Pixel Art?! Why not Call it Rather a Grid Art

[Cure]

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.

[Seiseki]

Yeah I can't imagine anyone that appreciates pixel art who would want to remove it's roots. Especially since those roots were the reason most of us were attracted to pixel art in the first place.
It's also the reason that pixel art is still relevant in the gaming world and personally I don't care if it is not relevant to the rest of the world.

[RAV]

I think the general consensus has been that the word pixel is morphologically flexible enough -- more than given appreciation for -- to account for what makes sense accounting for by itself. The name makes a distinction that makes sense having in many ways, that is distinguishing computational era of this medium logic from the non-computational era, and the particular possibilities in workflow that means. In that, it makes no sense discussing this as one name being a replacement for the other, on the thought that pixel art would be obsolete because it's all the same in a better name, but rather together describing a methodical hierarchy of on-going evolution and specializations: given two works of art, both may have a grid in common, but one of them also is pixel art in specific, while the other is not, and that's worth pointing out.

However it is rather peculiar that a cross-stitch can look more like pixel art than many a modern digital art using pixels looks like. The introduction of painterly workflow into pixel art came much later; in the very beginning it was just setting pixel by pixel. And over time, the more painterly the emphasis of tools, the farther it became from looking like the beginnings of pixel art, until forced calling it different entirely, despite made of pixels. Thus it stands to reason that a workflow that is not by-pixel of any given resolution, is muddying the primary nature of what makes this art distinctive most from any other art, and by this creating merely an artificial difference within itself and to its past of any era. Pixel art is more different from cross-stitch, the less pixel art is purely pixel art-ish, so to speak, given the computational possibility of using the same underlying logic of medium in a way that's more akin to a different art.

[questseeker]

There are many varieties of "grid art", and both defining aspects (discrete elements, arranged on a grid) are flexible:  not all constituent elements are as simple as "a minimal patch of color" inside each grid cell, and not all elements are arranged in perfect square or rectangular grids (or regular grids at all); pixel art happens to be maximally constrained in both aspects, but it is only a special case of a large spectrum.
Types of "grid art", roughly in order of appearance, include:

• Repetitive arrangements of similar objects, from a pyramid of skulls to surplus magnets on a whiteboard.
• Tapestries, macramé, leather braids and other regular arrangements of knots with the same shape.
• Combinations of knots with objects such as beads, pearls and seashells, including one-dimensional arrangements like necklaces and bracelets.
• Knitting, where the knots have variable shapes and the grid is deformed and/or exotic.
• Chains (one-dimensional) and chain mail, including popular kinds of jewelry.
• Mosaics, often with inexact grids.
• Larger scale arrangements of bricks, stone blocks, tiles and the like, often monochrome, on arbitrary rectangular grids (for floor tiles, on arbitrary grids and grid combinations), constrained by the need to stagger adjacent blocks, and rarely figurative.
• Cloth, except for the marginal case of very fine threads of the same color that don't produce any visible texture.
• All types of embroidery, which are strictly aligned to a grid even if not consisting of dot-like elements. Even the varieties that are most similar to pixel art (e.g. cross-stitching) feature elements with complex shapes and grid outlines in addition to cell interiors.
• Pegboard toys, which aren't necessarily constrained to a regular grid and usually include a variety of "elementary" peg head sizes and shapes that occlude many board holes.
• Patterns of nails etc. on an object, with regular large units but no practical constraint to following a grid.
• Pointillist painting is structurally very similar, except for allowing dot overlap.
• Pixel art, born for CRT screens, adapted to newer kinds of electronic screens, and increasingly inappropriate for the historical application of videogame graphics given the trend towards very high resolutions.
• Building stuff in Minecraft, Dwarf Fortress and similar grid-based videogames, an interesting example of natural re-emergence of low resolution from the same technical progress that is "killing" pixel art.
• Melding together Perler Beads; since they are round, an hexagonal grid is more natural than a square one, and the elementary unit includes an interior hole and a a quota of a concave exterior hole.

[Lanarky]

I never enable the grid when I work with pixels. In my opinion, it's visually distracting when set to 1x1. Most I'll ever use it for would be for tile-work, and that's with it set to 16x16 or 32x32.

[YellowLime]

Here's a very valid point for you: 'pixel art' is the decades-old term for it

I wouldn't mind whatever terminology will be used ten years from now, but I agree that the bulk of pixel art (and I mean 99%) is done in the digital medium, so I wouldn't change the term just for the sake of including very small niches (you can imagine how small, if they're small in comparison to pixel art ) or etymological correctness.

Even artists that work with traditional media understand that working digitally is (for the better or worse) much faster, comfortable, and beneficial to productivity (there is no ctrl+z in real life). For example, take syosa, who enjoys occasionally knitting grid art, but generally produces computer graphics.

Maybe in some years, if everyone started reproducing Pokemon sprites in Minecraft as a means of artistic outlet () the term might be seen obsolete in the practitioners' eyes, and then it might change. But the current digital, abstract workflow that graphics programs provide (and productivity that it entails) seems hard to beat at the time (although not for long, if we keep getting more Dan Fessler-like breakthroughs )