It’s the same for any “high-technique” thing, really. I’m into pixel art, or at least I used to be. I’ve spent hundreds of hours doing it, and I’m still not al

It’s the same for any “high-technique” thing, really. I’m into pixel art, or at least I used to be. I’ve spent hundreds of hours doing it, and I’m still not all that good, but I’m at least familiar with all the techniques. It’s a painstaking, time-consuming, and challenging medium—the best pixel artists in the world may spend hundreds of hours on a single piece that isn’t even terribly large—a few hundred pixels to an edge. If I look at their work, I’m blown away by the mastery of it and can spend ages examining it up close, because I know what to look for—detail work, palette optimisation, creative use of constraints, advanced colour theory, use of optical illusions to create form and texture, and execution of basic things like removing jaggies, antialiasing, and dithering. It piques the nostalgia of people who are into that style of artwork from games they grew up with, but by and large, pixel art is for pixel artists. Someone who isn’t familiar with how difficult it is will look at the same piece and go “Huh, neat. Kinda pixelated though.” (Or worse, they’ll judge amateur work—often not even strictly pixel art because it wasn’t done by hand—better than a masterpiece.)