Dex I can completely understand you.
It's not up to anyone to judge "that's good art, that's bad art" - everyone has his own taste and his own criterias to judge about certain pieces.
And I think that the whole judging thematic destroys artistic freedom on a very basic level.
If we start to judge something "as community", and even if it's just voting, it's an harsh insection of an "individual" artists freedom.
The only thing we can judge in art and we can measure is realism. The more realistic something gets the more we can compare it with reality and the easier it is to judge about an artists eye (Gottfried Helnwein?).
"oh wow that's like a photo" (craftmanship?)
However if we talk about something abstract and we don't get the ideas of the creator behind a piece (Wassily Kandinsky?)
there is a chance that we don't understand it and see it as "trash" without even questioning what's behind it (ideas?)
It's all up to oneselfs ideals.
Narrow-minded people are fearing the unknown. A lot of artists we consider as great nowadays brought something new to the table other artists don't understood and it was easier to say it's bullshit than trying to reconstruct a certain thinking process.
The problem is that some great artists aren't even questioning their perspective and they are doing stuff because they learned it that way and always will do it that way.
Now the big overall contradiction with pixel art technique is that it nowhere has anything to do with common "artistic craftmanship". It's not like perspective, color theory or anatomy and all of those techniques we need to make a descriptive piece of art.
We can't even measure it against anything
I suppose it's a much more abstract way of thinking about how to create a piece with pixels and how we use those pixels to get an effect.
And we need experimental pieces to look at to get out something.
Elks dragon would look great with another technique as well, same goes for Panda's falcon. Is it great "pixel art" (with applied pixel techniques we discuss here in this thread) or is it great art made with pixels (artistic craftmanship in the common sense, like crowd-voted on Pixeljoint)
Furthermore and I don't mean this insulting in any way (nor would I have brought it up, but it serves as a great example for "perception" and we are particularly talking about that in this thread as well and it lines up perfectly with the first paragraph)
your Secret Santa piece.
http://wayofthepixel.net/upload/ss13/tim_from_Dex.pngIf I measure it with my own preferences I'd say the effort you put into it shows off and it's something everyone could get inspired from, the colors are great, the subjects are well chosen and the overall look is also nice.
In terms of common artistic technique the piece fails in nearly all spots where it wants to shine.
the most obvious wrong spots:
In terms of anatomical details are both elbows,
in terms of posture it's how you connected the lower torso with the legs,
in terms of proportion it's the neck,
in terms of drapery it's the piece wrapped around the upper arm
the animal anatomy of the pigeons is quite off to, but that's a side detail
If we will crowd-judge this piece at Pixeljoint It will be percepted well, because a lot of people just see the overall details but can't look through the basis of the image or they lack the in-depth knowledge.
Nonetheless the piece definitely will find its audience as every piece with a certain level of skill does.
But just because the overall perception will be well this won't mean that I will change my opinion about it or I will adjust my knowledge to the average one.
And I could be nice and say "oh wow it's so great how much effort you put into it, how well the colors work and how great the overall impression is" then I also won't lie, I'd just have shifted my usual priorities
Whenever we judge something there is a serious danger that the creator adjusts his own artistic vision to the judges opinion which takes intentionally or unintentionally away from artistic freedom.
In arts we first learn about certain rules (or at least we should gather enough basic knowledge)
and then everyone goes his way and breaks them intentionally to his preferences
Helm was questioning the basic ideas and ideals of pixel art and I think everyone can gain from it, if we are capable of working it out.
The technique (or ruleset) we are discussing here has not a lot to do with our own judgment criterias and we can't apply it 100% to our established techniques yet.
It's an experience to apply different criterias to a piece and to look at it from a completely different perspective.
And from experimenting you can gain experiences and with experiences you can grow.
With my provocant questions like "leaving out AA completely" I just want to emphasize that everyone who participates in this thread overthinks his ideals as some people already did.
After all my experiences so far, I'd heavily recommend that you don't apply this technique to your old art first,
instead make something completely new which don't necessarily has to be "a part of you" and it should get a lot easier to experiment with a different mindset.
@r4c7:
Yeah you exactly brought up what I stated earlier - for me the key element also is the contrast.