6 ms·

Shibuya Pixel Art 2020

139 points by polm23 6y ago

spinach 6y ago
Why is Japanese art always so full of children and girls in their school uniform...
- derefr 6y ago
  Japan highly encourages children, starting in middle school, to join clubs; illustration clubs are common, and kids who like to draw will tend to join those. Children are not, on average, very creative (surprisingly!), so when told to create a comic book for such a club, they'll usually create a story with characters resembling themselves/their friends, and a setting resembling a school. Thus, most adults with illustrative talent in Japan, have usually coincidentally had a lot of formative practice drawing children in school uniforms, starting back when they were children in school uniforms.
  - anchpop 6y ago
    I think there might be something deeper to it. A lot of manga and anime take place in school as well, and I'd be surprised if it's just because all the artists know how to draw is schoolchildren. This is even more surprising because it seems like to me that the majority of western comics and tv shows don't take place in school settings. I expect that this is the sort of thing that only seems weird to outsiders like me. Maybe people in Japan look at the US and wonder why we have so much media about superheros, and so little about highschool, even though highschool is something almost everyone has experienced and has powerful memories of.
    - slightwinder 6y ago
      > I think there might be something deeper to it. A lot of manga and anime take place in school as well, and I'd be surprised if it's just because all the artists know how to draw is schoolchildren. That's for the simple reason that this is their main target-group. Anime is for kids, because adults don't have time to waste for them. Adults read manga, on train or break-time. And many manga have mature characters and topics. Of course are there are also manga aiming for kids and anime targeting adults, and in the last decades things have changed, because technology as also society changing. Also today there are strong tropes, sophisticates nerds, etc.
    - darren_ 6y ago
      > Maybe people in Japan look at the US and wonder why we have so much media about superheros, and so little about highschool To be honest as a non-american, americans seem pretty obsessed with high school as well.
    - threatofrain 6y ago
      Americans prefer live action high school depiction when they get older, and see animation for older kids as for the stoner population.
    - derefr 6y ago
      > A lot of manga and anime take place in school as well, and I'd be surprised if it's just because all the artists know how to draw is schoolchildren. Besides what the sibling poster said about target audience—these days, a lot of it's down to the fact that many manga/anime are being adapted from commercially-published(!) novels written by high-schoolers. Yes, Japanese book publishers are signing deals with teenagers these days. I think with the justification that they can better write things their peers want to read. I've got to believe they have sales numbers to back that up. But high-schoolers are still uncreative fiction-writers, writing mostly high-schooler characters in high-school-equivalent settings. I guess the publishers don't complain as long as the books sell. --- Though, honestly, what's really going on here is that everyone is mostly uncreative when writing voluntarily under no particular artistic constraints. Tangential Sturgeon's Law rant about fiction-writing (from the perspective of an editor reading through a slush-pile) follows: People mistake the advice of "write what you know"[1] for a recommendation to just "write your own life-story, gussied up a bit." For every one amateur writer who constructs a novel fictional setting, there will be nine writers who will just pastiche together the last three books they read; and 90 more who will won't bother with a novel setting at all. For every amateur writer who constructs an interesting character "from whole cloth", there will be nine that just re-skin characters from the stories they like, and 90 that just attempt to recapitulate the mostly-mundane people in their own lives. For each amateur writer who starts with the intent to write a novel conflict/scenario, letting the work define its own genre; there are 999 writers who will instead choose a genre to work in, and then regurgitate exactly the same scenario tropes they've already seen from works in the genre. (Many authors seem to think that scenario tropes are what genre is.) Professional authors aren't any better on their own, but usually they'll either have a publisher or editor who will push them to work outside their comfort zone; or they'll have written the same thing enough times that they'll finally get bored of it, and enter a more experimental phase. [1] If you're curious, "write what you know" is supposed to mean "if you want to include X in a story, then go research+experience X. Embed yourself in the world of X, like a gonzo journalist. If you want to write a story focused on a real-world place, you've got to live there for a while; if you want to write a story focused on a certain industry, you've got to have actually worked in that industry for a few years." It's not supposed to hold you back from writing what you don't know; it's supposed to push you to go know it!
