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:

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 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 :)

i'm honestly very loose with my definitions in general so pixel art to me is just when i feel like i can see the individual dots or squares of a thing. like Voxel art is something i do mix up with Pixel art, a lot, because i just care most about reaching that aesthetic than creating the predefined motions. It's like an adjective, as opposed to a noun.

Yea pretty much what Tiffany said. All digital art is made up of pixels. But I classify pixel art by it being a focal point of that art.

Opening caveat: this is all just my opinion

Pixel art, as an intentional artistic aesthetic choice, is a deliberate attempt to recreate the limits of 8- and 16-bit consoles and computers. Therefore, to read as “pixel art,” it has to mimic those restrictions and hardware quirks. This means using techniques like a lower resolution canvas, limited color palette and density, and most importantly, obvious and discrete pixels in the composition. i.e., you must be able to see/recognize that the image is made of little colored squares.

Although there aren't the same technical limits on modern platforms or in current art software, the pixel art genre is defined by the restrictions of the past. After all, the artists during the 80s and 90s weren't trying to make their art look “pixely," they were trying to make it look like an artistic vision, as represented through the hardware limits.

That's why things like dithering and anti- aliasing actually reinforce the pixel art aesthetic, despite, ostensibly, making the product look *less* like "pixel art”–they were techniques used at the time to achieve a better fidelity, but techniques that were accessible with the tools of the time.

So where does that leave us re: a clean definition? I think it would be good to include something like what I've said about the genre-defining restrictions–but that’s just my opinion; not everyone may agree (and they are free to be wrong about the whole thing 😸). But for a more succinct and practical way to put it, I can't do much better than the quote @kilowatt64 used.

As I've said elsewhere before, my personal preference to deal with this issue would be to create separate pixel art formats that adhere to specific platform restrictions (like NEXXT, ASCII, etc). This is because each platform has their own specific set of rules that is easy to find (e.g., 4 colors per tile, 16 colors total, canvas size 240x128, etc). But one drawback that I can anticipate is that, without hardware-specific tools, the entries will mostly have to rely on self-policing and user understanding of the specific hardware restrictions of the platform. So, for example, if someone were to submit an “NES pixel art” with colors that weren't native to the NES palette, it would require someone to actually notice the mistake. But even so, I think it would still be closer to the “pixel art" mark. And also, I think it makes comparing the art entries a bit more interesting because it is an apples-to-apples comparison. All the artists are working with the same set of rules.

The broad category “pixel art" is really the equivalent to wild chip, essentially a free-for-all. If that's by design, great. But I think this could all be tailored a bit more.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.

I agree with Tiffany that pixel art is more of an attribute than a concrete thing. I don't think there is a clear separation between "pixel art" and "not pixel art", just a vague ethos most pixel artists follow.
If I had to write down some key characteristics of what I consider pixel art, they would be as follows (from most to least important):

1. High detail per resolution
Pixel art can have a virtually unlimited resolution, as long as there are enough 1-pixel details to justify it.
If your pixel art can be downscaled without much loss of detail, then the resolution is definitely too high.

2. Building the image from the ground up
I do think some tools and methods can take away from the pixel-art-iness of an image (in the same way putting an artsy filter on a photo wouldn't really count as a digital painting).
To me the appeal of pixel art is starting with something simple and progressively working towards those smaller 1-pixel details, but using only a 1 px brush shouldn't be a requirement in my opinion.
Tools like gradients, posterization and automatic dithering are fine as long as they are used carefully and with intent.

3. Some level of intentionality behind color choices
Each color in the image should serve a clear purpose.
Carefully choosing your colors and limiting unnecessary duplicates is key.


That being said, I'm really not pedantic about this stuff, and I think the more lenient the rules are, the better!
I have definitely broken these rules on a couple occasions.
Also I will forever defend this entry as pixel art regardless of what anyone says!

I like the idea of pixel being a wildchip/fakebit because it seems to be a rather nebulous format where you can push the limits a little and leave it up to the individual voter's discretion if it qualifies or not. You can also use any tools to achieve the finished result.

If we had more OHBs for formats like NEXXT and Ansi like The Diad suggested, then the leniency of pixel might be seen as more of a feature than something to debate on.

That being said, to me there's a difference between regular freehand drawing and pixel art, which is much more focused on the individual pixels. But it's nice to have the room to experiment and see just how far you can take it and have it still qualify.

what is pixel? a miserable little pile of secrets!

I would push back somewhat against the suggestion that simply using hard-edged, aliased brushes (jaggy brushes) makes something pixel art. For a clear example of what I mean, here

's a piece I drew with jaggy brushes. The lines, including the detail lines, are all pixel-sharp, but I think we can agree this is not pixel art, right?

Proficient painters make great brushstrokes and textures and palettes. Proficient pixel artists make great pixels and tiles (and palettes).

Pixel art is when the pixels are the art. It should be possible to apply artistic critique on a per-pixel basis. If changing any one pixel doesn't make the art slightly better or slightly worse, then it's not pixel art.

I don't like resolution limits because I think level tilemaps

are pixel art - The individual tiles and blocks are obviously pixel art, so the whole is as well.

Easy, Pixel art is the stuff that I like. If I don't like it, it isn't pixel art.


Honestly now, I'm browsing the pixelart subreddit quite often and I'm really lenient on what can be considered pixel art.
Using actual 24+bpp gradients in addition is fine imo and I would even be fine with mixels when used in a good way, but I haven't seen any good examples of the latter so far.
Some people make pixel art 3d renders and clean up the exports later, that's quite cool imo. Kinda what DKC did on the SNES. You could argue, that's non-pixel-art, but I think it fits under the umbrella (with the cleanup step).
Oekaki is definitely different enough though. It's more of a styling thing, I guess. There's also probably a spectrum between pixel art and oekaki lol.

What's also overlooked a lot are hardware and tile restrictions. Almost nobody seems to care about this. Most of the stuff that gets made only adheres to a specific palette, which is fine, it's also what I also do almost exclusively - I'm not making a game for that specific hardware, but then again, those games had some tricks, like using additional sprites to get more colors for tiles, or even overlapping sprites to basically double the available colors. That part just isn't as interesting to me, especially when making an non-game art piece.

Where does "Amiga Lagoon" by Jim Sachs land?

I also think that a lot of the confusion of "is this pixel art" in terms of battles could be alleviated or cut off at the pass if we did pixel battles with more specific constraints (most of the ones I've participated in were very open). I wanna learn to do tiles so I've been thinking of running a series that focuses on that kind of thing. E.g. here's a specific palette AND a specific tile size, make a scene in these constraints.

re: Jim Sachs; that's pixel art, innit? That's obviously pixel art.

Fennel makes a great point, a pixel battle with no constraints on resolution and/or palette is kind of like fakebit isn't it? A fine format, but without restriction the question of whether or not it's chiptune (or pixel art) is ultimately subjective. What if there were various sizes of tinypixel formats kind of like we have for tinymod? :o

it all comes down to details you see when zoom in and that part is heavily subjective so i dont fucking know just some bullshit with dots