Pixels And Art Glossary

[RAV]

Such a great project. I look forward to see it all come together.

About scientific and emotional explanation: It's a bit blurry. Whenever we systemize something, to understand and explain it, make it methodical, we are unwittingly having one foot back in the scientific aspect. For example, to understand the human behaviour, one can look at the neurological and chemical setup, but also study the situational behaviour, and cultural/sociological/historical elements. From biochemistry to psychology to anthropology, it's all science, generating knowledge, with a different emphasis in research. So the moment we try connect emotion with colour in a chart, we are theorizing emotion, to make it usable for artwork. There is even a science to "fun". It sort of plays into Game Theory, and is important for game designers to realize, that a player experience can be planned better than by gut feel or happenstance.

Not really important or new to you, but I felt like talking a lil' about that, it's been on my mind.

I agree with the greater relevance of psychological colour than physical property description for art.

[0xDB]

Everything is about everything and everything connects with everything. But... I honestly do not think a single lifetime is long enough to explore and discuss EVERYTHING. A Glossary is like a door to a rabbit hole and a very rough overview but individual parts of the rabbit hole itself are better mapped out in detail elsewhere.

[RAV]

Agreed. You handle this well. it wasn't a critique. just felt like musing on this a lil' on the side.

This glossary will be something very special and useful.

[0xDB]

Was not received as critique, just felt like a good lead-in to re-explain the purpose and scope of the term "Glossary" to everyone who might also be reading along and maybe wondering why it's not overly detailed or why I'm not including everything everyone said or says.

[0xDB]

Everyone's favorite term added. Cluster! I took the liberty to broaden the originally proposed definition from "equally colored connected pixels" to "perceptually connected" and in the same breath added super-cluster, sub-cluster and fragment as terms for the mind to think about when pondering how to shape, place and combine clusters. An interesting observation is that the relationship between any two neighboring (sub)clusters, both in shape and value, has an effect on the implied orientation and direction of both clusters.

Cluster

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A patch of perceptually connected pixels which
are part of the description of a shape, volume
or texture or any other element.

A cluster may be thought of as a fragment of
any element, as a sample of anything, as seen
by the eye or as imagined.

Shaping and shading a cluster gives direction
and orientation to the cluster itself which
also serves to give direction and orientation
to the element which the cluster aims to help
define.

Shadow and light on a cluster can be thought
of as individual (sub)clusters as well. Single,
perceptually separated pixels are not clusters
by definition.
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further reading:
http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=8110.0 - Ramblethread
http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=15566.0 - 1st Cluster Study Thread
http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=15018.0 - 2nd Cluster Study Thread
(just search for "cluster" on this board... there are a few more )
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[Gil]

I like that definition, it's a little broader and encompasses more pixel art.

Maybe we should eventually use all this for a wiki.

[Ai]

Making some kind of site from it sounds good.

Personally, I don't have the same trust in wikis that I once did -- in particular, my impression is that the more room for subjectiveness in the topic, the worse a wiki functions. I think a site whose content is generated from a github repo curated by a small team, that of course anyone can submit pull requests to, is a model that would do better at creating a trustworthy resource of consistent quality.

[wzl]

i actually like the forum approach, as it doesnt disconnect content from the discussion. I was a member of the gpwiki before, and that just fell apart, because it split the community up. Not a fan of that.
And with the tagging system i suppose we can have a sort of overview or index page for tutorials and other articles like that, which would be kinda cool.

[Gil]

I like Ai's idea of a curated github.

[0xDB]

Updated op with a bunch of links (still lots of stubs/bullet points left to fill with details).

Changed the "Color" entry to emphasize that the concepts described in there are of emotional nature and not meant to describe the physical process of any color mixing theory nor the scientific property of color temperature.

Added entry for Color Gradient, Color Ramp, Color Shift.