- Youden 6y ago
  Children are young, innocent and widely appealing. School uniforms invoke a sense of nostalgia and make people living in Japan's harsh working culture think of their much happier high school days. Plus, much of a child's life will be spent wearing one so if you're depicting a child it's a realistic choice of clothing. As for why girls over boys, I think it's that cute and innocent things are appealling and more people find girls cute and innocent than find boys cute and innocent, even the artists themselves, regardless of gender. Many artists have mentioned that they find girls easier to draw than boys as well. There's also the sexual aspect but though I think such media is more common in Japan than elsewhere, I don't believe it's anywhere near mainstream.
- supuun 6y ago
  Maybe because the school period is the highlight of their lifes
  - waltpad 6y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by "highlight", but I remember reading somewhere that Japanese people are usually very nostalgic of their school years, though I don't remember if there was an explanation given for it. My personal opinion is that the Japanese society is very demanding for adults, and people recall these years as less burdensome. Perhaps this is the same everywhere?
colordrops 6y ago
Is this an art or a video game contest or both? I couldn't tell from the article.
- fenomas 6y ago
  It's an art contest overall, but TFA is about a video game category of that category. The game category is new this year and sponsored by TFA/the submitter; the contest (pixel-art.jp) is a larger, pre-existing thing.
arexxbifs 6y ago
I don’t understand why modern pixel art (outside the demo scene) almost never includes dithering and anti-aliasing. A lot of the creations are artistically impressive, but lack fundamental techniques. Employing such techniques would make for a wider range of aesthetics and the ability to cover more subjects and a broader emotional range.
- anchpop 6y ago
  To me, the main appeal of pixel art is to be able to clearly see the individual pixel boundaries. To a lesser degree, I also like the look created by using a limited palette. Antialiasing makes it harder to tell where one pixel ends and the next begins, and dithering makes it harder to identify the individual colors in an image. While technically impressive, both of those strategies are attempts to imitate traditional mediums instead of embracing pixel art on its own merits.
  - arexxbifs 6y ago
    On the contrary, I'd say they're core concepts of pixel art as a medium. It's not about emulating something else any more than crosshatching with ink is emulating woodcuts. It's about achieving the best results with what you have. In fact, certain kinds of dithering in combination with PAL colorblending on the C64 will produce completely new color values not available in the fixed palette. Similar tricks were employed with composite CGA output.
- erik 6y ago
  I've thought about this before, and the conclusion that I've come to are that dithering and anti-aliasing are both techniques from the wrong eras of pixel art. Dithering is something that you need the most when you are working with either a very limited or a fixed color palette. On the NES backgrounds were dithered because you had so few colors to work with per tile. EGA era PC games used dithering because the standard 16 color choices weren't very useful. Modern pixel artist don't have these technical limitations to work with. And I think that for most, dithering just doesn't look very appealing vs adding an intermediate color. Anti-aliasing is on the other side of technology window, from an era where there was enough resolution and color choices to support those techniques, but before 3d really took over. By the time you have that level of rendering capability, your are starting to push into the realm of photo-realistic or cartoon techniques. Late in the Super NES and VGA era the trend was away from hand drawn pixel art, and towards high resolution renders scaled down. And when you're working in that space today, you're starting to lose the appeal that the limitations of pixel art offer. This is all conjecture though. And I'm sure there are pixel artists out there doing amazing things with dithering and anti-aliasing.
looper_dude 6y ago
これが大好きです!
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
rbanffy 6y ago
It's fascinating that some images borrow the style of character displays. I imagine the addition of PETSCII, ATASCII, and other mosaic characters Unicode 13 will help to inspire more of their usage. I can't wait for the MZ-80 characters we are trying to include in Unicode 14.

