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Ramblethread! A brainstorm approaches!

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Helm:
Interesting discussion in this thread. I tend not to check up on this stuff much anymore because I've been generally disappointed at how hurtful people often are about their perceived necessity of these techniques that I had a part in shaping. But it's good to see new thought generated on the subject!

I think the linear ramp from oekaki to blurry-whatever is on one hand intuitive and clear as to what it means and therefore a useful tool but it still has a limitation in that I don't think clean and controlled, no-aa, no-dither, not a lot of single pixels work is necessarily in a middle point of the thought process of the artist that makes these choices. I think the 'middle' as it were is also a position of greater depth so - from my point of view, at least - we're back to a more three-dimensional example or perhaps a triangle. If the core of the work is of that 'depth' then it will withstand a lot of noisy nonsense on a more surface level, or a lot of blurry soft tools.

It is in a triangulation of that idea that I agree with you, Cure and concur that one can have very very controlled cluster work and then put all the lighting FX works on top of it and it will not hurt the clusters. Your example with the lady with the gradient hair is kind of brilliant for that, and it also has a historical precedent on the Amiga, where you have very pixelly pixel art and copper blitter backgrounds like in Enemy: Tempest of Violence or Lionheart.

That's why for me a strict definition of pixel art just judging by formalism is kind of a fool's errand. One first has to have the skills, the experience and possibly the intuitive idea of what tightly created pixel art looks like, why and how, and then they can take a loooot of nonsense on top without any problem, the thing is still cohesive and rings true. Just looking at the picture as if its a flat thing and examining every pixel (a 'machine pass' of 'is it pixel-art?' if you will) will not do, the eye will have to make creative judgement calls about where work went in and if it is enough to hold the whole thing together.

It's the same artist's eye that someone gets about oil painting as well. Bad oil painting seems off even if there's a few bits of the canvas where the brush strokes fell down sympathetically. And Good oil art is also apparent even if someone then took a picture of their canvas and photomanipulated it here and there.

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