This is a work in progress 🛠️
Pixel art is like art, but with pixels.
Generally the distinction is made at the point where the placement and colour relationships of individual pixels have a significant impact on the final piece, and where the artist is (or should be) concerned about optimising those relationships. This generally means both lower overall resolutions and lower colour counts, but there are many important works of pixel art that transcend those restrictions.
Pixel art and game art are often intertwined. Pixel art has long been used for game art because earlier systems had lower resolutions and lower colour counts, making a pixel art approach more important. It is important to understand, however, that the modern pixel art "movement" occurred significantly after those limited systems were mainstream, the modern understanding of pixel art has been developed in a reasonably post-hoc manner and the amount of academic interest in the movement is relatively tiny, with most of the folks thinking seriously about pixel art as a medium being the artists themselves, and the artists are generally not in agreement about every little detail.
That said,
(todo)
- resolution
- palette
- cluster
- tile
- dither
- banding
- pillow shading
- Androidarts Pixel Tutorial - Like everything Arne does, it's unfinished, but this is actually the first thing I link most people. It's pragmatic. It doesn't get bogged down in.. pixelisms.
- Pixelation Forums - Kinda quiet but a treasure trove of knowledge and art. Generally a lot more obsessed with pixel art for its own sake than for pragmatic purposes though. Expect a bit of zealotry, comes with the territory.
- PixelJoint - they have forums and the gallery is generally a great place to get pieces to study from.
Searching specific artists is a good idea, but also exploring pixelart related tags on various platforms can net you a wide variety of recent art. Earnestly studying all sorts of different art is a good idea - including outside of pixel art, even if you're only interested in learning or understanding pixel art.
Doing timed studies of existing pieces, photos, and game mockups are all high yield ways to improve. Practice makes progress.
I'll generally link their pixeljoint if it exists but it's worth looking for artists on other platforms. Just be careful depending on the environment you're studying in, as with many long term artists there's often some nsfw overlap.
This is not exhaustive at all, i'm trying to get a bit more breadth than depth.
- helm
- cure
- ptoing
- vierbit
- ilkke
- slym
- dan fessler
- derek yu
- arne jansson
- ryumaru
- cannonbreed
- junkboy - seems to have stopped working as publicly and mostly moved away from pixel art, but has a lot of lovely colour work and good detail.
- surt - does a lot of work on opengameart too, and generally a "low bs" low spec artist.