by mrandish | 2025-05-24 19:51:48+00:00
I'm just relating the way I personally saw a variety of professional pixel artists work creating art for commercial products on several different platforms when I was a developer at a few different companies in the 80s and early 90s. This was all in the U.S. and on platforms with 256 x 192 and 320 x 200 resolutions and intended for composite video output (a few were effectively half horizontal res due to artifact colors yielding 160 or 128 by 192). I think perhaps our different perspectives are due to differences of degree between Hardware (320x200x16 & composite video / 640x200x16 & RGB video) and Art Styles between the US and Japan.

> Doing detail work pixel by pixel is a much different claim than drawing the line art pixel by pixel

This might be a difference of language or interpretation because to me "Doing detail work pixel by pixel" isn't substantially different than "drawing the art pixel by pixel". Neither one is precise, gives a sense of degree or makes a claim about ALL the pixels. The broad point of both seems to be "a lot of work was done at a pixel level". I certainly didn't intend to claim every single pixel was only ever laid down one at a time (which would be ridiculous). Conversely, I took what you said to be claiming no work (or very little) was done at a pixel level 'because they had paint programs'.

Even though they had paint programs, in that era and with those limited resolutions and palettes, I still watched them spend the majority of their time zoomed in working on pixels. Perhaps we were both speaking briefly and broadly, so I'll detail more of the progression over time as well as the typical artist workflow I saw. Early video game art was initially sketched on graph paper, like Nishikado did on Space Invaders (https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/atxb3y/o...). By the late 70s and early 80s devs were making their own homegrown tools to accelerate creating art. Initially these were simply using keyboard arrows to select a pixel and a number key to set the pixel to a color but they quickly evolved into tools like MicroPainter on the Apple II which had shape, fill and multi-pixel brush tools.

Once they had access to paint tools, artists generally started a new image with box or flood fills of flat color or checkerboard over big regions like a blue sky at the top and ground at the bottom, although much of this would later be covered up. They might then use a line or circle tool to sketch in a horizon, building or planet. But in terms of time spent that initial rough-in was quick, akin to a painter penciling a sketch on a blank canvas. It was the zoomed in detail work on a pixel or few pixel level that occupied the majority of the artist's time. As a rough estimate based on what I saw, I'd guess it was more than ~70% time spent on zoomed in detail work vs ~30% full screen. And to be clear, that's Time Spent not Image Area percentage. I think Pareto probably applies (~80% time on ~20% of the pixels). I responded to your comment because it seemed to conflict with what I saw, which was talented pro artists spending the majority of their time per image working zoomed in and tweaking a pixel or few pixels at a time because it was necessary to create their desired output and quality level - at least in the context of 320 x 200 x 16 (or less) targeting composite video output.

I don't doubt you may have seen artists in Japan working on higher res RGB output hardware with different tools have a different ratio of "Zoomed In vs Full Screen" time spent. I'd struggle to believe that zero pixel level work was typical and I'd be skeptical the rough ratio was regularly more than flipped (ie less than 30% time spent in detail work) but I wasn't working in Japan in the 80s or 90s (though I did visit several times) and the pixel art styles shown as "PC-98" do have larger regions of flat colors and checkerboards than typical U.S. pixel art of the late 80s and early 90s.