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The Fungus Zone Blog


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in reply to @vectorpoem's post:

Oh, love this,
Kind of a tangent but I think it's underappreciated how much of a difference it makes for high colour pixel art to use designed gradients compared to the digitized painting look. Like, the palette is deep and atmospheric, but the objects have really prominent local colours (like how TEAL that urn is).

totally, yeah! working on @gradients and scavenging lots of old palettes from dosbox screenshots gave me a deeper understanding (via eg "select all pixels with these palette colors") of how artists worked in those days, which elements of a scene were built with which ramps. and i think in some cases the strong local colors and certain unusual choices come from artists who came up in the lower-color-count eras (EGA, etc), where you frequently see objects filled/outlined with weird single colors for atmosphere and lighting.

yeah, i noticed that too... maybe the thinking went that if a ramp is just a single hue going to white or black, it's more versatile than one with a hue shift (unless the entire scene has that hue shift, and all ramps have the same "white balance" equivalent bias). but i also found when ramp shopping for the @gradients library that the ramps with hue shifts are generally more distinctive and pretty and interesting. so i think it's that tension between general vs specific utility, that you have to some experience as a pixel artist (which tbc i don't have, i'm kind of more in the role of archaeologist studying ancient craft) to negotiate skillfully ie in a way that gets you the looks you want without running out of or misspending your 16/64/256 color budget.

It's interesting because I was doing a lot of pixel and was very active on pixel art forums for a long time, and hue mixing and treating them in that painterly way was generally considered very artful and best practice in general. But I think it's interesting that that very 'straight' use of colours which feels maybe naive has its own charms but also really distinguishes actual 'period' pixel art.

Another weird specific case of this is like DOOM for example with how the colours get remapped to the colourmap by light levels. It means games with a lot of hand-drawn art like Strife look really different from colour-compressed stuff, for example.