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.

[Niss]

I first got my hands dirty (I'm not talking about masturbating) with little icons on a shabby old palmtop. That was about 4 years ago. Of course I was always a big fan of the old (-> DOS, SNES, NES) games and their graphics. But it all got really serious early 2005. Well kinda serious.
And after a long night pixel-pushing there is always a hand and the idea of a reward...

AI: Wait you reminded me of the "basic" times. With 10 years I had some kind of scientific calculator from my dad. It had basic on it and a four lines monochrome display or something. I "pset"-ed my first rudimentary pictures with that - and continued in colour with qbasic on my first pc.

AI again: But you've definitely got the coolness-points with linux and scripting(python it is?). I'm thinking of switching to linux sooner or later too.

[Xion]

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

Haha, no.
I started because I wanted to become the next great game designer. It's an aspiration that I still have, but I know now that I can't just sit down and make a game with a snap of my fingers. I'd found RPG Maker 2000 back in...uh, 2000, and made little edits to the characters as I saw fit. I knew then that anything I made from scratch would suck, so I didn't even try. Then I found GameMaker and realized that it's graphic package was even worse than my own abilities. I opened a file in paint that I'd made a while ago and imported it, animated it, and made a little platform game which I somehow thought would become the Cave Story of the day. But Cave Story didn't exist back then. After about 70 little unfinished games made with gamemaker, I found to Pixelation and began improving my art for the sake of being art rather than just a little character in a game. I still made games in gamemaker but when I saw people making standalone images, I tried making one. I saw pixel artists like Monsoon2d, Helm, David, Blick (Yes, Blick), Kenneth Fejer, and Panda Guy, who greatly influenced me in my style both at and away from the computer. Sals'(Adam Tierny[sp?]) and Camus'(Conceit) animations and those black and white anime pixel movies made me want to learn how to animate, then I saw Paul Robertson's stuff and had my mind blown. Now I want to be just like them, only better. (Thus my delusions of grandeur.)

And here I am today.

However lately I've been pixeling less, and finishing nothing (I'll get back to that Dream Sweet pic eventually). I may eventually quit altogether in favor of traditional art, then come back later when mah skillz are honed and I'm ready to finish something. (Thus the psychotic fads dissipating to reality.)
But until then, I hope I don't become another infamous artist who never finishes his stuff.

Well, that was more of an autobiography of my pixel-art life than "What got me into it," but oh well.

[Ryumaru]

many years ago i was bored at my aunts house, and opened mspaint. i stubled apon the zoom button and saw that when i did that, it made everything look "gamey". that was in 2000, because i was drawing big the cat. i wouldnt call this pixelart, it was basically small oekaki? lol

then, 5 years later i had a game idea(horrible one) and i remembered how i did that big the cat years ago and started real pixeling. i made a character that was about 48 pixels tall and he had no shading. i actually still have a boss that i later made for that same game, it was made after i found the original pixelation and dipped my brain into things such as dithering.

ah the memories!
http://img133.imageshack.us/my.php?image=watergod8gp.png

[Filax_666]

Desktop icons

[Feron]

Me and Artisan used to fuck around in photoshop / ms paint making isometric stuff heavily inspired by super totto.

I then got my imac G3 and photoshop (legally of course  'cos we'd hate to deprive big multi million dollar companies of money wouldn't we?) about 2/3 years ago.
I then joined pixeljoint and realised there was pixel-art beyond isometrics 
I then became a massive lurker on pixelopolis. 

[Helm]

Video Games, man! AGI sierra adventure games, Shadow of the Beast, Flashback. Looking at those things real closely is why I became interested in what pixels can do. Messing around with them started to make apparent what they can do that other art forms cannot, and there you go.

[Terley]

Oh I first started on Tip.it runescape forums making runescape signatures using paint cus I didn't have any other program, at first I didn't think of it as pixel-art, don't remember even know what pixel art was.. Sick and tired of trying to make 'pixel signatures'  (they were hardly that as one of my pieces was 200+ unecissery colours), I realised there is more to pixel art than what I have been doing.. im still trying to shake off those old bad habits.

