Ode to the Hardworking Pixel
Seeing the recent ads in the media for the film “PIXELS” made me think of the transformation I have witnessed in digital painting: from the efforts to avoid the dreaded jagged pixelation of the early ’90s, to the fact that the “Pixels” brush in the iPad app Sketch Club (one that can make brush strokes made up of squares, triangles, circles or irregular cells) became the favorite brush of the children I taught iPad painting to this summer, as they created their purposely pixelated World of Minecraft characters.
The article that prompted this essay. I read this in USA Today on July 20, 2015.
“Victoria”, 1991, digital portrait I created from life using Mac IIfx, Wacom pen tablet and PixelPaint Pro software. One of my earliest digital paintings – notice pixelation when zoomed in slightly. At that stage in computer graphics the file sizes were limited and the natural media emulation brush engines still gave some pixelation.
Student in my Introduction to iPad Painting class this summer (August 2015) uses the Pixels brush in Sketch Club to paint pixels in a Minecraft “papercraft”, later printed out on card and used to generate a three dimensional character.
Pixels have transformed from crude graphic pariahs to rock stars clothed in a new found hip coolth and basking in unexpected popularity. The underlying source of bitmap imagery has emerged from being a hidden actor to taking center stage.
“Pixelscape”, an interactive installation at the “DigiFun Art: Urban Scape” Festival, Seoul Museum of Art, Korea, in which visitors create pixelated drawings which then become part of a larger collaborative artwork.
Following a quarter of a century that has seen the pixelated crudeness of the Pac-Man and Space Invaders early arcade video game imagery supplanted by the smooth semi-photo-realism of modern day internet virtual reality games, the return of pixelation in games like Minecraft comes almost as a nostalgic nod to the roots of digital imagery, a tap of the hat to an “old skool” era that predates the Millennials and Generation Zers now playing them.
Screen capture of the video arcade game “Space Invaders” c 1979
Screen capture of the game Monument Valley, one of the games, besides Minecraft, that my young students this summer liked to play in their breaks. Notice the combination of smooth surfaces and crude pixels.
I must admit that, inspired by my young students, I have started enjoying playing with pixels as image elements. In fact when I was painting portraits recently in the Heineken stage of the Forecastle Festival in Louisville, Kentucky, I started using Sketch Club’s “Pixels” brush myself! I really enjoyed the rough elegance of the big geometric shapes and chose an option that created brush strokes made up of triangles instead of the perfect squares that my students preferred for their Minecraft characters.
Portrait of “Noah”, 2015, digital portrait created from life at the Heineken Art Castle in the Forecastle Festival, Louisville, Kentucky, using an iPad Air, Sketch Club app and Pencil by 53 stylus.
I am glad the hardworking pixel, which has given us bitmap painters so much pleasure and illusion over the years, now has it’s time back in the sun.
With happy pixelation,
Cheers,
Jeremy