139 points by polm23 6y ago

spinach 6y ago

Why is Japanese art always so full of children and girls in their school uniform...

derefr 6y ago
Japan highly encourages children, starting in middle school, to join clubs; illustration clubs are common, and kids who like to draw will tend to join those. Children are not, on average, very creative (surprisingly!), so when told to create a comic book for such a club, they'll usually create a story with characters resembling themselves/their friends, and a setting resembling a school. Thus, most adults with illustrative talent in Japan, have usually coincidentally had a lot of formative practice drawing children in school uniforms, starting back when they were children in school uniforms.
- anchpop 6y ago
  I think there might be something deeper to it. A lot of manga and anime take place in school as well, and I'd be surprised if it's just because all the artists know how to draw is schoolchildren. This is even more surprising because it seems like to me that the majority of western comics and tv shows don't take place in school settings. I expect that this is the sort of thing that only seems weird to outsiders like me. Maybe people in Japan look at the US and wonder why we have so much media about superheros, and so little about highschool, even though highschool is something almost everyone has experienced and has powerful memories of.
  - slightwinder 6y ago
    > I think there might be something deeper to it. A lot of manga and anime take place in school as well, and I'd be surprised if it's just because all the artists know how to draw is schoolchildren. That's for the simple reason that this is their main target-group. Anime is for kids, because adults don't have time to waste for them. Adults read manga, on train or break-time. And many manga have mature characters and topics. Of course are there are also manga aiming for kids and anime targeting adults, and in the last decades things have changed, because technology as also society changing. Also today there are strong tropes, sophisticates nerds, etc.
  - darren_ 6y ago
    > Maybe people in Japan look at the US and wonder why we have so much media about superheros, and so little about highschool To be honest as a non-american, americans seem pretty obsessed with high school as well.
  - threatofrain 6y ago
    Americans prefer live action high school depiction when they get older, and see animation for older kids as for the stoner population.
  - derefr 6y ago
    > A lot of manga and anime take place in school as well, and I'd be surprised if it's just because all the artists know how to draw is schoolchildren. Besides what the sibling poster said about target audience—these days, a lot of it's down to the fact that many manga/anime are being adapted from commercially-published(!) novels written by high-schoolers. Yes, Japanese book publishers are signing deals with teenagers these days. I think with the justification that they can better write things their peers want to read. I've got to believe they have sales numbers to back that up. But high-schoolers are still uncreative fiction-writers, writing mostly high-schooler characters in high-school-equivalent settings. I guess the publishers don't complain as long as the books sell. --- Though, honestly, what's really going on here is that everyone is mostly uncreative when writing voluntarily under no particular artistic constraints. Tangential Sturgeon's Law rant about fiction-writing (from the perspective of an editor reading through a slush-pile) follows: People mistake the advice of "write what you know"[1] for a recommendation to just "write your own life-story, gussied up a bit." For every one amateur writer who constructs a novel fictional setting, there will be nine writers who will just pastiche together the last three books they read; and 90 more who will won't bother with a novel setting at all. For every amateur writer who constructs an interesting character "from whole cloth", there will be nine that just re-skin characters from the stories they like, and 90 that just attempt to recapitulate the mostly-mundane people in their own lives. For each amateur writer who starts with the intent to write a novel conflict/scenario, letting the work define its own genre; there are 999 writers who will instead choose a genre to work in, and then regurgitate exactly the same scenario tropes they've already seen from works in the genre. (Many authors seem to think that scenario tropes are what genre is.) Professional authors aren't any better on their own, but usually they'll either have a publisher or editor who will push them to work outside their comfort zone; or they'll have written the same thing enough times that they'll finally get bored of it, and enter a more experimental phase. [1] If you're curious, "write what you know" is supposed to mean "if you want to include X in a story, then go research+experience X. Embed yourself in the world of X, like a gonzo journalist. If you want to write a story focused on a real-world place, you've got to live there for a while; if you want to write a story focused on a certain industry, you've got to have actually worked in that industry for a few years." It's not supposed to hold you back from writing what you don't know; it's supposed to push you to go know it!
Youden 6y ago
Children are young, innocent and widely appealing. School uniforms invoke a sense of nostalgia and make people living in Japan's harsh working culture think of their much happier high school days. Plus, much of a child's life will be spent wearing one so if you're depicting a child it's a realistic choice of clothing. As for why girls over boys, I think it's that cute and innocent things are appealling and more people find girls cute and innocent than find boys cute and innocent, even the artists themselves, regardless of gender. Many artists have mentioned that they find girls easier to draw than boys as well. There's also the sexual aspect but though I think such media is more common in Japan than elsewhere, I don't believe it's anywhere near mainstream.
supuun 6y ago
Maybe because the school period is the highlight of their lifes
- waltpad 6y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by "highlight", but I remember reading somewhere that Japanese people are usually very nostalgic of their school years, though I don't remember if there was an explanation given for it. My personal opinion is that the Japanese society is very demanding for adults, and people recall these years as less burdensome. Perhaps this is the same everywhere?