I've picked up a lot from you guys over the last two years or so, first off I was a lurker learning from others, now hopefully I can be considered a 'pixel artist'. My goals are and always have been to make a game someday, and add my own animations.

(I'd don't consider any of my older work 'pixel art', they're just signatures made in paint really)

[shaheen]

I'd say that a few things helped get me into pixel art. Around 4 or so years ago, we had got rid of internet, and I was left with basically a blank PC with nothing fun to do than open up MSPaint and doodle. So, for about a year (or two?) without internet and only drawing in MSPaint, I got fairly good at controlling the mouse when drawing.

A little later on, I started playing a game that everyone in my area was called "Well of Souls." It was a fairly cheesy MMORPG that was your standard grindfest with mediocre quests on the side, but the unique thing it had was the ability to make your own "skin" (appearance) for your character, which was basically four or five frames for each possible action your character did in a scene. Game sprites were a popular choice for making skins, so I got into sprite editing from there (mostly SNK sprites) as well as trying to make my own from scratch (based on a "stretch bunny" toy my friend had). That was about the time where I really learned all the little tricks with MSPaint, like all the things you can do with the right-click button.

Take that, and the fact that I became really interested in SNK/Capcom fighting games, as well as getting into the emulation of older games. These days, I'm trying to make graphics to make my own games, and some just for fun and for expressing myself when I'm feeling all artsy-like.

[Darien]

I first dabbled in pixel art by opening MSPaint and making little castle scenes, where all the people stood with their legs at perfect diagonals, 90 degrees from each other.  I soon lost interest in that until I came across VERGE, and wanted to make a video game, of course.  Then in my attempt to learn skills I would do pixel by pixel copies of other sprites, especially this one sprite that was a rip off of Edgar from FF6.  Also the River City Ransom sprites, which I then pumped to all hell with many shades.

[hawken]

not sure if it was even called pixel art when most of us got into it.

[Helm]

I think I first came across the term on pixelation, yes. Many, many years after the initial infatuation.

[Scotteh]

Oh I first started on Tip.it runescape forums making runescape signatures using paint cus I didn't have any other program, at first I didn't think of it as pixel-art, don't remember even know what pixel art was.. Sick and tired of trying to make 'pixel signatures'   (they were hardly that as one of my pieces was 200+ unecissery colours), I realised there is more to pixel art than what I have been doing.. im still trying to shake off those old bad habits.

Lol same here, except i started on runescape community and was enspired by 3 people,  Jabraulter, misterxman and musn't forget Godslayer

[Neoriceisgood]

Running into sprites, not managing to find what game they were from, realising that people could make them themselves, with paint.

Pretty much the entire realisation that it was possible to make such awesome things with pixels; I was always fascinated with pixel art back when I was still hogging my SNES all day.

[Keops]

One day I just wanted to make an icon...

And suddenly I was making more and more pixel art. I also love games, even more if they are 2D, so I guess it's natural.

[alkaline]

i think i first got into pixel art from seeing it on DA...there were some impressive works and it just totally got into my head that i should learn that stuff. i was probably pretty influenced from all those consoles as well but didn' really experiment until about 2 years ago. i saw those isometric works and that was all i wanted to learn how to do...ISO!

DA just may have been my gateway into finding pixeljoint, pixelation, etc etc.. everything pixel art...weird.

[Skull]

Street Fighter II.   

[goat]

When I was really really young my sole source of entertainment for a while was an a500 with

- a shitload of Psygnosis titles
- Deluxe Paint III

I was doomed.

[Conzeit]

it was called spriting when I got into it.


