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A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

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Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#81

Post by rnprince »

Schoenberg, on writing four-voice chorales:

"Even in the limitations of the individual voices, in their relative incompleteness, there are advantages.* The necessity for utilizing them within the narrow range of their effectiveness demands characteristic usage and treatment consistent with the material. Thus the pupil learns by this simple example to heed an important principle of handicraft: to make characteristic use of the strengths and shortcomings of the material at hand.

"*I am taking such pains with these things ... to establish explicitly that these principles are not derived from aesthetics but from practical considerations. If what is known as aesthetics does in fact contain much that is merely practical handling of the material, and if what is known as symmetry is perhaps often not much more than an organization of the material that reveals a sensible regard for its properties, yet I consider it worthwhile to set down these observations. For the conditions of practicality can change, if we take a different view of the material and if the purpose changes."

--Arnold Schoenberg, Harmonielehre

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#82

Post by eigenbom »

Pixel art may have come from the limitations and formats of the past, but it'll continue to evolve and change like other art styles. It's simple to get into and complex to master.

There are some good points in the article, but pixel art in games (or art heavily influenced by pixel art) is a style that many people enjoy, especially when it is done well. It's very puzzle-like and you have to think economically when creating larger pieces. Pixel art and low poly art are fundamental art styles of gaming, I think partially because they are so overtly digital.

I think my favourite pixel artists show how the medium is always changing and getter better, e.g., Paul Robertson, Pixels Huh, Yuriy Gusev (Fool), Barney Cumming, and Mrmo Tarius.

PS. I'm a game developer and also run a pixel art on community on Twitter called @Pixel_Dailies. Come check us out sometime. :)

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#83

Post by gavanwoolery »

the_af wrote: post #80
gavanwoolery wrote: post #17

It is the duty of an artist to fulfill their vision, not someone else's. For this reason, many prominent artists go unknown in their lifetime. The masses are attracted to "bad" art like Thomas Kinkade (I use quotes because the art is not actually bad, just lacks the originality that art connoisseurs seek). I would actually argue that you will have to make a choice between being a popular artist and being good artist…

> For me personally, I think that good pixel art is timeless (emphasis on "good") Agreed about the timelessness. I find good pixel art more timeless than other forms of good videogame art. I thought about it and I think it's actually a case of abstractness, not pixelation. Pixel art is often more abstract. Another example of good non-pixelated game art that has this same quality is Another World 's, which I find awes…

Another World's style is making a comeback in a way, with the low-poly movement (not identical, but along the same lines). See below if you don't know what style I am referring too:

https://www.google.com/search?q=low+poly&safe=off&rlz=1C1CHF...

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#84

Post by gavanwoolery »

pan69 wrote: post #53
Goronmon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And it may well be the case that you don't have the luxury to make this choice. Which, unfortunately, is usually the case when it comes to game development.

Or any sort of development for that matter. I've never worked with a client who said; "Yeah, sure. What ever you think is best". When someone else pays the bills, you're either used as extension to Photoshop or used as a glorified typist.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#85

Post by Tyr42 »

dragontamer wrote: post #22
fgsfdsfgsfds wrote: post #8

Sounds like they should have been developing for PC instead of mobile. The average mobile user plays exploitative "freemium" garbage to kill time in lines. How can you expect them to appreciate the art behind it? Meanwhile, "retro"-style games are doing gangbusters on Steam, selling to people that actually appreciate those styles of art, music, and game design.

While you have a point (and I've given you a +1 vote because of it), the fact remains that the "average person" I know thinks that Street Fighter 4 animations were better than Street Fighter 3. The Chun Li discussion happens a lot in my circle of friends, and I'm always in the minority. Very few people appreciate classic pixel art.

So, if we look to the digital art like Pixar, there are a lot of guidelines from traditional animation to make a scene come alive.

* Squish and Stretch * Fallow through * Secondary Action

These principles really help make dynamic scenes. If you look at the Chun Li animations, you can see that the older one does a better job of using these.

