Since this topic comes up fairly often in the IRC, I thought I would try to get a community consensus.

The rules of the pixel format at the moment are somewhat vague. Actually, they used to be even more vague, so I recently tried to make it a bit clearer by adding this clarification which is paraphrased from Wikipedia:

"An artwork is generally considered pixel art if deliberate, artistic thought is put into each individual pixel. "

Now that's all fine and dandy, but is still somewhat ambiguous. The question of "is this pixel?" often comes up in regards to what I would call "mspaint-style art", which has sharply defined pixels and limited color palette, but also has a bit higher resolution and works on a somewhat larger scale.

So what do y'all think? Should we clarify the format to allow for this "pixel art on a slightly larger scale?" Be more strict? Be more lenient?

Personally I can see merits in both, but lean towards leniency.

(PS anybody who says "actually all digital art is pixel art because it's made of pixels" gets banned)

anything above 300px is pushing it a bit too far, if its below 300px and doesnt have stuff like massive ass gradients or like 256 colours, ill consider it pixel... though you can change my mind about specific circumstances

one example is the pc-98 with its massive ass 640x400 resolution (but only 16 colours), if you make pc-98 art and submit it under pixel, it would make complete sense to me

Pixel communities reached the consensus that stuff like this is not pixel art, but oekaki:

Personally I believe actually all digital art is pixel art. After all, it’s made of pixels. Even vector art could not exist without such picture elements

Lol @webriprob testing agargara's patience. Sure, all art is also abstract art because it's an abstraction of reality. But if everything is everything, language becomes meaningless.

To me, the gold standard is using a single pixel-sized brush, with no advanced editing tools.

I.e. taking a photo or other image and reducing the res and number of colours isn't pixel art to me. Something with a bajillion colours but done using a pixel sized brush would still be pixel art to me. My 2c

webriprob's doe RPG and surfcroc's frozen pukester are both above 300 px in each dimension (before any upscaling), but i hope we can agree that these are clear examples of pixel art. similarly you could make "mspaint-style" or "oekaki" art on a small canvas with a limited color palette and that wouldn't make it pixel art, imo, similar to what ebeedell said about photography. it's about the style and method, not the size of the canvas or the color count. but i don't really know how to articulate that style & method any better than the definition agargara already presented

As much as I am just the SNES guy, I've been falling in love with hand-drawn pixel art, sort of like my last chip battleart entry DOGGO

I would still consider this to be pixel art even though the methods aren't what most people use these days.

I've been doing a deep dive on whether a hand-drawn to pixel art pipeline was ever used commercially and apparently, before good digital paint programs it was near ubiquitous (except they used assembly and not dithertron with an aseprite touch up). Nintendo's 30 year late devlog

i just know that everything is made out of pixels so basically everything is pixel art

I really like the Wikipedia line from the artist’s perspective, but of course from the voter’s side it’s challenging to vote on since we don’t often have information on intent or process. We’re more or less voting in terms of the famous US Supreme Court quote, paraphrased: “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.” In the interest of not squelching creativity, I think it’s appropriate to have a somewhat open definition and to leave the judgment call with voters outside of places where we have defined what’s legal (like chip battle art, which has specified resolutions). People should just make a personal call on the matter and vote accordingly. There’d be no need to deliberate or argue in chat in the majority of cases.

I could’ve just said — I’m personally happy with how it currently stands :)