I've always been obsessed about imitating 2d game graphics anyway. My school notebooks are full of drawings imitatiing mario bros and megaman :p

But it wasnt until I saw the ripped sprites from MegamanX4 that I actually sprited, I couldnt belive that the graphics that I liked so much in-game were so tiny and simple to do.

there was also an influence from editing digimon/pokemon cursors, I was into animating from the beggining.....I remember one of the first things I did was animating the fire in a charmander's tail.

Then I came to pixelation it was because I got a heads up from the first guy who's homemade never finsihed game I worked on.

[Sohashu]

My sister bagging me out about asking other people for graphics on the GMC.  So I opened paint and did a little sprite.  I found the experience quite enjoyable.  So I did more, and I found myself getting better.  Then after about a month I found Pixel Forums.  I saw indigo's stuff there and was quite impressed.  So I followed the link in his sig here, and I realised how crap I was.  Since then I have been trying to get better, and if you compare my newer posted stuff with my oldest piece here:



to my later stuff:


VV WIP VV


I think you'll see the impact this place has had on me.  Anyway, enough about my life. 

[Dogmeat]

When I was about 11 i was messing around with applepaint or whatever the paint program was called on the macintosh ( one of those ones that was a single unit ). Anyway, I was trying to draw something, but really didn't like how jagged the pencil tool made everything look. Zoomed in, tried to make something pixel by pixel and came up with a little man. Decided to make a bunch of these, knights, men, women, animal people, whatever. Then decided I could do a little wares waldo montage. A few hours later I had something like that, brought it to school, all the kids thought i was cool

Didn't repeat for nearly 12 years.

WHat got me back into it was that taiwan site lovepixel, the first piece I did was:




Really the one and only ISO piece I've ever done, moved on to pixeling my sketches after that.

[VictorR]

It's really nice hearing how you guys got into pixeling. Fun fun!

[HauntedArt]

I got into it because I wanted to make games too. I dabbled a bit with it Games Factory when I was a stupid little kid, and at that time I didn't even know it was pixelart, much less how to make the game actually work. I just enjoyed making some sort of ship... and then another... and then making one move while the other being controlled by me and shooting stuff at the other ship and playing it over, and over, and over... If I only used that time to learn a real programming language. Stupid me...
Anyway, after that it's been a little on and off, mainly doing different sets of stuff I dream about would come to life finally in some game, if I ever learnt how to program. I'm still doing that... And I STILL can't program anything more advanced than different incarnations of "Hello cruel world of games that don't program themselves" in about 3-4 different languages...

[Gunne]

I started in Mspaint 7 maybe 5 years ago, just drawing stuff (wallpapers), because I'd never heard of other programs. I thought it was the only thing to create things, and then I discovered Rpg maker in begin 2002, and start spriting, well and after that period it really ends, didn't do pixeling for about 4-5 years (I was to busy playing Quake III, Unreal etc.). And suddenly photoshop came into my life, first I made stuff using photo's and filters, later I developed my skills with vectors, and now back to basics, so I really started again with these little pixels mid-2006, in order to learn gamedevelopment

Maybe I can digg some stuff up from ye olde times

[Dogmeat]

I dabbled a bit with it Games Factory when I was a stupid little kid,

Don't put yourself down man..

[Godslayer]

He's putting the kid that was him down.

[Dogmeat]

Thats very deep GS, thank you.

[Conzeit]

what about dates people? I want to know dates...I think it'd be interesting to find out how the internet pixel cult started out.

I think....I started my interest on pixelart (knowing what it was, because as I said I drew mario levels in my notebooks) in 1998 and I got to actually doing it in 1999...

Godslayer...I think that's still just as bad, you know..the inner kid kicks ass, we put down innocence way too much in this individualist society....sorry I have to have an opinion on everything XDD

[Rynen10K]

Mario Paint's Stamp editor mode along with the Nintendo Power "Player's Guide" (if you can call it that).

There was a section in the middle that showed you how to make sprites from zelda, Street fighter, and a bunch of other crap.

