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.