Bit Blot Forum
Bit Blot => Off-Topic => Topic started by: Azuu on October 01, 2007, 08:45:46 pm
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some people lately have been asking the question if pixels can be considered art, this game seems to blur the line like many others that have been recently released. I'm intrested in the idea but Im not sure how many people are.
So what do you think? Also which face is confused, I'm perplexed as to which one it is .
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I think ??? is probably the closest equivilent.
Is there seriously a debate as to whether pixel art is Actual Art or not? A decent proportion of the work I submitted for my degree was pixel art; the likes of eBoy, Craig Robinson, Paul Robertson and Rich Stevens make a living as pixel artists, entirely independantly of computer games. Hell, I've sold prints of pixel art.
If you mean to ask whether games are art...well, that's another can of worms entirely, and not one I'm up for opening just this minute (I'm tired).
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Yeah... Aquaria isn't even pixel art.
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I beg to differ! Art is any form of expression, wether it be music, story telling, carpentry, or in this case Aquaria. And Aquaria is composed of pixels! Wa-la!
Pixel art!
Of course, if you change the definition of art, this may not be the case, but in my opinion, this game most certainly is a piece of art.
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Pixel art is a distinct style, see E-boy, where pixels are clearly visible and not subtle building blocks of the image.
Aquaria is not pixel-art by any means. Can Aquaria be considered as a piece of art? Definetly.
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Aquaria is basically a high-drawn graphics art game. Pixel art is yet another kind of style - when people started to make things that would look like characters from old-school games, because they loved when huge pixels filled whole the screen. And that's how pixel art was created.
Today, we could call anything pixel art, because some of us still forget that whole graphics is being rendered from single pixels - just decrease your windows resolution to 320x240 and you'll have pixel art all the time :D. It's just a style of olders days, when low resolutions were all you could get on the screen, and some poeple later managed to distinct it into a type of art tightly defined by rules.
If you're interested in it, search Deviant Art for some good tutorials or look at Derek's site ;)
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*quickly hops in the topic*
I have to say that I generally suck at normal art, I can't draw, not with pencils, markers or with a mouse, something I definitly CAN do is pixel art. I'm a classic gamer and I LOVE pixels, I love the old Mario, Metroid, Zelda and I love pixel'd web comics.
Yes, Pixel Art is also art, pretty much anything can be art, especially when you would look aroud in online galleries of paintings and statues and go wtf, cause they have the most weirdest choices of art. As one simple long cone with a sphere ontop costs around the 3K just cause it's "art".
Aquaria is definitly art, not pixel art. If you want a game with pixel art, which I think Alec and/or Derek also know it's Cave Story (Doukutsu Monogatari) (http://www.miraigamer.net/cavestory/). It's also a very awesome game.
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It may be in bad taste for me to do this for one of my first posts here, but it really is appropriate...
This is a screenshot from a game I'm working on. I didn't do the graphics, for the record.
(http://www.arafell.com/images/afxpshot3.jpg)
I don't understand how someone could say this isn't art. Maybe, MAYBE you could say it's somehow "below" more traditional styles or techniques for making art, but I sure wouldn't.
I do, however, think you could make the case that some of the first video games' graphics wouldn't necessarily be considered art...
Maybe art is more what something is intended to be? A lot of old video games weren't trying to be artistic. Maybe pixel art and/or video game graphics became "actual" art the first time someone intended them as such?
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woah, that's really good pixel art! How far is the game in progress? :)
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I'm expecting the game to take about 2 years to complete, and it's been... I think... 8 months so far? We just entered full production (from pre-production) actually.
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I have to agree with p3ter_st0ry. everything can be seen as art. Even small rectangular (?) dots on a display.
Good examples would be: Megaman Zero series, Metroid, Castlevania, Terranigma, etc etc.
A lot of new DS games is the most beautiful 2D games I've ever seen.
And that's just the 2D ones, 3D also have pixels! Helvete, I don't have to list any artistic 3D games, do I? :P
Anyway, it's all about what can be considered "pixel art".
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damn O_O
that was bootiful
can't wait for it to come out =D
reminds me of aveyond
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that preview looks gorgeous! I prolly have about somewhere in the order of 300 to 500k ( file count, not file size ) in game sprites, cellphone graphics and other pixel art on this puter. takes forever to do properties on the folders but it's around 5 gigs now. even wrote scripts so I could download them more efficiently. I dun care if it's art or not, it's all so beyootiful.
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reminds me of aveyond
Aveyond 1 was awesome, but I was a bit disappointed from Aveyond 2. Too easy, too short, more bugs, ...
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reminds me of aveyond
Aveyond 1 was awesome, but I was a bit disappointed from Aveyond 2. Too easy, too short, more bugs, ...
I so agree..I didn't enjoy Aveyond 2 at all...-_-
I didn't like the story lol
the graphic was better than 1 though.
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I don't know if I would call that pixel art though....it sort of blurs the line. I can kinda see the pixels...but it's not of the definition that Derek/Alec have managed...I guess if I had to say I'd call it high-end pixel art. In which case yes, I love it too. Hopefully it has the gameplay to match.
