Valley Of the Shattered Dreams: Isometric Pixel Art Research Board

1.0 What is Isometric Pixel Art?

Pictures flowing through the medias, screens are formed by tiny little pixel. However, these do not define pixel art. Pixel art is anything drawn in the medium of computer pixels, usually created one pixel at a time.Isometric pixel art is the use of pixel art in an isometric viewpoint whereby pixel art is being created with two or more perspective views. Alternate perspective or exeggerated perspective is rarely being used because it complicates the drawing process.

Pixel art varies from other form of digital art as it is completely manual generated or drawn through a pixel-level editing of an image. In other words, pixel art does not involve image filters, automatic anti-aliasing or special rendering modes. Pixel art is often created in a close magnification.

To clarify the thin line, pixel art is commonly devided into two subcatagories: Isometric Pixel art and Planometric Pixel art. Isometric pixel art is drawn in a near-isometric/ dimetric projection. This is commonly seen in games, mobile phones/ electronic devices' GUI or to provide a three-dimensional view without using any real three-dimensional processing. However, Planometric Pixel art/ non-isometric pixel art is drawn in a form of top, side, front, bottom perspective views only.

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Isometric/ Dimetric projection - a form of axonometric projection, in which its direction of viewing is such that two of the three axes of space appear equally foreshortened, of which the attendant scale and angles of presentation are determined according to the angle of viewing. ref. wikipedia.org

GUI (graphical user interface) - a type of user interface which allows people to interact with electronic devices like computers, hand-held devices (MP3 Players, Portable Media Players, Gaming devices), household appliances and office equipment. ref. britanica.com

Anti-aliasing - the technique of minimizing the distortion artifacts known as aliasing when representing a high-resolution signal at a lower resolution. Usually used for rounded edges or to create smooth blending of colours. ref. britanica.com

1.1 When was Pixel Art created?

The term pixel art was first published by Adele Goldberg and Robert Flegal of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1982. The concept, however, goes back about 10 years before that allso at Xerox PARC. Some traditional art forms, such as cross-stitch, mosaic and beadwork, bear some similarity to pixel art by constructing pictures out of small colored units analogous to the pixels of modern digital computing.

Xerox Palo Alto research centre . ref. wikipedia.com

PARC co-founder, Adele Goldberg . ref. wikipedia.com

1.2 How is pixel art created?

Purists create pixel art by staking pixel by pixel. Although on today's modern technology, pixel can be generated by simply a click. However, pixel art can be manually achieved through simple programmes such as MS paint or windows draw DOS 3.0 and above. Pixel art can also be created through high end programmes found such as Adobe Photoshop , PSP and more.

Tool: MS paint, Adobe Photoshop/ Imageready, Pro Motion, GraphicsGale

Preferences setup:

resolution - 72ppi
colour - RGB/ HSL(hue based)

Part 1 - Lines

Straight Lines

With pixels, even straight lines can be problematic. "Jaggies" are little breaks in the line that make the line look uneven. Jaggies crop up when one piece of the line is larger or smaller than the surrounding pieces.

Curve Lines

For curvature, make sure that the decline or incline is consistent all the way through. In this next example, the clean-looking curve goes 6 > 3 > 2 > 1, whereas the curve with the jaggy goes 3 > 1 <>