A few weeks later, I found MSPaint. Then, quite a long time later, I found the original Pixelation tutorials.

As for the Mario Paint date, I think i got it for Christmas of 1992, then I got the player's guide early spring of 1993.

I don't remember when I found out how pixels worked the same as the Stamp Editor in MSPaint, but I remember I was at my cousins house when I figured it out.

[Ai]

what about dates people? I want to know dates...I think it'd be interesting to find out how the internet pixel cult started out.

I know no exact date, however I was around pixelation at it's original creation, was monitoring tsu's tutorials page, and guess that the activity began picking up popularity on the net around the time of the second iteration of Pixelation (the first was a modest 'board with green writing on blue bg, mimicing the tutorials.)

[Gunne]

Well here are my first creations back in 2000, haha just for the laughs , I think I lost the rest with cleaning the hard disk...

made links because of the size:

http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f196/PUD-syn/FinalLegendsUltimatetitle.jpg
http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f196/PUD-syn/herooftheflowerpower.jpg
http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f196/PUD-syn/kaibrood.jpg
http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f196/PUD-syn/kai.jpg
http://i47.photobucket.com/albums/f196/PUD-syn/kai-1.jpg






haha, the memories

[Terley]

http://img131.imageshack.us/img131/8548/signaturesbb3.png

this is basically my intro to pixel art.. Everyone's gotta start somewhere 

[pkmays]

Fighting games. :-) In late '99 I got a Dreamcast, KOF98 and a hand-me-down slot loading iMac and made some fighter sprites on whatever the paint program that came with Appleworks on OS 9 is called. Still got the iMac, but I do most of my stuff on my 10X faster PC.

[Helm]

I touched pixels a decade ago and more, but the first time I tried to understand the techniques concerning them was in second-version pixelation.

[pixelsforhire]

I'm a huge fan of old games, as are most people here, I assume. I enjoy old console RPGs, arcade fighters, DOS strategy games (Stardock is making a sequel to Master of Magic! Yeehaw!) and 16 bit action games. I really liked the art, as well as the gameplay. I thought the limitations of the early consoles and computers were kind of like iambic pentameter in poetry. It limits you, but the limitations in some paradoxical way free your imagination. I tried programming some with Game Maker and got pretty handy with GML, even making a nifty program that drew red and blue wireframes that pop out at you with 3D goggles (a crappy Starfox Clone.) I wanted to attract other coders to help me make my games, and thought that the best way would be by making really pretty screenshots. So I pixeled. I really like working with pixels, small tile based stuff in particular, so I think I'm stickin' with it. I don't do GML anymore (hard to find serious people to work with.) Maybe someday I'll be good enough to do some professional work on the side.

[goat]

Forgive the OT but I had to comment on this:

Mario Paint's Stamp editor mode along with the Nintendo Power "Player's Guide" (if you can call it that).

That guide was awesome! I made a full Metroid scene with it and showed everyone I knew :p thanks for the awesome memory.

I also still listen to Mario Paint music when I pixel.

[Cow]

Dates... I actually started about 2004. Armed with only crude drawings and very basic art knowledge.


I loved Mario Paint too. Especially the music maker.

[Lawrence]

I guess in around 1999 or 2000 when I was about 11, I got my Gameboy Camera and I used to use the paint mode quite a lot, although I wouldn't call it serious pixeling. Around that time I went to see some Chuck Close pieces at a gallery in London, I was really impressed and I thought about how similar they were to the aesthetics of Gameboy games, especially since a lot of the ones I saw were greyscale. I only really started to get seriously interested about 2 or 3 years ago when I saw all the good stuff on sites like Pixelation.

I wished I'd saved my old photo's/drawings on my Gameboy Camera 

[Royal Syrup]

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.

Weird, same deal with me except a friend introduced me to pixel art, I didn't even know it was an actual type. Then, I entered a new world, well, just the same, but expanded.

[xanthier]

Scuba Steve, DOOM, and Klik and PLay.