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Everything can be pixel art if you zoom in far enough. =p
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Well, traditionalist pixel artists often hold that the means by which the image is created is what makes it pixel art (or not). Chrono Trigger's graphics are pixel art; each pixel has been individually placed. Aquaria's graphics are not; they have been digitally painted, using tools that affect surrounding pixels and alter their properties automatically. I'm not entirely sold on that definition, but on the other hand, it neatly removes the problem Glamador raises about aesthetic; essentially, by that tenant, it doesn't matter how it looks, just how it's made.
I don't think "high-end pixel art" is a particularly helpful term. Assigning a value to art like that has never sat well with me. While there's no denying that the screenshot shown is technically very adept and impressive for it, I personally don't think it's inherently better than, say, Flip Flop Flyin' (which is visually much, much simpler, but much more sophisticated in its use of pixel artifacts). It's just a different, more traditionally representational approach.
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Perhaps a better way to convey what I meant would be "a greater number than usual of pixels" art.
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Again, not really as helpful or descriptive as, say, representational pixel art. If an analogy can be drawn between pixel art and painting, would calling a Rembrandt portrait "a greater number than usual of brushstrokes" art be particularly illuminating? I don't mean to bang on about it, but this stuff's kind of important to my artfag brain :).
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Well the point is like you said, that it's made out of pixels NOT brushstrokes. I amended my previous statement to try and recognize what you were saying, about the previous wording made it sound like I was putting his art above something as great as say, Mario, Zelda, or Cave Story. By saying "higher than usual number of pixels" you can still call it pixel art, as a style, yet it accurately conveys that which distinguishes it.
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Pixel art is something that was made pixel by pixel and usually has only a few colours, some around 4, 8-bit, 8, 16-bit (as far as I know anyway) coming up to about a 100 colours. That's what I define under pixel art anyway.
And this was a joke:Everything can be pixel art if you zoom in far enough. =p
Y'know... see the tongue? People seem to be missing that. :P
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Okay, guys:
(http://www.toadscastle.net/images/smrpg-1.gif)
Pixel art? Or prerendered 3d? ;)
Or rather: is it the method, or the result that matters? O0
(BTW: I love Super Mario RPG!)
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I think mixed actually, you can see alot of thing could be from 3d when it would be a bit higher detail and that other things are just really made 2d. With pixels and stuff, but further, I'd have no clue.
And yes, I also love Super Mario RPG, I even have the theme of it on my mp3-player, lol.
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I think SMRPG is clearly pre-rendered 3-D. As far as I'm concerned it's the method that matters.
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Personally, I like the aesthetic of pixel art a lot more than I care for the method; that's just the closest thing I've heard to a satisfying definition. There are purists who insist that a "true" pixel artist won't even use such as straight line tools, or frickin' flood fill, electing to one-pixel-at-a-time it, which is just madness. I'm happy to admit that I've cheated on pixel art stuff before; I've used layers to shift elements around, I've used Photoshop brush styles to find shader tones when I'm in a rush, all that bad stuff. I think the ends justify the means in art, and to purposely ignore a useful tool is unnecessarily limiting.
On the other hand, I love the discipline and precision of the traditional process, and I learned a lot of valuable lessons in the years I was spriting before I acquired a copy of Photoshop or (later) Pixen. The patience and skill you need to create high-quality pixel art without resorting to quick fixes or more powerful tools is an admirable trait. I still think creating good art is more important than how you create it, to a certain extent, and that of course applies equally to pixel art, but there is merit to labouring over it old-school. We didn't abandon martial arts just because some smartarse invented a handgun.
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Does a title really matter? Art is art is art and only the real stick in the muds will be so pedantic about it that they have to give every medium a title. To me computer art is art, and if it's a creation and it's pleasing then it is art.
If you want to see a real fusion of computer art with solid media have a look at my friends work here (http://www.redbubble.com/people/revad) , he takes maths and build images prints them out cuts them up into further configurations paints them then scans them back into his computer for further treatment, he can do this over and over again to get some really stunning work.
That is my opinion, what do you think of it?
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We give them names so we can refer to them without needing a paragraph to explain it. It's the same reason we name anything. If some guy says "I love pixel art" it conveys something easy to understand and for the most part doesn't require further inquiry (though we seem to have inquired quite a bit into the term here).
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I supose it does Glamador but also some critics and so called art lover departmentalise because it gives them the feeling that they are in control, and on artist eve went as far as saying that only oil paintings were true paintings and art everything else was just pretence. >:(
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I think SMRPG is clearly pre-rendered 3-D. As far as I'm concerned it's the method that matters.
jumping back into my thread here, the snes could barely render a few polygons. The background is made of pixels and the charaters are sprites so they would be that too. this game would have been rendered like that by the n64 as apposed to the snes (and was in the form of paper Mario). before 3d graphics became the staple, artists were called in more often to create sprites and the like as apposed to a modeler and a texture designer, less efficient says I.