colordrops 6y ago

Is this an art or a video game contest or both? I couldn't tell from the article.

fenomas 6y ago
It's an art contest overall, but TFA is about a video game category of that category. The game category is new this year and sponsored by TFA/the submitter; the contest (pixel-art.jp) is a larger, pre-existing thing.

arexxbifs 6y ago

I don’t understand why modern pixel art (outside the demo scene) almost never includes dithering and anti-aliasing. A lot of the creations are artistically impressive, but lack fundamental techniques. Employing such techniques would make for a wider range of aesthetics and the ability to cover more subjects and a broader emotional range.

anchpop 6y ago
To me, the main appeal of pixel art is to be able to clearly see the individual pixel boundaries. To a lesser degree, I also like the look created by using a limited palette. Antialiasing makes it harder to tell where one pixel ends and the next begins, and dithering makes it harder to identify the individual colors in an image. While technically impressive, both of those strategies are attempts to imitate traditional mediums instead of embracing pixel art on its own merits.
- arexxbifs 6y ago
  On the contrary, I'd say they're core concepts of pixel art as a medium. It's not about emulating something else any more than crosshatching with ink is emulating woodcuts. It's about achieving the best results with what you have. In fact, certain kinds of dithering in combination with PAL colorblending on the C64 will produce completely new color values not available in the fixed palette. Similar tricks were employed with composite CGA output.
erik 6y ago
I've thought about this before, and the conclusion that I've come to are that dithering and anti-aliasing are both techniques from the wrong eras of pixel art. Dithering is something that you need the most when you are working with either a very limited or a fixed color palette. On the NES backgrounds were dithered because you had so few colors to work with per tile. EGA era PC games used dithering because the standard 16 color choices weren't very useful. Modern pixel artist don't have these technical limitations to work with. And I think that for most, dithering just doesn't look very appealing vs adding an intermediate color. Anti-aliasing is on the other side of technology window, from an era where there was enough resolution and color choices to support those techniques, but before 3d really took over. By the time you have that level of rendering capability, your are starting to push into the realm of photo-realistic or cartoon techniques. Late in the Super NES and VGA era the trend was away from hand drawn pixel art, and towards high resolution renders scaled down. And when you're working in that space today, you're starting to lose the appeal that the limitations of pixel art offer. This is all conjecture though. And I'm sure there are pixel artists out there doing amazing things with dithering and anti-aliasing.

looper_dude 6y ago

これが大好きです!

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

rbanffy 6y ago

It's fascinating that some images borrow the style of character displays. I imagine the addition of PETSCII, ATASCII, and other mosaic characters Unicode 13 will help to inspire more of their usage. I can't wait for the MZ-80 characters we are trying to include in Unicode 14.