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I wanted to make you all aware of a new hobby of mine. Music has been my main interest for most of my life, and near the end of my high school days, I picked up photography as a secondary pastime. I definitely consider photography a visual art, but to be honest, I’ve always wanted to find a freer form of visual art that I would progress at.

Pixel Art is where you create very low resolution pieces of art one pixel at a time. The best example of this is to look at really old video games, like the early Final Fantasy games. Here’s Cecil from Final Fantasy IV:

This is what you would call non-isometric pixel art, because the pixels are from a 2-dimensional perspective. Any perception of depth must be created with the use of colors, shades and shadows.

This is the style I prefer, since I like doing portraits of people. And generally, things that remind me of 90s DOS games hold a special place in my heart.

The other style of pixel art is isometric, which adds the third dimension by making each block a diamond instead of a square. So no matter how you stack them, it’s going to look 3-dimensional.

Popular examples of isometric pixel art are games like Farmville orHabbo Hotel. In both of those screenshots, you’ll notice the grid is clearly outlined along the floor of the map; each square is given a 3-dimensional perspective. It is important to note that no systems or computer monitors actually use diamond pixels. For isometric pixel art then, you create isometric blocks, squares or objects non-isometrically and build with those.

You can see clearly that this isometric car is created non-isometrically (notice the square pixels) but when you zoom out, it looks 3D.

That method doesn’t interest me though, so I’m glad I spent so much time explaining it. Feel free to read the tutorial on how to draw this car.

One of the reasons I’ve been enjoying this form of art so much ties back to my post about limitation, which I encourage you to read. There are many ways one is limited by pixel art, making it quite a creative workout.

Firstly, you are largely limited by your frame, since the whole point of pixel art is to create a low resolution object. Whenever I start drawing from a reference photo, I look at the resolution of the photo and open a document with the same aspect ratio, but less pixels. So, for example, if my reference photo is 600 x 800 pixels (3×4), I’ll open a document that’s something like 120 x 160 pixels. You have to be careful not to start in too much detail, or you’ll end up having to expand your frame because you ran out of pixels. The beauty of digital art is that it’s not a big deal to make your frame bigger, but I once started in too much detail and by the time I was done, the final product was about 250 pixels in height, which took probably about fifteen hours.

Another challenge in pixel art is shading. With a pencil, you can be virtually as detailed as you want. For example, in a portrait, there is a gap between the subject’s upper and lower lip that is virtually black (unless the light source is shooting them right in the face). However, when you only have about a five pixel budget from the top of the upper lip and the bottom of the lower lip, you can’t afford to use an entire line of black, otherwise it will look really weird. When it comes to shadows, you find yourself playing a lot with colors in order to find the combination of shades and colors that will give you the best illusion of accuracy.

Needless to say, it’s extremely difficult to capture unique facial expressions in pixel art. In fact, I think any artist, no matter what style, would tell you the same thing. I would argue though, that in pixel art, it is even more difficult because of the low resolution. When you’re working with such restrictions in detail, the placement of one pixel in an eye, eyebrow, mouth, or facial wrinkle can make the difference between a smirk and a smile, or between annoyance and intrigue. I think this is what I’m worst at.

In any case, practice makes perfect, so I’ll keep practicing. I’ll show you two of my favorite works so far. Lately, since I’ve been rather addicted to pixel art, I’ve been drawing pictures of my friends for them to use as Facebook cover photos if they so desire:

Something he said at a party.

"The Word of God is sharper than any double-edged sword… Stephanie Gravel is still sharper than you…"

What inspired me to try out this art was an idea I had to make a music video using pixel art. In the near future, I hope to start designing characters from scratch, and not from reference photos.

By the way, if any of you who follow this blog have art anywhere on the internet, I’d love to see it. If you’re and artist and you don’t have your art online, I highly recommend getting an account on Deviant Art, which supports everything from poetry to Twilight fanart, or worse. ( from http://david.shortens.net/tag/non-isometric/ )

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Thursday, 2 May 2013

The BAD BEAR CLUB ( gif pixel art )

David Shorten : pixel ( from http://david.shortens.net/tag/non-isometric/ )

START pixel art !