AuthorTopic: Pixel school  (Read 63269 times)

Offline Aleiav

  • 0010
  • *
  • Posts: 141
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • I like my coffee black just like my metal.
    • View Profile
    • Gothiclola (dot) Net

Re: Pixel school

Reply #90 on: August 10, 2005, 05:04:13 am
Oh, no I'm not a negative person, at all. Most of my posts have been in response to the incident that happened with the project I started and the harassment by someone.

Then this situation in particular, I felt it was uneeded sarcasm that wasn't really funny, just seemed like he was being an ass for the sake of it, that's all.

I don't have an attitude, I've just been provoked lately, that's all.

But anyway, sorry to veer off your thread NG, I just wanted to ask the question but I've changed my mind now.

Offline Helm

  • Moderator
  • 0110
  • *
  • Posts: 5159
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile
    • Asides-Bsides

Re: Pixel school

Reply #91 on: August 10, 2005, 10:23:24 am
Dunno what the deal is. If you want to tutor someone, openly or not, go right on ahead, and if it flies, it flies, if it doesn't, too bad. If you think you've got what it takes to have 'students' then go for it. This wasn't even Lief's idea, originally. I think Kon tried this some time ago?  It's not about attitude ( although a positive one helps ) even if someone told me my art sucked and then proceeded to give me amazing and exact crits for my work, I'd still learn a lot from it.

The purpose of this temporary forum, and pixelation after it soon I hope, was and is and will be to help each other with critique. While I don't like the pretense of 'mentoring' people (and would rather see such ego-boosting outside this forum), others might, and should be free to persue this as they like. Whether they succeed or fail is up to them and their 'students'.

Relax, dogmeat. Your impression of Aleiav is wrong.

Offline Negative Gravity

  • 0001
  • *
  • Posts: 95
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • I'm a Pixel!
    • View Profile
    • Zoomrix

Re: Pixel school

Reply #92 on: August 10, 2005, 08:24:18 pm
Hmm... well I don't really count this as "tutoring" or even a "school". It's just a cool way of getting real critique. You know? Sometimes you don't get many posts (well I don't because seeing how I'm a beginner) but in this thread lief practically "had" to give me critique because he did start this topic (not the idea - as you already said).

aka: Zoomrix

Offline lief

  • 0010
  • *
  • Posts: 226
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile

Re: Pixel school

Reply #93 on: August 10, 2005, 10:06:46 pm
Quote
While I don't like the pretense of 'mentoring' people (and would rather see such ego-boosting outside this forum), others might, and should be free to persue this as they like. Whether they succeed or fail is up to them and their 'students'.

Pretense? Mentoring?  Lets call it regular and guaranteed consistent C&C... with a bit more direct feedback so pieces can be altered as they are made, keeping the artistic flow moving. :)
Ego-boosting?  I'm not putting this on any resumes, its actually time-consuming.  Some things may have been typed here in jest ('students'), but then i never was the most serious of people (as the mods of pixelation would agree, hence the warnings).
Besides, newbies are not the most ego-boosting artists.... if I could show YOU something, that would be ego-boosting.
no funnily enough, guidance from mainly one person (what do they call it... teaching?) is not a new concept.  I think it originated in the late '90s in Africa (j/k, it was UK in the 80's)

helm some of that comment was out of line, and out of character?  this was just a thread where i was helping people directly and consistently.  If they posted here, they knew they would get feedback from someone who has been watching them progress.  Look around, there is no school, no uniforms, shit... there's not even a teacher!

bye again

Offline Helm

  • Moderator
  • 0110
  • *
  • Posts: 5159
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile
    • Asides-Bsides

