I don't actully need someone who makes it the the monthly top, it's more like an idea of the level I'm going for. There are tons of people I could learn from here.
If Cyangmou is still active on the Discord he might be a good fit.
As Gawrone said I do know that Cyangmou has offered mentorship over Discord before, but he also hosts pixel-along streams on twitch which I highly recommend you to look into. Good luck.
@Zizka
I think you have the highest chance of finding a great mentor here since we have lots of active pixel art legends in the flesh. Good luck! :)
Absolutely agree with Theoden. PJ is a time capsule and in my opinion the strict submission guidelines are what keep it alive. No matter where I'm at in life, I always find time to lurk PJ! I'm grateful to have shared the space with all the amazingly talented artists here over the last 2 decades.
Cyangmou checks all the boxes you've mentioned. Except maybe, purism (however you understand this), but with his knowledge and experience you will definitely get what you need, if you precise your expectations.
Hi!
I'm looking for a mentor who'll help me improve my pixel art (paid). Looking for someone who's good explaining things and who's pretty advanced. I'm looking for people who make monthly top pixel art and who are generally speaking purists.
Message me if you're interested.
Z.
You obviously never asked the wrong questions on here. They really don't like it when you have a mind of your own and question the status quo. 
I have opinions on how this place could be run. And apparently some people feel threatened by the mere existence of opinions. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
PJ used to be so much more accepting and tolerant once....
12 years in PJ and still lurking around... and making some pixel art occasionally
I come back and check purely to see people older than me, which gets increasingly more difficult on the rest of the internet but PJ never lets me down 
Has it really been 20 years? I'm currently decomposing.
The only vetting in place is to make sure you are a PJ member and have a single pixel piece in your gallery. For a Discord community intended for PJ members, that's really not a tall order.
In the art showcase channel on Discord, it's anything goes. I've been posting digital paintings and pencil drawings, and I haven't gotten banned yet. 
"Good old PJ" had an IRC where everyone was welcomed. Last I checked PJ of today has a discord with some sort of authoritarian vetting process because god forbid you should offend someone by saying oekaki is real pixel art.
@Stickman
Celebrating PJ's 20th year anniversary with a special art event is a really good idea.
I have been here since 2010 and I think the key to PJs longevity is the fact that PJ is unique and niche in what it does and has no agenda other than just keeping the same service going as long as possible. I think the old-school interface and look of the site is iconic and nostalgic and that helps too. It feels like a safehaven or an active timecapsule in this fast evolving, obnoxious internetscape.
Though I must say that PJ is getting less and less active as years pass by, especially in the comments section but people still keep posting here since this is the only "hardcore" or traditional pixel gallery out there.
Every site tries to change something per decade just for the sake of change (at least visually. DeviantArt is a good example to this). But PJ is just the good old PJ :)
I see larwick and leel post on instagram from time to time. Lar is pretty shredded ngl
20 is definitely a milestone worth celebrating! There are a bunch of names that I see every now and then on facebook and would be easy to reach out to. Larwick, Souly, Skull...
It's sort of bizarre to have grown up on here, like I asked Larwick to fileshare me his Tool albums over MSN because I was 12 and didn't know how to download them myself... Cocefi and Indigo are still active on twitter. Miaschugh stepped away from pixel/game art around 2016 I think.
MashPotato, Mil. jamon, Varok Shade, Cocefi, Larwick, Inkspot, miascugh, Indigo...
Haven't been active in ages.
Next year will be Pixeljoints 20 year anniversary. It would be amazing to post a message to everyone to celebrate, by either remaking their first pixel piece or their first avatar with the number 20 on it. Could even be a comp.
@Hapiel: I would assume it being a niche art community has something to do with it. Like if you remember a piece you'd actually have to check back to see it again. At least when I have to draw something specific for work I often loop back to specific pieces I remember here for reference on how they solved a problem.
Short answer is we don't know. I was convinced he had passed but then activity from him appeared on other online communities from after he had stopped visiting PJ, so now it's not so clear. Either way nobody that has tried to contact him has had any response for the past 8 years.
Pixeljoint got an official discord server now yeah, it's linked under the Community tab. Or right here.
Someone mentioned a pixel art related Discord that'd be up for joining? When I search on Google I just get "Pixels is the NFT metaverse for collections you already own!" which does not spark me with joy.
I'd also be curious if anyone found out what happened to jal, he is an absolute star and a legend and I've been worried about him over the years.
What is it about this group that quite a few oldtimers still check in regularly? I'm not aware of any similar internet communities that have this longevity... (2007 here)
I feel plenty old without you measuring my time here in centuries! Also ditto what Reo said, we're early but not the first wave, the site was already populated with great art when Ensellitis dragged me over from dA (RIP to my homie Chris).
I was just thinking the other day: who has been continually making pixel art the longest of all the humans on earth? Theoretically someone could have been making pixel art for 40 years or more, though I doubt many of the pioneers stuck with it that long. But pixel art has really taken off, so I think there are a lot of us who will stick with it for decades to come!
When I can finally play the Beatles "When I'm Sixty-four" on my birthday (knock on wood), I'll have been making pixel art for half a century!
Just wanted to type Mirre - since 2005. Not only active, but a mod.
