Since I keep bumping my head on this and never feel like commenting on it in the topics where my art is (since then people might accuse me of being a bad-crit-taking-person-thingy) I'm posting this up here for discussion.

As it seems to me there are two types of pixel art.

The one is what you do for fun, endlessly refining until you get the perfect image. Doing stuff that would be excruciating to animate isn't usually much of an issue as you're probably just going for the one still frame. Because you're doing it for yourself making slow progress over time isn't much of an issue either, and even when animating you can always just do whatever you want; as there are no HD/memory/time/animation system requirements.

I don't do that one very often.

The second is what you do for practical ends. An animated sprite for a fighting game, a template for an MMO character, tiles for a game you're making, and that type of thing. Art that's for something, and comes with all the constraints and considerations that go with this. You can't spend a month refining a still frame of a sprite, because that means you might take half a year just to finish the animations that flow out of the still as well. You can't make things as perfect as you want because it usually takes too long and "really good" instead of perfect, or even "good enough!" becomes a priority. You also start using messy tools like rotate, animate things through moving seperate parts and touchups, and all that jaz, just to be faster. Result: a non perfect, messier, but faster result.

The latter is what I do almost exclusively, since I can't seem to get my motivation up unless I'm doing it for something, even imaginary.


Now, it seems to me that often crits are mostly given from the first standpoint, which is totally understandable. After all, the first standpoint actually looks at what could be improved and tells you, even if it's a single misaligned pixel. But I've noticed sometimes it can grate a little, at least on me, to hear things being said that I explicitly did because it was production art, rather than hobby art.

Smoothly flowing hair is awesome, but if rigid anime, gravity defying hair shaves off 10 hours per frame, I'm probably going with that. Same with animations; most games don't have a very complex "reuse" system like fighter games that employ sprites have, and usually a lot more memory and space constraints to boot. So you wind up with less frames, less canvas, and you can't even flop in extra frames from elsewhere because there is no system that deals with that in place for you. Yes that outline is hideous and needs AAing and selout, but sometimes just keeping your outline flat color is just easier and faster. Yadayadayada, things like that.

So um. Not sure what I'm trying to accomplish with this thread, aside from getting discussion going. Maybe I need to start tagging my pics with a "production art disclaimer" that says most crits that would drastically increase workload or be impractical in an actual project setting will likely be ignored, so I won't feel guilty when I ignore crits I can't do anything with, or feel like I'm bad at taking them.

Discuss?