Re: Pixel school

Reply #94 on: August 11, 2005, 11:54:47 am
Hey lief. Sorry if you felt insulted by what I said. I mainly didn't like 'all my little students' and that type of comments, but I ate my words  because you were helping people in a very direct way, which was awesome. I don't like the teacher/student thing because frankly, most of us here aren't any sort of PIXEL MASTER (and to think we are would only be folly when we can take a stroll down gfxzone and see what Lazur or Cyclone were doing 10 years ago...) and when we critique stuff, WE learn from it too. In fact, most of the times I've given help to people here, there's at least one or two of my comments that I realize later that were wrong, or misleading and would potentially derail an artist if they were taken as one would take the wise words of a master. Not to mention how much sometimes 'how I would do it' creeps in in my critique whereas we're trying to objectively discuss pixel techniques etc etc Plainly speaking, sometimes my critique sucks, and everything I say must be taken with a grain of salt and with keeping in mind that I am an amateur as well. Most people are amateurs here, and we're sorta feeling our way out of the darkness, one helping the other. Even if someone is a paid pixel artist, a pro, this doesn't mean what it should because the quality of pixel art ( sadly, pixel art = game art these days) is SO LOW, a lot of okayish games are praised to the skies because they're pixelled competently. There's no 'big book of how to do pixel art' (although after 5 years from now, the wiki might be it!), there are no certified masters around here. We're all students here, and there are no teachers. Besides, game art only begins to scratch the surface of what can be done with pixe-levell precision artwork, whereas most people around here are ready to call themselves masters when they've drawn a good snk-type sprite. That's how it is in all small communities. We have blinkers on. You don't have to outpixel Lazur, you have to outpixel your friends. I don't like that. I don't like artificial limits. Let's persue this artform to the best of our abilities, not just so we can make gba platform games.

If however, Cougar, or Made or even Henk Neiborg or Gustav who are game-art guys, come around and posted critique, that's when I won't mind if they called themselves teachers. But you know what? They wouldn't call themselves teachers anyway, because they don't have to.



Little bit of cougar to put things in perspective.

Offline ptoing

  • 0101
  • ****
  • Posts: 3063
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • variegated quadrangle arranger
    • the_ptoing
    • http://pixeljoint.com/p/2191.htm
    • View Profile
    • Perpetually inactive website

Re: Pixel school

Reply #95 on: August 11, 2005, 12:49:25 pm
I have to agree with Helm there, tho i have to say that example pic is a bit meh, as it is more indexpainting than pixeling.

same artist. 31 colours. and i guess it's fair to say that almost every pixel was touched individually.

There are no ugly colours, only ugly combinations of colours.

Offline BeL

  • 0001
  • *
  • Posts: 32
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • how handy!
    • View Profile

Re: Pixel school

Reply #96 on: August 11, 2005, 04:47:29 pm
Wow.... this feels like the first time I listened to gary willis playing the base guitar... It kicks you in the face and says "Go away, I am the one".

Offline ehwhy

  • 0001
  • *
  • Posts: 17
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile

Re: Pixel school

Reply #97 on: August 11, 2005, 06:28:56 pm
Whoa.  Okay, I'm very confused.  What is indexpainting? Demoscenes? How does what is shown on gfxzone differ from pixel art?
I looked these things up and it just baffled me more.  Does anyone mind explaining this?

Offline Negative Gravity

  • 0001
  • *
  • Posts: 95
  • Karma: +0/-0
  • I'm a Pixel!
    • View Profile
    • Zoomrix

Re: Pixel school

Reply #98 on: August 11, 2005, 07:57:44 pm
Lmao! I told you it would turn into a freaking collage!  :D

aka: Zoomrix

Offline Helm

  • Moderator
  • 0110
  • *
  • Posts: 5159
  • Karma: +0/-0
    • View Profile
    • Asides-Bsides

Re: Pixel school

Reply #99 on: August 11, 2005, 08:47:16 pm
ehwhy, the wiki will eventually cover all that, but in a nutshell:

demoscene: groups of individuals, usually european, scandinavian and the like who revolve around the making of demos (demonstration programs. usually no interaction. Think of them like showcases of the machine, with stylish music and colours and code effects, and usually a scroller message bragging on how the current demoscene group pisses all over the others :P) for their machines. Usually Amigas, C64s and Speccy or Atari machines. The PC demoscene was curiously small, maybe because the PC sucks?  heh. Oh, there's worse. The Mac had NO demoscene, whatsoever lol

These demos push the limitations of the machine to a ludicrous degree, getting small programs (like 64k small) to do real-time renders of 3d stuff on an Amiga, for getting the PC bleeper to play polyphonic music. These demos are fitted with state-of-the-art (then) art and music and they are presented in demo parties and they generally have a blast rating them. A demo is about kickass ART, awesome MUSIC, and ingenious CODING. It's multimedia in a very underground way, and I guess a very advanced computer-based aesthetic that is now lost...

