Purism is a dead-end. You shouldn't try to have a small palette to have a small palette and nobody should care or commend you for your small palette. You should have a controlled palette (of whatever size, as long as you can control it) if that leads to more coherent art.

preach it

I must be the only one here that prefers neofotistou's original take over the other versions. It's a lot cleaner, simpler, less bulky. reads better.

Ok, let every person who claims to own the copyright and/or intellectual property to a specific piece of information/knowledge step forward

Very few people literally no one is making legal threats, I don't think that's the most important issue here. Let's return to your first comment- why should those of us who see the book as problematic feel "foolish?"

gnosis is free. knowledge is for everyone.

that's the point...

Someone took the time and effort to write a book/summary on a topic you hold dear, and the problem is?... seriously, think about it, specifiy it and spell it out. I'll bet you're gonna feel pretty foolish once you break it down.

The problem is the information in this book was thought up and compiled by the community, to be freely distributed to anyone interested in our artform. Someone repackages it and wants to sell it back to us, but what is the benefit of this? Other than the benefit to his own wallet? It doesn't seem to serve the community, they can learn these things for free from the original sources.

What we call a pixel art can be best described as a crossover of digital painting and the traditional art of tapestry

Dubious.

You start with a grid and you fill its cells with square patches of color

I start with a blank canvas, the same as when I paint traditionally. I don't consider the grid until I'm pixel-pushing toward the end of the image.

A specific role that a colored cell plays in the final image is determined by its relation with other cells. With the adjacent ones, in the first line. It means that the image is never a simple sum of its colored cells. Rather, it is an organic composition where the grid position of the colored cell determines its specific role in the image taken as a whole. For example, a cell with a certain color that is surrounded by lighter cells gives a shadow effect. Surrounded by darker cells, the same cell with the same color results in a highlight, etc.

I didn't follow any of this.

The capacity of the single cell to influence the whole image - or at least adjacent cells - is made possible by the size of the cell. Obviously, the minimal size of the cell should not go bellow the naked eye visibility. Otherwise, a single cell color change would not have any effect on the image. The minimal "brush" size of our digital painter would have to grow in order that he be able to control the effect of a single color placement gesture. That would, however, transform our grid art into an ordinary form of digital painting - one that we normally do in Gimp or Photoshop. The grid art would lose its proper essence and it would cease to be what it is.

I think you're a little concerned with the visibility of squares. As Ryumaru and Carnivac have pointed out (and Pix3m proved with an image), this is a strict and contemporary definition. In the days of CRT monitors, the pixels were blurred, which affected the medium and how the artists created images (e.g. dithering was a much more useful technique.) Likewise, "hi-res" pixel art that "loses" the grid is fine too (see: Panda, Elk, etc.) The bit about losing its "proper essence" and ceasing to be "what it is" is especially nebulous.

That said, two minimal conditions must be fulfilled in order to call something a grid art:
- The image has to be a) grid-structured and b) a minimal patch of color should be a square that fits exactly the size of the grid cell.
- A single grid cell must be visible to the naked eye.

I've seen pixel art that uses a triangular grid, an offset-brick pattern, and non-square rectangles (either tall or long).

We do not want our art to be defined by something as volatile as screen technology.

I think it's defined by its medium of expression. We can't divorce pixel art from its dependence upon and history with the computer. It is true that there is a tradition of grid-based art (beadwork of the Native Americans, dyed inlays on colonial American furniture, mosaic pattern from the Islamic Golden Age, etc.), but it would be simplistic to reduce pixel art to just this impulse. That would reduce pixel art to just the 'tapestry' mindset you described earlier, with no regard for the importance of the 'digital' or 'painting' aspects that you yourself say are foundational.