My Eltroduction to 7 Cups

@Anomalia

Pixel Art is a form of digital art that's drawn in a low-res (sometimes low color) canvas. Usually, it's to emulate old game graphics from the 1980s to 90s. They're technically drawings made up of large, equally sized squares (if zoomed in without a blur filter). Alternatively, it's called "sprite art", because old video game image assets were called "sprites". And a large bitmap image composed of smaller images was called a "sprite sheet". Other alternative names are "8-bit art" and "16-bit art", but those names are kind of misleading because of the "bits" part.

Like most visual genres, it has its own set of principals or practices. The first one (and most essential) being the small pixel resolution ranging from 480p to something as small as 16x16 pixels. The second practice is mouse-drawn "anti-aliasing" ranging from sparse to lack thereof. Anti-aliasing is done to make jaggy, staircase lines look smoother, but it's sometimes not needed. The third practice is the limited or efficient use of colors or color palette, and this is where the "8-bit" and "16-bit" names get misleading. To begin, the number of bits determine the amount of colors it can carry in powers of 2. So a 4-bit image can have up to 16 colors, and an 8-bit image can have up to 256. However, "8-bit art" usually refers to a tiny color range between 2 and 8, whereas "16-bit art" refers to a color range between 16 and 256. The 8-bit/16-bit part actually has less to do with the graphics and more to do with the game console's processor being 8-bit or 16. True, the SNES had a 16-bit processor, but the sprites were 4-bit, and the display was 8 for example. Aside from the bits rant, there's also the practice of "dithering", which is my favorite practice, but it's heavily discouraged by some pixel artists. Dithering is when you take two color shades, and apply some grainy/checkerboard patterns in between to create the illusion of more shades. The bad reasons it gets discouraged is that 1) pixels don't look blurry on an LCD screen compared to a CRT monitor, and 2) the option of using more colors is available. However, those two reasons only dismiss the idea that dithering can give a good sense of texture, can still create the illusion of more shades (much like dotted pen art), and smoothness is not necessarily the purpose of dithering.

But considering that today's technology is capable of displaying mega pixels and millions (maybe trillions) of colors, as well as automated graphic filters; it's no surprise that there's a stigma towards pixel art in the sense that it's "low quality" compared to a detail-sharp photograph. You'd hear comments like: "Why are you drawing it so small when you have a big screen?" or "Why are you making it so blocky when your program can do smooth lines?". There's also this false belief that "pixel art is cheap and easy" when it's drawn pixel by pixel and takes a while to get things to look right. There's no automated, one-click "pixelate" button in the process of pixel art.