So, the Amiga was the strongest machine for art, and the programs they used at the time were usually Deluxe Paint and Personal Paint. In fact, Dpaint is largely to blame for the amiga demoscene going the way it went but that's another story... Both of these programs weren't just for pixel-pushing (the process of altering every single pixel by one, with 100% opacity brushes). There were simpler programs that did much the same. D/Ppaintbut had painting modes like blend, smear, darken, lighten, tint which work basically just like how they work in photoshop today. Only for indexed (read: 256 colours maximum) pictures. You set up your colour ramps, and then you can use the modes etc. However the modes don't make pics themselves! In fact, mode usage by non-masters can get DOWNRIGHT UGLY. It takes YEARS to learn to use them to make results like the ones abouve. Armed with these programs, talent and peer antagonism, the amiga demoscene spawned some amazing artists (everybody has their favourites. Mine are Cougar, Cyclone (because he pixelpushed more) and you cannot help but love some of lazur's best), who did mind-numbingly detailed and smooth art using 16 - 256 colours with various usages of the drawing modes. For example, the first cougar pic I posted has extensive usage of brighten, smear, blend. Which prompted ptoing to rightly say that is isn't mostly pixel-pushed. There IS pixel-level detail work, but the one he posted is far more closer to our type of work here than the first. The first is closer to indexed painting ( where AAing colours meticulously doesn't count as much as composition and colour usage like in a real painting) while the second closer to handpixelled sprite art like we usually do.

Now, whereas demoscene people where AMAZING with dpaint and ppaint and apparently very patient with their work, they were also, for the most part, copiers. They had no reali ability with a pencil and paper, usually their anatomy sucked (even lazur :( ) and for the most part, when they graduated to Photoshop type programs, with 16bit colours, most of their NO COPY  pictures were generic BAD photoshops, or at best indifferent. So back in the day, they copied. Google 'No Copy?' and go there and be sad :( They took pictures of Boris, Frazetta or just supermodels and they meticulously copied the composition to pixels, from liberal transmogrifications like Made's water gril frazetta rip, to 100% lifting of pics. The copying was a reason for redicule and resentment towards demoscenesters. The scene eventually falls apart for these and other reasons and the art of deluxe paint is quietly forgotten about 10 years ago. There were however, pics that weren't copies that totally rule.

Tsu stars pixelation, Zog has pixelzone... a new internet community revolving around sprite art and game art is created, largely unaware of the demoscene artwork from before. It evolves by studying game art and professional sprites. At this stage, when I reach it some 5 years ago? It's really a world in itself. The people there know of SNES sprites and the gba... but nothing of the amiga or atari st. They're interested in breaking in rpg tilesets, final fantasy sprites and snk fighters, and how to break in the current industry, not how to win in a demoscene party (which they didn't even know existed) with their meticulously made 320x240 pixel art composition. Pixelation started as a SPRITE ART, TILE ART, GAME ART type of place, and that's the sort of artists it bred. Look at stoven, Kon, Tsu himself. Eventually however, enthusiasts of the demoscene like pHASE1 or ptoing make it to pixelation and post a few pics from gfxzone. A lot of people go nuts, but strangely, it doesn't catch on... maybe because the pc doesn't have a deluxe-paint equivalent besides the buy software of Pro Motion. And maybe because most of us aren't good enough. It's really impossible to do demoscene pics without the tools provided by Dpaint/Ppaint/Pro Motion so if you're interested... shell out the cash for the latter, or emulate the former. There's a Dpaint version for the pc too but it's lacking... Dpaint 2 I think. Besides, with no SCENE to carry the momentum of this type of art, it seems nobody bothers ( besides crazy people like me). Pixelation was this momentum about sprite art. But it wasn't for demoscene type work. Maybe this will change in the future, but I'm afraid that the demoscene is dead, the old masters if they ever stumble on to pixelation browse a few threads and laugh as they leave, and the few enthusiasts of more complicated pixel art better find a new name for the work and leave SCENES alone...