pixel of the image.

Oekaki is a form of digital art done at small resolutions that presents many similarities with pixel art.

Some earliest examples of pixel art could be found in analog electronic advertising displays, such as the ones from New York City during the early 20th century, with simple monochromatic light bulb matrix displays extant circa 1937.

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Term pixel art was first published by Adele Goldberg and Robert Flegal of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1982.

The golden age of the demoscene and its associated pixel art milieu is often regarded as beginning in the early 1990s.

Over time, the overlapping but separate communities on Pixelation and Pixel Joint were engaged in online discourse about the nature of pixel art, inspiring widely shared tutorials and arguably contributing to a new paradigm that was different to the pixel art of the 1990s.

The relatively strict ideas of what constituted acceptable pixel art, enforced by moderators on Pixel Joint, led to repeated conflict but contributed to pixel art standing out as a separate medium at a time when many types of digital paintings were shared on the internet, on websites like DeviantArt.

In video games for computers and consoles during the 2000s, pixel art was largely abandoned in favor of more modern graphics, particularly based on 3D.

Many professional game artists who had been working with pixel art either left the industry or switched to other forms of digital art.

Pixel art continued to be a popular style in games across platforms, with releases such as Eastward, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge, Songs of Conquest, Vikings on Trampolines and Loop Hero .

Some argued that the recent wave of pixel art games, released thirty years after the release of the SNES, was largely influenced by nostalgia and freedom from publishers, responding to unoriginal stories in modern video game blockbusters and wanting to integrate contemporary themes, such as ecological concerns and representation of queer characters.

Pixel art typically involves a more careful and deliberate placement of pixels compared to other forms of digital art.

Traditionally, pixel art was done on a single layer, similar to painting on a canvas, but modern software permits work with multiple layers, potentially adding animation or transparency to the foreground while keeping a static background.

Pixel art is a flexible medium and shares traditions of figure drawing, landscapes and abstract with traditional media.