Dots of Light

Today's digital art is difficult to distinguish from traditional media.  For example, a news story recently ran that showed someone using Microsoft's Paint program to paint the Mona Lisa - and it looked very good!  The fact that such art can be created in a paint program that comes installed with the operating system shows just how far graphics have come in the last twenty years.

Jump back in time to around 1990.  Remember the graphics of Super Mario World?  Those were the good old days of video game graphics.  You had to use your imagination a bit.  There weren't the elaborate 3D landscapes you find in today's games.  Scenes composed of artistically arranged blocks of color were the norm.

There's been a revival of this digital art style (usually called "pixel art") in recent years. Maybe we long for those simpler days when you could waste away the time eating tiny dots of light and killing chunky aliens with pixel bullets.  Maybe it's that creating pixel art is somwhat like building with legos.  Whatever the reason, it does take real effort to make a matrix of blocky pixels actually look like something in the real world.  You can't simply take a photo and stretch it over a wireframe mesh.  You must painstakingly create the image block by block.

Here you'll find examples of pixel art and links to tutorials that will show you how to create your own worlds made of only dots of light.