
Shibuya Pixel Art 2020 - polm23
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?tid=37971
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arexxbifs
I don’t understand why modern pixel art (outside the demo scene) almost never
includes dithering and anti-aliasing. A lot of the creations are artistically
impressive, but lack fundamental techniques.

Employing such techniques would make for a wider range of aesthetics and the
ability to cover more subjects and a broader emotional range.

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erik
I've thought about this before, and the conclusion that I've come to are that
dithering and anti-aliasing are both techniques from the wrong eras of pixel
art.

Dithering is something that you need the most when you are working with either
a very limited or a fixed color palette. On the NES backgrounds were dithered
because you had so few colors to work with per tile. EGA era PC games used
dithering because the standard 16 color choices weren't very useful. Modern
pixel artist don't have these technical limitations to work with. And I think
that for most, dithering just doesn't look very appealing vs adding an
intermediate color.

Anti-aliasing is on the other side of technology window, from an era where
there was enough resolution and color choices to support those techniques, but
before 3d really took over. By the time you have that level of rendering
capability, your are starting to push into the realm of photo-realistic or
cartoon techniques. Late in the Super NES and VGA era the trend was away from
hand drawn pixel art, and towards high resolution renders scaled down. And
when you're working in that space today, you're starting to lose the appeal
that the limitations of pixel art offer.

This is all conjecture though. And I'm sure there are pixel artists out there
doing amazing things with dithering and anti-aliasing.

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edjroot
There's a lot of discussion about that in the "classic" pixel art circles.
More generally, if you look at it from this angle, pixel art itself is "from
the wrong era" of digital art since it is literally self-imposing constraints
that maybe used to be there by external imposition but don't need to be
anymore.

I've come to the conclusion that whatever we call "pixel art" is just a range
of subjective preferences that may be more biased towards aesthetics, or
techniques, or tradition, or even "pseudo-tradition". Nowadays the trend seems
to be aesthetics with disregard to technique, but there are still many people
who consider it "cheating" if you use the "wrong" tools, there are those who
want to emulate the exact specs of certain machines, and there are those still
who have a mashup of rules that aren't fully justified if not historically
(the best example I know is Pixel Joint, but in the end their restrictions
have created a community that has flourished and produced awesome art anyway).

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arexxbifs
To me it’s probably just the multiple meanings that are confusing.

Reading the replies in this thread I realize that to a lot of people it seems
to mean a certain aesthetic (I.E. blocky pseudo-retro game graphics). Nothing
wrong with that.

I guess I fall into the traditionalist camp. Pixel art to me is about working
against fixed limitations to create an illusion of more colours, higher
resolution etc.

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rbanffy
It's fascinating that some images borrow the style of character displays. I
imagine the addition of PETSCII, ATASCII, and other mosaic characters Unicode
13 will help to inspire more of their usage.

I can't wait for the MZ-80 characters we are trying to include in Unicode 14.

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colordrops
Is this an art or a video game contest or both? I couldn't tell from the
article.

~~~
fenomas
It's an art contest overall, but TFA is about a video game category of that
category. The game category is new this year and sponsored by TFA/the
submitter; the contest (pixel-art.jp) is a larger, pre-existing thing.

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spinach
Why is Japanese art always so full of children and girls in their school
uniform...

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derefr
Japan highly encourages children, starting in middle school, to join clubs;
illustration clubs are common, and kids who like to draw will tend to join
those. Children are not, on average, very creative (surprisingly!), so when
told to create a comic book for such a club, they'll usually create a story
with characters resembling themselves/their friends, and a setting resembling
a school.

Thus, most adults with illustrative talent in Japan, have usually
coincidentally had a lot of formative practice drawing children in school
uniforms, starting back when they _were_ children in school uniforms.

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anchpop
I think there might be something deeper to it. A lot of manga and anime take
place in school as well, and I'd be surprised if it's just because all the
artists know how to draw is schoolchildren. This is even more surprising
because it seems like to me that the majority of western comics and tv shows
_don 't_ take place in school settings.

I expect that this is the sort of thing that only seems weird to outsiders
like me. Maybe people in Japan look at the US and wonder why we have so much
media about superheros, and so little about highschool, even though highschool
is something almost everyone has experienced and has powerful memories of.

~~~
darren_
> Maybe people in Japan look at the US and wonder why we have so much media
> about superheros, and so little about highschool

To be honest as a non-american, americans seem pretty obsessed with high
school as well.

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looper_dude
これが大好きです!

