Realistic pixel art. When do we call it realistic, and whats the fun of doing this with pixels? Lets find out!

I discussed this topic with Varock Shade, who made a few pixel arts from photographs.

What is realistic pixel art?

Realism comes in many aspects. You could use realistic shapes, realistic colors or realistic proportions. If you would like something perfectly realistic, you better just take a picture. But with realistic shapes and smooth color contrasts, you can still give your own twist to it.

Portrait

<- “A Pixelated Photograph” by Varock Shade – WIP and Original photograph

Varock Shade: “What I did with this portrait was leaving detail away. The hair locks are not visible in all places, you can not see her freckles and  moles.  If I did put all of them in there, the image would get much to busy. With pixel art, I have a limited amount of space and colors to use. One off pixel, like a mole would draw all attention of the eye and destroy the smoothness of the surfaces.

The whole face is dithered, to make nice transitions between colors and make everything smooth. However, you have to keep in mind that it gets a lot harder to have the skin still seem shiny with all this texture over it.”

The above image is by Alex Bond

It is again a portrait made by redrawing a photograph, which I was luckily able to find. Every thing is in proportion, every detail is visible. However, his version only uses a few colors, features dithering, and is much more stylistic than the original. Id call this a nice example of realistic pixel art, even though its so different from the next portrait:

“Wind blowing trough her hair”, again by Varock Shade. – Wip and Refference

I think this is beautiful, I hope you do so too. It was recently finished.
Do check out that WIP.

Dithering and Anti Allias

Both two important terms for realistic pixel art. Required for smoothing things out, and taking away the pixelly feel.
Taking away the pixelly feel??? But then why would you still make pixel art?

I personally think that in a lot of cases you can make things  pretty and pixelish with colors. Like in Alex Bonds drawing that is very clear.

But in some cases, just having the idea that this is made pixel by pixel is enough. Like in this portrait.

“Sara Brightman”, by Andy Oakley – WIP and referrence

If you zoom in on this beauty, you will notice the excellent dithering, and Anti Allias mastery! This is 16 colors.

However, to most people this will look like a photograph.

Until now I have only been featuring portraits. The reason to this is quite logical: Portraits have to be perfectly realistic or you will immediately notice. For most objects goes that they are originally designed by humans already. So if you alter that design, it will still look like the same object, as it is still human made.
For example, you can think of a thousand different ways to draw a toaster. The proportions of a toaster are not important.

Of course plants and animals are not designed by humans too, but they are less recognizable by the human eye.
This is also why we can’t keep recognize cats by their faces. Or at least not when you have to pick out of a 100. With humans, you can browse trough a database of a million different faces, and still know which ones the people you know are.

So, to make a face look realistic, it has to be very exactly right, especially if you try to copy someone specific. That’s a challenge!

A bit of it goes up for human bodies too, but often people wear clothes, and if you are drawing nudes there is still less detail than in peoples faces.

However, I here have a picture of a car.

“Lisa’s Little 206″ by Varock Shade – WIP and Referrence