The pixel (or picture element) is the smallest single component of an image, and directly from this very important element comes a kind of art that’s been around for over 20 years now, but remains under-appreciated.

Remember how they used to create those old video games, with the pixelated images?

According to Wikipedia,

Pixel art is distinguished from other forms of digital art by an insistence upon manual, pixel-level editing of an image (without the application of image filters, automatic anti-aliasing or special rendering modes), often at close magnification. In this form, it is commonly said that “each pixel was placed carefully” to achieve a desired result.

From this definition, it seems that this type of art is tedious. And the development of advanced image-editing software such as Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, etc, makes it seem like it is impractical. Moreover, the strictest (probably the most masochistic also) pixel artists limit their usage to only the pencil tool, and nothing else.

However, before you start to forget about appreciating pixel art, try to look at the following examples from deviantArt. They are quite impressive, especially when full-viewed…

Please visit the artists’ sites, and show your support for their work.