Illustrated Academic Essay - Pixel Art

Pixel art is mostly known as a form of digital art which is done by using raster graphics software, where the images created lose quality when they are resized. A digital image is made out of millions of pixels, which are normally represented by dots or squares and are not visible in high quality images, but in pixel art all the pixels are purposely shown as if you were zooming in on a raster image. Although pixel art is more associated with digital art, some visual artists have found a way to recreate pixel-like art in real life, such as mosaics and beadwork.

Pixel art was initially used in old computers and consoles due to the small screen resolutions and low-powered hardware at the time. The characters and objects in the games were not so visually complex and they had a restricted color palette. With that said, many developers focused on having vibrant colors for the characters in the game in order to make them stand out from the background, like the Sonic the Hedgehog video game franchise, which was developed by Sega and released in 1991. The game mostly focuses to convey the speed and power of the console, and is not really associated with pixel art gaming since the graphics of the game has developed enormously since its first release. 

                                              Figure 1 - Sonic the Hedgehog

The first video game made was a tennis simulator called Pong which only made use of white square-shaped pixels on a black background (switched off pixels). The pixels on screen were used to represent the two paddles, one for each player, a line to divide the screen in the middle, to give the idea of a tennis net, and the ball. The game was a great success and it inspired a lot of games that have come after, like Space Invaders and Pac-Man, where the games were also made out entirely of pixels graphics.

                                                Figure 2 - Pong Video Game

Another iconic pixel character is Mario, originally from the Super Mario Bros. video game released in 1985 by Nintendo. The character of Mario was created with a big nose and mustache in order to hide the lack of facial detail and to avoid creating the animations for the mouth and take unnecessary memory space and also because the NES system had a screen resolution of only 256x240 pixels.

                                               Figure 3 - Super Mario Bros

The first graphics software program that enabled users to create pixel art was known as SuperPaint, released by Richard Shoup in 1972. After that, in 1977, the video game console Atari 2600 was released, and it contained 2D sprites in games such as Space Invaders and Pac-Man.

Even though pixel art began due to the restrictions of the hardware used, it is still popular nowadays and has been used to create modern games such as Citypixel and Habbo, and also games on hand-held devices such as Nintendo DS, PS Vita and cellphones, such as snake. Some designers still use pixel art today due to the sharp art one can produce and also due to the fact that since the sprites do not take up too much memory space, the animations will run smoother given the advancements in the hardware nowadays. 

These are some of the pixel art works I created using Photoshop CS6:

                                                           
                                                  Figure 4 - Pixel art sprites

In order to create these assets I opened a new document, zoomed at around 1000%, and then used the pencil tool with 1px in size. Then to save it in a large size, I copied the image created in a new project, go to image size (Alt + Ctrl + I), change the width and height to 1600 and select ‘Nearest Neighbor (preserve hard edges)’ from the drop down menu at the bottom of the window.

Some artists are so fascinated with the unique style of pixel art that they have decided that they wanted to create it also in real life, as painting or sculptures. This clearly shows that pixel art is not used because of hardware restrictions anymore, but simply because it looks good and it is an interesting art technique to use.

The main difference between pixel art in real life and digital pixel art is pretty evident; digital pixel art is displayed on screen while real life pixel art can be done by any object that basically has a circular or square shape, in order to create an image. 

After the great impact that popular games such as Pac-Man and Pong made, the idea of having pixel art in gaming has inspired pixel art all over the world, and nowadays it is not used only in gaming, but also to create pixel-like sculptures.

Even though pixel art is slowly fading away, it is still being used by some game developers, even to create 3D games, such as Minecraft. Many developers nowadays prefer to use vector shapes to create elements for their games though, since they look more realistic and smooth. But even if in gaming pixel art is not used so much often as it was once, recently there has been a trend of artists that prefer to show pixels on display instead of normal paintings. 

One of the many mediums by which artists create real life pixel art is the Rubik’s Cube. The Rubik’s Cube was invented in 1974, around the time that pixel art was becoming popular. Josh Chalom is an artist who uses the Rubik’s Cube as his canvas to create real life pixel-like art. This type of art is interesting because from a far the art just looks like a pixelated canvas, and only by seeing it up close can one realise that it is actually made out of hundreds of Rubik’s cubes. Chalom explains how detailed this process of creating pixelated art from Rubik’s cubes is, “ You have over 100,000 pixels that you have to adjust and make sure that one’s correctly next to the other.”

                                        Figure 5 - 'Falling Apart' by Josh Chalom 

John O’Hearn is another visual artist that creates pixel-like mosaics using thousands of 6mm BBs. To produce his pixel art he makes use of a computer program that he wrote which is connected to a machine that he invented to help him turn any image into a mosaic. One of Hearn’s most notable work is his Lebron James mosaic which uses 62,016 colored BBs. 

                                 Figure 6 - Lebron James mosaic by John O'Hearn

Bibliography:

Wikipedia.org, (2015). Pixel art. [online] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_art [Accessed 18 April 2015]

Knowyourmeme.com, (2015). Pixel Art. [online] Available at: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/pixel-art [Accessed 18 April 2015]

2dwillneverdie.com, (2015). Pixel Art. [online] Available at: http://2dwillneverdie.com/intro/ [Accessed 18 April 2015]

Mashable.com, (2012). The Pixel Renaissance: Pixel Art's Place in 21st Century Expression. [online] Available at: http://mashable.com/2012/01/20/pixel-art/ [Accessed 19 April 2015]

Chipchick.com, (2010). Josh Chalom’s Falling Apart is Pixel Art on Rubik’s Cubes. [online] Available at: http://www.chipchick.com/2010/09/josh-chalom-rubik-cubes-falling-apart.html [Accessed 19 April 2015]

Nintendolife.com, (2015). Topic: The future of pixel art. [online] Available at: http://www.nintendolife.com/forums/retro/the_future_of_pixel_art [Accessed 19 April 2015]