| ▲ | mrandish 9 hours ago | ||||||||||||||||
> You didn't have to draw a pixel at a time. Back in the day I was fortunate to work with some of the best pixel artists in the industry like Jim Sachs (https://spillhistorie.no/2024/09/13/legends-of-the-games-ind...) and they definitely did draw the vast majority of their pixels one at a time in the best paint programs available like Electronic Arts Deluxe Paint. In the linked article Sach's is quoted "I put dots on the screen. One at a time at first. Green dots for grass, blue dots for sky, gray dots for castle blocks. Hour after hour. I was happy if I got one square inch of the screen done in a day." To create top notch pixel art in those limited resolutions and palettes forces the artist into creating the illusion of colors and detail which aren't actually there in any one pixel. They do this by modifying the colors of individual adjacent pixels to imply shading and highlights. Jim would modify one pixel, zoom out to assess the overall effect on that area of the image, then zoom back in and modify the next pixel. I encourage you to zoom in and pixel peep some of Jim's images. Most of those pixel patterns aren't uniform enough to be from an 80s paint program and not randomly Bayer-ish enough to be a digitized image. Jim has discussed his workflow in detail in interviews. The value of Deluxe Paint to an artist like Jim wasn't laying down swathes of pixels, it was mostly fast zooming and panning as well as detailed palette control. Of course, those artists would use whatever capabilities their tools enabled when they could but it wasn't nearly as much or as often as you're assuming. | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | JKCalhoun 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||
I think that's right. Paint programs might give you the "broad strokes" (so to speak), fill areas — it's clear the dithering on an arm, for example, was done a pixel at a time. I spent many hours in "fat bits" mode in MacPaint creating B&W game artwork for early shareware games I wrote. Click a pixel to invert it. | |||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | qingcharles 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||
100%. I worked with artists in the 2D era. They were doing sprites a pixel at a time. | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | charcircuit 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||
>I encourage you to zoom in and pixel peep some of Jim's images Even without zooming in you can tell that those images look nothing like what was being made on the pc98. The article was talking about the 80s which was a decade before what we are talking about with the pc98. It is not valid to assume that they were done the same. | |||||||||||||||||
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