I’m often fas­ci­nated how some­one can cre­ate illus­tra­tions out of tiny pix­els. To me it’s no dif­fer­ent than a more technologically-advanced form of Lite Brite art and it’s some­thing, albeit jagged in appear­ance, that I’ve come to admire through­out the years.

Pixel art, now a full-blown art scene and expe­ri­ence depend­ing on who you ask, was some­thing I became famil­iar with in the early-80s (post Pong era) while play­ing video games in the arcade and on the Atari, where I clocked in sev­eral hours play­ing Frog­ger and Dig Dug. At the time it seemed a bit sur­real that just a hand­ful of green-colored dots rep­re­sented Frogger.

Toss in a lim­ited color palette and you (as Frog­ger) were faced with all kinds of ene­mies includ­ing speed­ing cars, hunger-surpressed gators and logs a plenty. Now it seems quite pri­ma­tive and even then it did as well, but still, it’s noth­ing less than admirable to think that we’ve (and by we, I mean those who enjoy gam­ing as a past­time) been star­ing at col­ored squares for years on end.

In later years pixel art became more detailed and at times, depend­ing on the game, there were sequences where I would be blown away at how beau­ti­ful the onscreen art­work looked. Games that stood out in my mind, even to this day, were the Castl­e­va­nia, Con­tra and Super Mario series on the Super Nin­tendo as well as Another World and Flashback.

I’m sure there were oth­ers, but those games in par­tic­u­lar inspired me to cre­ate my own pixel art after pick­ing up a copy of the now defunct Klik and Play by Maxis (even­tu­ally resold to Click­team), which I believe has since been rolled into other soft­ware pack­ages after being acquired by another com­pany years later.

Accord­ing to the pack­ag­ing, Klik and Play was the “ulti­mate game cre­ation soft­ware for the PC” and allowed any­one, so long as you were will­ing to accept the rather steep learn­ing curve, to cre­ate your very own 16-bit games with the aide of sim­ple pro­gram­ming and pixel art.

Hon­estly, I paid less atten­tion to the game cre­ation aspects and instead focused on cre­at­ing beau­ti­ful pixel art. Within a few moments of exper­i­ment­ing I real­ized that it wasn’t as easy as I had ini­tially thought. Despite what I had con­vinced myself prior, this wasn’t the same as pick­ing up a brush, dip­ping it in paint and spread­ing it across a canvas.

On the con­trary, cre­at­ing pixel art takes a great deal of patience and an under­stand­ing that what­ever you’ve set out to cre­ate dig­i­tally is only a few hun­dred (thou­sand, mil­lion) pix­els away. Yet, you need not let that deter you because once you’ve reached that goal and are able to look at some­thing that’s com­plete, it’s a feel­ing like you’ve just been climb­ing Mt. Vesu­vius and finally reached the peak.