I feel like if the HD version took advantage of these, it would look the best out of all of them, but it failed to reach its full potential in it's medium.

Watch this early Pixar short: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D4NPQ8mfKU0

See how alive and full of emotion the little lamp is?

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#86

Post by Tyr42 »

zeidrich wrote: post #60

A big thing about pixel art and it's issues today is that what he mentions as pixel art, isn't so. I mean, he argues about the way the devices scale his art up and change aspect ratio etc. But on the other hand, he compares a picture of Yoshi at the end to an algorithmically smoothed version. However, Yoshi was never intended to look like the leftmost image. The thing is, pixels aren't square. In fact, when we played…

For anyone else interested in scaling up pixel art, there are alternative methods to just using nearest neighbour, such as EPX or something. I found this article on Datagenics to be pretty solid:

http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/december32013/index.html

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#87

Post by ryanobjc »

This feels like a "modern art" moment.

The key question is, who is your audience?

For a lot of modern art the audience is other insiders. And also, possibly, buyers. The average person may not find it so compelling.

And so it is here as well.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#88

Post by kalleboo »

astrange wrote: post #51
EdSharkey wrote: post #20

I think pixel art by itself is rad and has an audience that appreciates it. For games though, even beyond the problem of the audience not getting the point, in the age of retina displays there are many technical roadblocks with getting the pixels to stay blocky and render the way you want. If one was so inclined to stick with blocky pixel art, one could always render the bitmaps' pixels as filled vector rectangles an…

> There are many technical roadblocks with getting the pixels to stay blocky and render the way you want. Huge blocky pixel art never really looked that way in the first place. The pixels in Atari/NES games were made to go through the various distortions in the video pipeline (composite crossover, scanlines, flickering, misaligned electron guns and all that) that left them with all the hard edges blurred off. The aes…

> Huge blocky pixel art never really looked that way in the first place

Some did. For instance, I played games like LucasArts adventure games and WarCraft 1 on a Mac with a Trinitron display, which faithfully showed the blocks in all their glory. I imagine the experience was similar for other PC games. Not all pixel art was made for NTSC TVs.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#89

Post by mrob »

zeidrich wrote: post #60

A big thing about pixel art and it's issues today is that what he mentions as pixel art, isn't so. I mean, he argues about the way the devices scale his art up and change aspect ratio etc. But on the other hand, he compares a picture of Yoshi at the end to an algorithmically smoothed version. However, Yoshi was never intended to look like the leftmost image. The thing is, pixels aren't square. In fact, when we played…

The SNES supported interlaced video modes, but Super Mario World did not use them. Early consoles achieved progressive scan by sending all the fields at the same polarity (eg. only odd field or only even fields), violating the NTSC standard. This is the reason why they had obvious scanlines on CRTs. Because this is a non-standard mode some modern TVs and capture cards will fail to support it and show interlacing artifacts, but this is not how it looked originally.

Re: A Pixel Artist Renounces Pixel Art

#90

Post by mrob »

the_af wrote: post #75
soup10 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your sentiment, I think the author makes some decent points but is pretty biased towards an aesthetic he prefers and the art tools he's most familiar with. The sf4 example is particularly demonstrating of that, people that do 3d modeling know that it's not as easy to get the arbitrary distortion effects you can do with frame by frame animation, that doesn't make it lower quality animation, it's a trade o…

How can he be biased, beyond his love of pixel art? He more or less concludes pixel art is not the best choice, and he sides with the public's opinion on this issue . Read the comments. He is not blaming anyone for this "pixel tax". To my eyes, the SF4 Chun Li is infinitely inferior to SF3, and I'm not even an animator. And haven't played either game, so I truly have no preconceptions at all in this case.

SF4 has bad animation because it mixes mostly realistic motions with cartoonish anatomy. SF3 consistently uses cartoonish style for both. The only obvious reason somebody might prefer SF4 is if they really hate pixel art. I've played far more SF4 than SF3 and I still prefer the SF3 look.
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