Mirre, Helm and Ptoing joined before either me or Cure. Wayuki was also here in 2005. Adarias and Big Brother haven't posted here last year but they're still both doing pixel art.
Edit: Morganne too of course!
You joined in 2007. 17 years is, in fact, 1/6 of a century. Just sayin 
Look for the 2005ers in the memberlist... (Sedge "joined" in 2001 but PJ launched in 2005, right?)
No way.
'Cure' has almost been here for nearly 2 decades. That's 20 years. In fact - 1/5 of a century
Out of interest, who are the longest active members on PixelJoint?
Confirm. Everytime a challenge has less than 3 entries at the end of the deadline, it gets another week. This is beyond our control, since we are unable to close the challenge.
I think it's carrying over into this week as well because there weren't enough entries
Hi everyone, silly question, is the Vanity weekly challenge will be maintained or it will be switched?
The first person that comes to mind is Cyangmou of course. But you could also recall some pieces by Wolfenoctis.
Hello guys! Trying to get back at pixel art and tried googling a reference that I had in mind. Only found AI weird stuff. I'm searching for another pixel artist work but I can't remember his name, he did a lot of medieval armor with high details and things like, does anyone know his username? (And feel free to recommend another pixel artist that you like!)
We are very active as a community on discord! Would love to see you there.
I returned back here recently, and returned to pixel art in general recently, and it's been great. Really sad that Pixelation forums aren't up anymore though, I learned so much from those forums that influenced my art a lot. I hope someday twitter and social media bs dies off and people return to places like this and pixelation. Forums are really great, at the very least better than social media.
I joined this community when I was in middle school and now I'm in college pursuing a degree in animation. I definitely wouldn't be here if it weren't for the community. Pixel art was my foundation and start into art as a whole, and it always has a special place in my heart. The forums and stuff helped me through some bad times, and I'm grateful.
I just wish the community was more active now. It would be really nice to hand down a lot of the knowledge I've learned in my journey, along with what I've learned from other pixelartists, to new and aspiring pixel artists. To help others like I was once helped.
Anyways, PixelJoint is cool and I hope that this website continues to exist.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2779230/Zarathustra__Cybergeddon/
So apparently this game was made entirely using AI. For those of you who can look past your own insecurities for a few seconds, I highly recommend you give this a try, there's something very beautiful here.
I honestly can't wait to see more games like this.
well I guess technically that's just 4 years and not 15 years
oh neat, artwork that isn't 15+ years old in the hall of fame
It tends to come in waves. Sometimes you'll feel really stagnant and other times you're amazed over what you apparently can do now.
looking at my pixel art improvements in the gallery rn is honestly a little wild. my most recent pixel art is so much prettier than my vtuber concept from a few months back
anyone else find art level-ups staggering sometimes?
Here is the link to Secret Santa post for easier access, because it is already swamped by many fresher news.
During that last decade, have you made any cool artworks you could share in the gallery?
@Partack, wow, a comeback after ten years. I wasn't around back then, but still, I'm very happy to read this.
I still don't get why everyone is all up in arms about AI given that real live humans frankensprite and "copyright" ownership over palettes. At least the AI isn't threatening to murder anyone's dog. 
Hey PJ, keep on rockin. you guys are still awesome =) i'm glad to see this site still active
Hello everyone! Does anyone have the link to that pixel art tutorial by Cure? Where he examplies what is considered pixel art and whatnot? A friend of mine is starting to do pixel art and I thought that would a nice first steps.
my apologies i should have read more closely. i guess my bias against ai in general colored my perspective haha
In that case, the creator of the plugin/model clarifies that it was trained with a person's sprites, with their authorization.
wow those are pretty incredible tools, i know ai is frowned upon here but i'm impressed there's one that works so well in conjunction with aseprite. looks like it pretty shamelessly borrows from other artists though, in some of the examples you can even see it faking a signature in the bottom right cornor lol
the adopt pixel extension for aseprite looks good:
https://astropulse.gumroad.com/
the stable diffusion plugin looks good too! and in the preview of retro diffusion, they use a plugin called paletize I think. This is a start way!
would be interesting to somehow have a high res image on a layer, and pixel in chunky pixels on top of that image. like tracing with legos haha. maybe photoshop can do that? but yeah scaling down a photo and just doing pixel art on top is a pretty quick way to get where you need to be, compared to trying to get whatever software to behave just the way i want.
Yeah I think Reo's method is the way to go. Personally I scale using GIMP, load into Grafx2, then auto-reduce the palette to a number where it feels like it still maintains all the info I want, could be 64 colors or more, then I manually combine similar colors until I feel the palette is about as concise as it can be. Then I load it into Aseprite to do the actual pixelling and cleanup.
Though sometimes I find it faster and easier to just pixel right on top of the (downscaled) full-color photo/painting using a limited palette, using the full scale image as a reference. I used this latter method for these portraits.
i think they mean a method for turning a regular image into pixel art, without having artifacts or needing to do manual editing to make it convincing. i personally don't know of any way to do it without lot's of cleanup, but what reo suggested is probably the closest you can get with normal image editing software. maybe there's something out there though.
So, does anyone know the way to process an image so that it has, let's say, "the rules of pixel art"?
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Cyangmou charges over 100$US/an hour so as much as I'd like a tutor, I'm not ready to pay that much. So send me a PM if you're interested.