June 2009 News

Create an image that shows some kind of a mysterious glow. Remember, this challenge is basically about lighting.

edit: it seems a lot of people are misunderstanding the term 'mysterious'. From dictionary.com: "3. of obscure nature, meaning, origin, etc.; puzzling; inexplicable." Light sources from generally known and explainable circumstances do not constitute mysteriousness!

Canvas Size - Min 100x100.
Colours - Unrestricted. But must contain BOTH black (#000000) AND white (#ffffff).
Transparency - Optional.
Animation - Optional.

The challenge thread will have all the challenge updates. The thread is also a great place to post your WIPs.

Newgrounds.com, a site that used to be only for flash movies/games and music, has now added an art section.

Users can submit up to 20 works of art, and then if an established artist likes your work, they will add it to the gallery. The gallery has 5 sections: Ilustration, Fine Art, 3D Art, Pixel Art, and Other.

You can also choose to allow people to use your art for their works, like games or movies. Really just another way to get your art seen, and by possibly different people. I know some of you already know about it, because I've seen some recognizable art there. They also have a very nice upload/crop system.

Newgrounds News post about the gallery:
http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1072217

Newgrounds Pixel Art Gallery:
http://www.newgrounds.com/art/category/pixel-art

Pixel your own interpretation of the tooth fairy. You may include a background if you wish, or you may simply draw the character, leaving the background transparent.

Canvas Size - Unrestricted.
Colours - Max 20.
Transparency - Optional.
Animation - Optional.

This is a follow-up to the news post below by Evilagram.

Read the full post...

The following pixel artists produced Pixel Joint's top rated pixel art for May 2009. Many thanks go out to this month's top pixel artists and all the members who took time to rate.

 

P.O.D by TheInquisitor

Plagued - GB Challenge by jalonso

Pixelblink - Failsafe by Adarias

Monolithic Circle by Kaiseto

Blueball Crab by jalonso

The King of Clubs - Weekly Challenge by JinnDEvil

Elk's Doodle Interpretation Worm-Thingy by Elk

King of Hearts by cocefi

APH picnic by emlan

Tiepolo Conception by AlexHW

surt challenges you to pixel a scene that could be captioned with the word "Egads!" using only the default EGA 16 colour palette.

A caption containing "Egads!" in the image is encouraged, but optional.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egads

Subject matter and execution is up to you and your imagination.

Canvas Size - Max 320 (width) x 200 (height).
Colors: Max 16. Use only colors from the default EGA palette:

Transparency - No.
Animation - No.

The challenge thread will have all the challenge updates. The thread is also a great place to post your WIPs.

As of the official implementation of Gecko version 1.9.2, there will be a tag implemented that chooses the resizing algorithm used on a page, allowing you to choose between Nearest Neighbor (direct resize, no blur), Bilinear Filtering (low quality blur, which is currently used), or Bicubic Blur (high quality blur, what photoshop uses). Meaning that we'll no longer have blurry pixel art when we resize.

https://developer.mozilla.org/En/CSS/image-rendering

This is the official documentation. It'll be stuck in along with HTML 5, meaning that you can probably try out the new tags in the current Firefox 3.5 beta.

The tags to be added into the CSS styles are as follows:

img[src$=".gif"] { image-rendering: -moz-crisp-edges; -ms-interpolation-mode: nearest-neighbor; }
img[src$=".png"] { image-rendering: -moz-crisp-edges; -ms-interpolation-mode: nearest-neighbor; }

For an invidual image you'd use this code (can be factored into the  BBcodes in the forum, and the display for individual images on the site):

<img style="-ms-interpolation-mode:nearest-neighbor" alt="images/WhateverAlt.jpg" src="images/Whatever.jpg"/>

The code will be fully implemented in Firefox 3.5, but as mentioned above, you can try it out now in the beta version.

Finally it come to an end: the great work made by PulkoMandy and Yrizoud, the two lead developers of grafx2, finally completed the TODO list left by the Sunsted Design team that in 1999 abandoned the project.

Grafx2 is a bitmap program born to emulate Deluxe Paint or Brilliance, now it can run under most of the operating systems available today, like Linux, Mac OS X, Windows and even Amiga OS among many others.

The program is stable and filled with a lot of tools and functions, it's shipped with a great palette editor and it's freeware and open source!

Check it out on its home page!

http://grafx2.googlecode.com

This week Lollige challenges you to create a space ship sprite in side view.

Some examples:
http://pixeljoint.com/pixelart/17107.htm
http://pixeljoint.com/pixelart/4640.htm
http://pixeljoint.com/pixelart/13825.htm

Canvas Size - Unrestricted.
Colors: Max 16.
Transparency - Required.
Animation - Optional.

Challenge winner cocefi challenges you to pixel a scene showing the grand doorway to the other world. The scene must contain an entrance gate or doorway of some sort.

A lone staircase leading up to the sky or down to darkness doesn't count (but the door to your brother's hellish room does!).

Canvas Size - Unrestricted.
Colors - Maximum 32.
Transparency - No.
Animation - Optional.