I've been trying to understand why all the bad runescape art. Is it because they sell sigs to each other for 'runescape money', so there's some sort of faux-economy that calls for such. But then why pixel art sigs and not photoshops?
Yes! Exactly - why pixel art? It's displayed at 1x, and there is no real retro theme that I can detect, at least in the stuff that ends up here. So i mean, stylewise, there does not seem to be any advantage over photoshop...my guess is a lot of the sigs are probably made up of other people's line art, and the thought is that pixel art is kind of like a coloring book. You just hit "fill area" and then you have your colors and ta-da you're done? I don't see any other real advantage to the approach given the subject matter and general style.
also, my apologies if my previous comment overstepped some boundary, but I did think very long and hard about every piece of runescape art that has ever been posted here (that i am aware of) and was not able to find any convincing contradictions. This is no claim to my own quality of work or professionalism (and in fact probably reflects poorly on the latter), just a strong trend with no apparent counter-evidence.