Before scanners, digitisers and 3D renderers, a game’s graphics were drawn one dot at a time. An artist decided the colour of every pixel on a screen of a few hundred by a couple of hundred dots, with a palette of 2, 4, 16 or 32 colours and rules about where those colours could go. Matthew Smith drew the graphics for Manic Miner on graph paper. Lemmings made characters “only a few pixels high” look as if they had personalities. The phrase for this work, “pixel art”, is older than most of the games: it was in print by 1982, and by the mid-1990s “pixel artist” was a job studios advertised for.
Fast facts
- The term: used as the title of a 1982 piece by Adele Goldberg and Robert Flegal of Xerox in Communications of the ACM; used of a games artist in Antic in August 1984.
- 8-bit method: design on graph paper, colouring in one square per pixel, then turn each row of squares into bytes for the program.
- The palette: for Amiga game graphics “only 16 colours, because you have to allow for sprites” (Paul McLaughlin of Bullfrog, 1992).
- The tool: Deluxe Paint, “the most widely used program” (Amiga Format, November 1992).
- The job title: “a pixel artist with knowledge of D-Paint or Brilliance” (Millennium Interactive’s advertisement in Edge, November 1994).
The term
The earliest known published use of “pixel art” is as a title: a short piece by Adele Goldberg and Robert Flegal, both of Xerox in Palo Alto, in the December 1982 issue of Communications of the ACM, the journal of the Association for Computing Machinery.
In games the phrase turns up soon after. Antic’s August 1984 profile of the Lucasfilm games group (later LucasArts), 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.” The magazine used the phrase without explaining it. Winnick went on to design Maniac Mansion with Ron Gilbert.
Five years later a games magazine still felt it needed explaining. Jim Edwards, writing in Amiga Action in November 1989, said 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 put “this month’s collection of pixel art” on its coverdisk: pictures by Alastair Hearsum, who had drawn the graphics for Rainbird’s unreleased Dick Special.
By the mid-1990s it was a job title, defined against a newer one. Millennium Interactive’s recruitment advertisement in Edge in 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”.
On graph paper
On the 8-bit machines the pixels were placed before they reached the computer. Matthew Smith told Personal Computer Games in 1984 that nobody helped with Manic Miner’s graphics: “I drew them out myself on graph paper. Art was one of my better subjects at school.” Each square coloured in became a bit in a byte, and the bytes went into the program.
Sinclair User showed how the method worked for a trained designer. Ann Hughes had been a freelance stage designer, “wielding massive brushes”, before she joined Psion in October 1983. “I didn’t know one end of a computer from another; I thought a pixel was a pistol,” she told the magazine in March 1985. For Psion’s Spectrum tennis game Match Point, the animation of the players and ball boys “was done first on graph paper, colouring in the individual pixels”, with eight positions for the ball boys and ten for the players.
The Spectrum’s colour rules made the drawing harder. Each 8×8 block of the screen could hold only two colours (the limit behind colour clash), so a player holding a racket, with a hand, a handle and the background behind, needed “three different colours in one attribute”. Hughes had to place his arm on the edge of an attribute block, which sometimes made it too long. “It is totally restricting,” she said, “coming from something where you have everything at your fingertips and to be told that you have to work in squares and you can’t mix colours.” On the Sinclair QL she “mixed” colours anyway for the chess board, by laying black and red pixels in a pattern. Her advice to would-be designers was to use graph paper for animation sequences, and “be patient, that’s the main thing really.”
The method lasted. In 1991 the Rowlands brothers kept a diary of Creatures II for ZZAP!64. Steve Rowlands, the artist, described planning a Commodore 64 screen on the machine with a single reversed character, then adding the detail, and then: “The next step is to get an A4 piece of graph paper and copy down the character layout. I then work out where all the sprites I plan to use can go.”
What a pixel artist drew
On the 16-bit machines the artist worked on screen, mostly in Deluxe Paint, and mostly not on whole pictures. Edwards’s 1989 article was about 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 artist Jeff Bramfitt 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”. His colleague Mike Waterworth warned that flipping a brush with the grid on left “a pixel gap on the edge of your brush”.
Their example of what the work 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.” Part of the reason, they admitted, was the packaging, whose larger illustration 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
On the Amiga the constraint was colour count as much as 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 up to 32, built from “four or five basic colours with up to four additional shades of each.” A scene planned for Populous II was made from “two colours: red and blue, with many tones of each for highlights.” His advice to anyone hoping to join the industry was blunt: “you will be restricted to 16-colour palettes most of the time”.
Domark’s artists described two hand techniques that made a small palette look larger. 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, they said, was “sometimes a little strange”, and “the hand-drawn effects are usually better.” A caption put the craft in a sentence: “Getting across detail in an image using pixels is an art form in itself.”
Amiga Format’s 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”.
A chosen style
When hardware stopped forcing it, some artists kept working this way by choice. Looking back in 2004, Retro Gamer’s history of Graftgold remembered Michael Field, an artist who “excelled in pixel art”, who “would painstakingly build up detailed bitmaps pixel by pixel”, and who worked on Paradroid 90. By 2011 the look was a deliberate choice for new games. Phil Fish told Edge how he arrived at the look of Fez, a platform game whose world is built from cubes: he came up with the idea that pixels are really cubes, and “When I realised that, I was like, ‘Of course! Pixel art!’”
Sources
- Adele Goldberg and Robert Flegal, “Pixel Art”, Communications of the ACM vol. 25 no. 12, December 1982, pp. 861–862, doi:10.1145/358728.358731 (bibliographic record, web, secondary). https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358728.358731
- Wikipedia, “Pixel art” (web, secondary): names the 1982 letter as the first published use of the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel_art
- Antic vol. 3 no. 4, August 1984, pp. 40–42: Michael Ciraolo, “Creative partners” (Gary Winnick and the Lucasfilm team).
- Edge issue 151, July 2005, “The making of… Maniac Mansion”: Ron Gilbert on the idea coming from “both Gary Winnick [the game’s celebrated artist] and I”.
- Personal Computer Games issue 4, March 1984, pp. 29–31: Peter Conner’s profile of Matthew Smith (graph paper).
- Sinclair User issue 36, March 1985, pp. 58–59: Theo Wood, “State of the Art”, on Ann Hughes’s graphics for Psion’s Match Point and QL Chess.
- Amiga Action issue 2, November 1989, p. 87: Jim Edwards on pixel artists and tiles.
- Amiga Format issue 4, November 1989, p. 76: coverdisk art by Alastair Hearsum.
- ZZAP!64 issue 75, 1991: the Rowlands brothers’ Creatures II diary (screen design on graph paper).
- Amiga Format issue 40, November 1992, “How to DPaint” by Andrew Nuttall, Asam Ahmad and Brian Larkman: pp. 29–30 (introduction and Deluxe Paint III), p. 32 (Paul McLaughlin of Bullfrog), p. 39 (Domark), p. 41 (Jeff Bramfitt and Mike Waterworth of Psygnosis; the magazine prints his name “Bramfett”).
- Edge issue 1, October 1993: Psygnosis recruitment advertisement giving Jeff Bramfitt as the contact.
- Edge issue 14, November 1994: Millennium Interactive recruitment advertisement. Edge issue 19, April 1995: MotiveTime recruitment advertisement.
- Retro Gamer issue 8, 2004, p. 89: history of Graftgold (Michael Field).
- Edge issue 235, Christmas 2011, pp. 54–56: Phil Fish on Fez.