Pixel Art

Pixel art is drawing directly in the picture elements of a low-resolution, fixed-palette display, where each dot is placed by hand. The phrase is older than it looks: Antic used it in 1984 for the background of Lucasfilm’s first games artist, an Amiga magazine put “pixel artists” in inverted commas in 1989 as a job its readers might not know, and by 1994 studios were advertising for one by that name.

Fast facts

• Earliest use held: Antic, August 1984 — Gary Winnick, the one artist on Peter Langston’s Lucasfilm games team, “had a background in film animation, graphic arts and pixel art”.
• The job title: “pixel artist with knowledge of D-Paint or Brilliance” — Millennium Interactive’s advertisement in Edge, November 1994.
• The palette: for Amiga game graphics “only 16 colours, because you have to allow for sprites” — Paul McLaughlin, Bullfrog, 1992.
• The tool: Deluxe Paint III, “the most widely used program” (Amiga Format, November 1992).
• Unit of work: the tile — a screen kept as a picture “would take up some 32K of memory” (Amiga Action, 1989).

The term

Antic’s August 1984 profile of the Lucasfilm games group — makers of Ballblazer and Rescue on Fractalus on the Atari 8-bit — introduced the team’s one artist, Gary Winnick, “originally a commercial artist” who “worked at Atari before joining the Lucasfilm team and had a background in film animation, graphic arts and pixel art.” That is the earliest use of the phrase in the library, and it is used without explanation.

Five years later it still needed one for a general readership. Jim Edwards, writing in Amiga Action in November 1989 about what happens to the pixels before they reach the screen, explained that programmers “have to rely upon ‘pixel artists’ (read that carefully), the talented guys who turn a game’s design and theory into a digital visual extravaganza, using the rather limited source material of electronic pixels and colour palettes.” The same month Amiga Format ran “this month’s collection of pixel art” on its coverdisk — IFF pictures by Alastair Hearsum, who had drawn the graphics for Rainbird’s unreleased Dick Special — using the phrase for finished pictures rather than game graphics. Atari ST User had trailed “a top pixel artist” on its contents page in May 1988.

By the mid-1990s it was a job title, defined against the newer one. Millennium Interactive’s recruitment advertisement in Edge 14 (November 1994) wanted “a talented 3D rendering artist, with knowledge of Lightwave or 3D studio”, and separately “a pixel artist with knowledge of D-Paint or Brilliance”; MotiveTime asked in April 1995 for “talented pixel artists familiar with DeluxePaint”. The earliest use held here of “pixel art” as the name of a chosen style, rather than of a job, is a 2003 Edge review of a freeware Spectrum-style game.

What a pixel artist drew

Not pictures, mostly. Edwards’s 1989 explanation is of tiles: a scrolling game shows “a scrolling ‘window’ upon a vast graphic world”, and “each screen-full would take up some 32K of memory”, so “the answer is to draw a set of component ‘tiles’ which can be slotted together in a pre-defined sequence by the program.” Three years on, Psygnosis’s artists told Amiga Format the same: most in-game graphics “are used to create screens from blocks”, assembled in Deluxe Paint “with the Grid function on” — with the quirk that flipping a brush with Grid on “you tend to inherit a pixel gap on the edge of your brush”.

The Psygnosis pair’s example of what the discipline could do was Lemmings: “On screen, the characters are blobs of blue and green, only a few pixels high, yet they have their own distinct personalities” — helped, they admitted, by the packaging illustration that showed players what a lemming was meant to look like. “It is amazing how a single pixel can make such a difference.”

Working in the palette

The constraint was colour count before it was resolution. Paul McLaughlin of Bullfrog, a draughtsman before he joined, said the palette for game graphics “is only 16 colours, because you have to allow for sprites”; for an intro screen with memory to spare he would use 32, built “using four or five basic colours with up to four additional shades of each.” A Populous II scene reproduced with the feature was “made from two colours: red and blue, with many tones of each for highlights.”

Domark’s artists described the two hand techniques that made a small palette read as more. On dithering: the spray can “tends to give a computery effect to your picture that lacks realism. It is often better to dither and shade things by hand”. On anti-aliasing: “one extra shade of each colour is sufficient to produce a smoother display than would normally be visible. The main point about anti-aliasing is to compensate for the low resolution of the screen and hence to smooth out the pixel transitions.” Deluxe Paint’s own Smooth tool was, they said, “sometimes a little strange”, and “the hand-drawn effects are usually better.” Their caption put the craft in a sentence: “Getting across detail in an image using pixels is an art form in itself.”

The tool

Amiga Format’s November 1992 feature opened by noting that “despite all the 24-bit 3D rendering and image-processing programs that have arrived recently, basic bitmap painting is by far the most popular form of graphics production”, and that Deluxe Paint III was “the most widely used program”. Two years later Millennium’s advertisement named D-Paint and Brilliance as the two a pixel artist was expected to know.

See also

• Deluxe Paint
• Dithering
• Tile maps
• Sprites
• Palette cycling
• Frame animation
• ASCII art
• Lemmings
• Commodore Amiga