[Aleiav]

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

XD ah, that is a good hobby. 

How did I get into pixelling...

Dolls. 

[Rydin]

Scuba Steve, DOOM, and Klik and PLay.

Klik and Play \m/
Though TGF was more of a serious starting point for me pixel-wise.

 But before all that, like way before that, I remember making lightsabers in MS Paint by putting down black, spraying it with the spray-paint brush and inverting the colors....used to think it was the coolest stuff.

[Ryona]

Um... to tell the truth, the first form of pixeling I did was picture knitting (you basicly draw a picture on graph paper, then knit that same picture, square by square). heh

I then played around occassionally on MS Paint over at my friends and made some simple pixel pics.

When I finally got me a computer (which was only a few years ago) I finally started to really get into pixeling.

The rest is history.

[baccaman21]

My dad! My Brother and John and Ste Pickford...

He bought us (me and my bros) an ATARI VCS on xmas (1979) then a  DRAGON 32 (1981) - we made a few games and then in around 1983/4 we got a ZX spectrump...
by that point my bro was making games proper with one of his school chums John Pickford and his brother Steve (both of whom went on to bdl, rare, zed two) at the time John he wrote this ace sprite editor (on the speccy) called "sprite editor"- which I 'borrowed' got me into 2 color pixel animation (prior to that I did the corners of all my excersise books at school with running and jumping stickmen) and then i aquired a copy of melbourne draw... for doing title screens... both on the spectrum... then there was the amstrad and it's grfx package - (Screen Editor) and then the atari ST came along with Degas Elite - and then the PC with Dpaint, autodesk animator (great package that was), photoshop and promotion... (oh the amiga was in there somewhere but I kind of majored on dpaint on the PC [I always found the 'mig version was wrong]))

all things melbourne draw

great article by ste pickford about the early days

oh... and as far back as I can remember it's always been called pixel art... and i've always been a pixel pusher... "spriting!?!" what kind of a crazy ass goddamn name is that for pushing pixels? - lol

[Ryona]

Wow! You've come a long way, Baccaman! No wonder your stuff is always so gorgeous and mesmerising!

[saimo]

Well, I'm not actively into pixelling - I mean, I'm not a pixeller - but still it's the computer graphics form I prefer. The first time I saw a computer game (you know, Intellivision, VIC 20, C=64, etc.), seeing those pixels really fired up my imagination (which cannot happen anymore with today's hyper-realistic games). That got me into computing, where pixelling is second to just coding

The very first time I pixelled something was for some C=64 proggie I wanted to do... but it was not real pixelling, as graphics were "pushed" by means of numbers in code.
The next step was taking a cassette case + inlay and sticking to the inlay a 24x21 grid (that's the size of C=64 sprites, BTW) so that I could draw on the transparent case surface with a felt-tip pen and wipe what I did not like/want with a cloth.
And - oh, boy! - I still have that stuff!!!
Here it comes for your delight - please excuse the low quality of the picture:



(you may notice the powers of two at the bottom: those helped me with calculating the binary values to put into the code)

After that, I wrote my own paint program... and actually managed to even draw an animation of a little man dribbling & dunking a ball to a basket (I've been a basketball addict forever). Of course, I still have the tapes... what a pity I don't have a C=64 anymore (and, anyway, I doubt those tapes are still of any use).

Then I left the C=64 for the Amiga, where I started pixelling (again for a gamey of mine) with a tool that makes MS Paint look like the perfect solution for any graphician's wildest dreams: however, back then, it looked to me as a wonderful application... I'm talking about the Object Editor that came with AMOS Professional - a few may be shivering now.

Much later I discovered real paint programs: Deluxe Paint (by Electronic Arts) and Personal Paint (by Cloanto)... and, guess what?!? I use Personal Paint still today!

Well, I went way OT, so I'll stop it here.
saimo

P.S. this post is a bit hurried... I hope it turns out to be readable.