There is no way Pixel is this hard

>>7668572 (OP)
a few days ago I learned that maggots are fly larvae and it blew my mind

>>7668575
>Flies gather around meat or dead animals
>Maggots appear a week later
Wtf do think is going on anon??

>>7668572 (OP)
Its a lot harder than is looks. Especially doing more complicated things than your op pic which is super basic beginner tier stuff. That's the equivalent of doing a 1.5 year draw this again of a cup

>looks up twitter
Nice tits!

>>7668577
imagine if they thought the rotted flesh turns into maggots. lmao

>>7668572 (OP)
uh... looks like a serviceable low res icon of a cwassant. i dont get what the artist is trying to say here its readable

>>7668577
>>7668609
I can 100% see some sheltered urbanite who has only ever encountered maggots in media thinking they are just some kind of worm from the earth that eats dead things.

>>7668572 (OP)
Many people who do pixel art can't draw, but pixel art is easy to get into and make some half decent looking stuff quickly, which is the reason they picked up pixel art specifically, and it's why pixel art is still so popular for indie games.

Much of the improvements they likely get is actually them gaining some drawing abilities, or an 'artistic eye', rather than really improving at pixel art specifically; though those things go hand in hand.

Not to shit on pixel art as a medium though, great pixel art that really embraces what it is and plays with the limitations that it was originally designed for, is always a pleasure.

>>7668572 (OP)
I don't consider 99% of pixel artists real artists. It doesn't help that now pixel art is being used to obfuscate ai slop

>>7668640
i thought maggots was what ppl called men who kiss other men

>>7668824
>It doesn't help that now pixel art is being used to obfuscate ai slop
This does not just apply to pixel art. I would say its even harder on pixel art because pixel art is always pixel perfect. Which is easy to check against AI.

It's possible it took that long.
Like, maybe they didn't draw for 18 and a half months

>>7668575
>>7668577
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VwKLJvtOdg
Spontaneous Generation

>>7668824
AI can't do pixel art for shit, ask it for something in a limited palette and watch it fuck up completely.

>>7668572 (OP)
I would hesitate to call it hard, but it is a very slow and time-consuming process depending on what you're going for.

>>7669044
Not sure I totally agree. Higher res pixel art is popular these days - after all, there's no real restrictions on it like there used to be - so a lot of pixel art opts to be somewhat messy as a stylistic choice now.
Picrel, for example, has people debating whether or not it's AI.

Now if we're talking tiny pixel sprites, like >>7668754 , you're totally right about every pixel needing to be perfect and AI being able to replicate it.

>>7669414
how is that ai? people just say ai whenever something's well drawn at this point

>>7669414
AI, the obvious tell are the buttons and the shading which results in an excessive color count. Color pick similar hues and you'll find they're 1-2 value different, they're never the same.
It's blatantly obvious when you know where to look.

>>7668572 (OP)
i think there is a high skill ceiling to it

>>7669530
>>7669540
Ah, something something the duality of man.

The artist uploaded this picrel a few days before posting that final image, if that sways either of you in another direction. Personally, I think it's not AI, though it could have been traced from it, but I find myself not being so angry at pixel artists tracing, because they still have to interpret the image in that style - but that's likely just me.

>>7669589
Works well enough against normies that don't know any better.

>>7669540
shiet you might be onto something here

>>7669643
I can see behind the curtain and it is ugly.

>>7669589
the picture is more akin to oekaki drawings than actual pixel art which is why there's very little interest in keeping the tones on key.

People really be out there trying to claim literally anything is AI now without understanding how things are made.

>>7669589
>adding the highlight/reflection before the base layer
>finishing one part completely, doing another part half and another part is still sketch
yeah, it's ai, this process doesn't make any sense

>>7669941
it makes sense if you ever had to paint a cel. there's alot of people that still do that method

>>7669974
stop defending obvious slop retarded subhuman

>>7669978
I'm a pixel artist. I did it as a job for about 3 years before I hit a burnout phase and needed to slow down. I'm not talking out of my ass here.

>>7669999
pyw

>>7670016
sure thing!
here's my portfolio too. check the most recent post if you want confirmation
forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=73706.0

>>7668572 (OP)
pixel art is the easiest thing to get into, and a medium difficultly of getting good at.

>>7669974
yeah right after I posted I realised I actually know nothing about pixel art and maybe the process is entirely different, apologies

It's been awhile since I last worked on making a minecraft texturepack

>>7670637
>forgot picrel

>>7669414
Jaggies
Jaggies everywhere
AI

>>7671808
I don't get how jaggies would somehow mean AI. That's common mistake on the artist's fault. A very common one that non pixel artists make when they're basically doing oekaki style illustrations.
AI generated pixel art is actually very good at avoiding them when it's that Retro Diffusion thing, but it has far better tells. It tends to avoid curved surfaces, instead mainly sticking to lines because those are easier to get away with and look simply okay.
The other, far more noticeable thing, is that it puts an outline around nearly everything. regardless if it's a black outline or a colored outline, it is pretty much always going to outline around the whole object it generates and probably the background too. It also doesn't understand the idea of outer AA at all unless it's told to do a background, and even then it might just make a garbled mess.

