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
