Thinking about the whole cause ..

Back at the era of 8bits, where I guess 'pixel art' was born, it was a necessity. There was no other option how to put an image into computron, then define it point by point, in few colors or shades of grey. Often just white on black and 'painted' with pencil on graph paper, while resulting 'sprite' was entered by hand as coordinates into a game code. (Yeah I remeber doing that)
And I woun't even debate Ascii art here, which dominated some gaming eras on some platforms and we loved it as it was.

Then came things like Amiga. With 32, 64, 256 col indexed screen formats where you could have mixed colors from unimaginable gamut (compared to predefined C64 palettes). But especialy with real, powerful digital painting and animation applications!
Soon people were exploiting the poor 320x256 like crazy and creating images you wouldn't dream of.
Some things were pixel art, in a sense that every pixel was put there by hand. Some were index-painted, in a sense that artist still used painting app thats today considered pixel art only, but used broader brushes and freestyle strokes, while leaving a specific style on the image. And it indeed was admired and considered a real digital art.
Some were experimenting with scanning real cartoon-ink anim frames and canvas paintings.
Some stayed at just - necessary - color reduction of the scanned image, some cleared\sharpened the images in digital and some used it as underpaint and created something even more insane atop of that. And indeed they were admired as gods in theyr trade.
(Here, let us hold a minute of silence for damned HAM and Chunky to planar :)

Then came hi-res screen modes. 640x480 plus the more obscure ones. Still mostly with much less then 256 index colors available, especialy for games and demos. And people just continued doing great art using all the previous techniques. And as far as I know, it still was all considered basicaly pixel art. Since there were no tablets in sight and all was done by mouse (or in strange cases with joystick :), so some super hires PhothoShop Digital painting gayness in todays sense was not imaginable.
Sure, there was some horrible 3d rendering presented at that time, and you knew its 3d, if you looked at the image. Also you could have just scanned a painting but again you knew it was an unedited scan if you saw one (and shivered :).

Now demoscene largely embraced the re-painting of scans. Some done it simply to get a hi-fi image you couldn't obtain other way (with the horrible scanners avilable on earth. Both of them).
Some took the scan and often totaly repainted it into something that was almost too sweet to watch. Often using theyr own canvas as source, but yeah, mr Valejo was abused a lot back then :)

And it was still considered a pixel art, since you still had to go down and dirty to specific pixels to, at least, correct them.

Then came Truecolor, realtime 3d and it all went to hell.. :))

But the pocket gaming handhelds remained, and were joined by early cell phones and PDAs with lo-res monochromatic screens, and then less early - cursed - java cellphones, and then came 'retro' gaming style.. And they all needed pixelart again.

And now we have 'pixel art' as a relic from the past.
Most of the people who 'do' it now don't even know the circumstances, let alone remember the times and trends by which it was defined.

And now we have 15 years old 'purists' who tell us that true 'pixel art' is only when its image in 15x15, it has 4 colors from some obscure Atari videomode nobody really ever freaking used on the device :) and its all dithered into oblivion :)

Right, that was a joke.
What I wanted to say is we all should be pretty careful about calling something true pixel art. At the end, considering the historical aspect *snicker* the so called index-painters, who are so blamed here and there on the site, might be as real pixel artists as rest of us, and atop of that better then us, since they found and mastered a technique thats not only a true pixel art, but also brings a hellish results in unbeatable time. (if thats true)

Of course you (we) can say this community and gallery is only interested in art created with certain styles, sizes, limits and tools. And if you are an index-painter or you used the foul scanned image as reference, you are encuraged to publish on deviantArt or found your own server.
But then I propose we should clearly state it somewhere. Like, on the front page, or under the logo.
And I didn't see it there.
And if I look at the rules for posting a piece, I can pretty much upload anything and still argue its valid pixelart ;)

And I would love to see any of you while you are telling artists from Andromeda group, or Minkey Island 2 game that they are not true enough pixel artists :)
And you can train on me, as I was more then once blamed that I use the forbidden techniques too :)

And thinking further, what bad would it bring us if we broadened the (non-written) rules and allowed index-painted images and re-painted scans, as long as they are ie within some size, quality, and the technique is clearly stated ? Allowing those artists who feel they are part of pixel art community some support.

Anyway, just thinking, right ;)

Edited by Riva - 08 March 2011 at 5:35am