What got you into Pixel Art?

[VictorR]

I was thinking a while back how some of you great artists got into such a hobby. (A good way of saying such a hobby)
I'll start us off.
A while back a friend of mine started did pixel art. His stuff was pretty good but it didn't really get my into it. But a while back I made a large muscle piece and a great great friend of mine Indigo did an amazing edit that had me going into all sorts of art. From anatomy, to shading, to drawing and coloring. Up to date I still look back at it and stare.
He really is the cause why Im into this stupendous hobby and I'd like to thank him for it!!

[Frychiko]

Probably late 80's..I wanted to make games that were popular at that time... so I made some rudimentary BASIC art program so I could draw pics for my games (starting drawing with CGA, then EGA then VGA). I tried making sierra-like games, and apogee-like games, oh it was a blast. I only ever successfully finished ONE GAME EVER.. (among 50 or so rpgs, platform games, etc) during what.... a ten year span. I look forward to making another small complete game within 20 years. That's my goal.

[Cow]

I used to make crappy games with crappy graphics. I wanted to make crappy games with good graphics. That's the gist of it.

Yeah, it was mostly making games that got me into it, but when I saw stuff from people like im9today, Sticky, and Wolverine, I kinda dropped what I was doing and went on to just pixeling. Because I wanted to reach their level. Haven't yet though. Hopefully I will eventually.

[.TakaM]

a couple years ago one of my friends showed me ocarina of time 2d's website, at this point I didnt really know people tried to make serious games themself, so I kept an eye on the site for a while and eventually signed up at the creators forums, found an active spriting section and I kept trying to make something good enough to be used in his 2d remake, as I recall nothing I made ever got accepted but I noticed heaps of people were making their own games so I started helping them

so yeah, I didnt learn a whole lot over that period except discovering a passion

[Sherman Gill]

Graal Online. When I joined all the user-made things sucked, and by the time I was good enough to confidently submit new graphics there was tons of good stuff.

[Xion]

I brokedance into the line of fire, getting by with a low-res mosaic perpendicular to indignance of a sprite who was willing to commit suicide to gain immortality in the halls of gamedom. Postmortem to aspirations, oneself finds oneself finding that hopelessness permeates every vein to the point of aesthetic reconnection, devoid of hope beyond trying-failure. So it continues to seek, slowly killing the original dream, replacing it with rainbow delusions of grandeur. Soon the solctice will come and psychotic personal fads will dissipate to reality.

[Mega10]

It was probably back when i was in 5th-6th grade, around 11-12 years old. I was really big into emulation, and also fighting games(SNK Neo Geo games first and foremost), not just because I loved playing them, but their aesthetic and design was just so different, the sprites on screen weren't like platformers or any other kind, they were big and alive and demanded my attention above anything else. And due to the fact it was all on my computer, there was no blur or scanline to depreciate the image, which was a huge difference for me(I had always been a hardcore gamer glued to the tv, i probably didn't even know what a pixel was). But it wasn't the arcade game stuff that got me into pixelling, it was probably when i started emulating, and eventually bought a Neo-Geo Pocket Color so I could play King of Fighters R-2 and SNK vs. Capcom. If you're not familiar with them, most of the neo-geo pocket color fighting games carry the same trademark style that's become quite popular.



I think it was because the sprites were so simple, but so great to look at, especially in motion, it lit a spark for me that made me realize I could draw my own. The amount of character they had was absurd, and I was really inspired to try and capture that. That's about it I guess. I was a weird little kid.

[robalan]

Um...wow Xion, I'm not quite sure whether I understood that or not, but I think it was cool...

Anyway, I got into pixelling when I found Pixelation from a link from the credits of some DarkBasic game I had downloaded.  Then I lurked.  For two and a half years.

[Blick]

A lot like Xion's case, I was tired of masturbating and needed a new hobby. That was what that story was about, right?

I opened MSpaint one day and said "I will draw something." I did and it sucked. I'm not entirely sure why, but I continued to make my attempts and I continued to be the worst artist ever. One day I finally started to improve and realized the general opinion of me changed from "We all hate you" to "You aren't that bad" so I stayed with it.

And I was tired of masturbating and needed a new hobby.

[Ai]

When I was young (by which I mean, 4-7 years old) I played plenty of games on the Amstrad CPC.
At 8 I got Laser Basic , which came with a built in sprite editor (operated by joystick or cursor keys), I started using the sprite editor, naturally. Some influences may have been:
   * Batman
   * Head over Heels
   * New zealand story
   * Ghosts n Goblins
   * Lost caves

My first significant upgrade to that was PCPaint, when I was using a 286. I drew much more using PCPaint than I had with LaserBasic. I fought QBasic, trying to get it to display my pictures with proper colors in a way that was not a complete chore. I didn't succeed in that, though eventually I managed to set a truecolor mode and completely baffle Qbasic's graphics routines (on a 486 -- I was using RSE by then, which I maintain is still a good tool if you can get it to run these days..) Eventually I encountered Gimp, which I've been using since just after I finished the graphics for Watman. I've always had a technical bent and the view that technology facilitates art, and in order to do your best in art you must also continue to make technical and technological improvements.
This may relate to the fact that I first coded at 4 (I can remember my exact first program: '10 print "Hello" 20 goto 10' I've made an extensive set of plugins for gimp, and a number of enhancements (the ability to move to next/prev color in palette and the ability to use custom dither matrices were both implemented by me). My greatest technical achievement is probably my vector-based smooth scaling system(example output ), which was designed for scaling or antialiasing sprites but can also scale 24bit pictures with comparable quality. Specifically, it was meant for the case where you have a small version of a sprite and you want a bigger one without needing to redraw it all. It does do that well and often the scaled sprites require only very minor editing before looking good. I haven't used it much artistically yet because it's not integrated in the UI yet; most of my plugins which are built into the UI get a good workout.