Again, that piece is more of a painter coming into something to try their hand at it more than anything. If you look at their other work on twitter, there's a pretty consistent progression to their work.
Also, a bit of an aside, AI is really, really bad at making cyclopses or doing really anything interesting with hand poses. This piece they did before is a bit more refined by comparison.

>>7671808
>>7671991
>That's common mistake on the artist's fault. A very common one that non pixel artists make when they're basically doing oekaki style illustrations.
I'm not even sure it's an artist's mistake, because as I had said earlier, it's kind of a popular visual trend now to do messy higher res pixel images. I hesitate to say they're oekaki, because they feel different stylistically to them than the usual, and seem to be going for a more pixel art look (in my eyes), but I suppose oekaki is essentially just a higher res/no limits pixel image as well - so tah-mato, too-mato.

>>7669530
It's got some tropes of AI when it comes to stuff like lighting but the pose is clearly too complicated for an image generator to get right

>>7668575
thats a croissant

>>7668578>>7669414
This >>7668754
and https://youtu.be/Tfh0ytz8S0k?si=_IqTCEKjd9RqfO5P&t=201
Is what I'd call good pixel art.

>>7672285
I agree with you, but those other images still make the stylistic choice of clearly showing their pixels, and that must account for something too.
Full screen images on older pixel based games were still pixel art, after all.

That said, there is something antithetical to the idea of pixel images that have no restrictions. As shown in that video, pixel images weren't just born from those restrictions, every image made in the medium had to account for them up until the advent and normalisation of 3D graphics.

>>7668572 (OP)
Fug yeah, pixel art

>>7672894
>Lady of the Ants.png
Whoah, how many pixels is that? One?

>>7672941
>>7672894
>Here comes scribble schizo derailer.

>>7670026
>no response
you won

>>7671991
>>7669589
How the fuck do you learn to color like this?
Whenever i try to add extra hues to my shading it looks like mold

>>7668572 (OP)
There's a saying that pixel art is for people who can't draw.

>>7669589
This is the kind of picture every tracer posts, where they "work" on the final rendering in the most nonsensical order that no artist works in

>>7669044
You can get loras that'll output close enough to pixel perfect but it's usually 8 blocks of pixel = 1 pixel so you'll have to downscale to 1/8. But there's still a decent amount of work to make it usable like palletize or reduce the colors, fixing all the jagged edges, fixing the faces, etc. I'd say it's great if you want to just quickly get a prototype or mockup of your game characters / scenes to get a feel of how it'd look like. Then you can start drawing the real stuff or build over what the AI generated stuff that you liked most or feels like it's closest to what you envisioned it.

AIsloppa isn't that bad but honestly tons of lazy fucks just generated those stuff and just go 'yup, good enough. Submit'. And audiences don't even have high standards so they'd just consoom slop.

>>7669589
This makes no sense. Why's you make the details on the clothing before you finish up the roughs for the other parts? Usually when you finished up detailings unevenly like this you'd get hotch potch of one part being ultra detailed and not matching the other parts

>>7669589
You know what pains me is when people trying to pretend they don't use AI by showing off unconventional workflow that don't make rational sense. Makes it way more obvious that they dont have nearly as much experience in whatever they're dabbling with. It's fine anyway, beats the generic keyboard proompter.
You know like if say if you're a cook or a baker, you know there are steps to doing stuff so when you get from step 2 to step 7 on one part of the food but the rest is still at step 2, other cooks already know you just bought the other stuff premade.

Also, other artists who also use AI assisted will know you're using AI assistance. I don't particularly care what other people are doing since as long as you put in the work and it turned out way better than what you could do by yourself.

>>7669643
Yeah. Majority of pixel artists would have more limited color palette especially since this is just one character.

>>7673175
I already went over this. It's a method that happens with cel painting. it's not a particularly normal method, but if someone does animation at all you will see it with lightest tones being put down first, then everything else.
There are weirdly still some artists that do this, either because they worked with cels before, they saw the workflow and thought it was something they had to do, or they just... like how it works.

Truth be told, I experimented with it a couple times, but I much prefer working from darkest to lightest. You have to do way too much mental planning to basically color in reverse like that, or sketch the color sections out in advance like with anime.

>>7673132
Speaking of which. I'm surprised jannies haven't taken action yet, as a lot of threads have been samefag spammed.

>>7672156
Nah man, it's traced AI. It's got the lighting to boot. As for the hands and the pose, a good enough LoRA can take care of that

>>7673167
Fuck that saying

>>7671808
>>7673958
schizo

>>7673958
I mean, you can keep saying this all you want. You're wrong though. I already spoke from my own perspective as someone who worked in this subject.

>>7673872
>painting the ambient environment reflection in the pants shadow when your "draft" has a neutral gray background
>scribbling that random red pants highlight over the background and unfinished leg, only for the final to look nothing like that
Olympic mental gymnastics defending this as a real workflow a human used

Pixel art is like digital art

>>7674152
It was a real workflow. It's just not terribly common now.
Like honestly I hate how incurious you act just because you're obsessed with AI.

>>7674227
For some actual content, here's a small guide on sub-pixelling I made awhile ago. This is probably the simplest way to explain it without having to spend hours writing about it.