Best Pixel Art of The Last 5 Years

Almost 12 years ago back in 2004 a trio of awesome websites devoted to pixel art were born. One of them is called PixelJoint. To this time PixelJoint is considered a Mecca for the lovers of this particular visual style. It’s an astonishing storage of some of the best pixel art in the world. It may not be the best place for beginners, but it does provide a wide variety of references for the hungry artists.

There are some rules on PixelJoint: no rips, no filters, no paintbrushes, no gradient fills. Usually, modern pixel artist is not limited to the color count, but on PixelJoint low color count is appreciated. It’s nice to see that there are still places, which appreciate the power of old-school art. Back in July 2016, Retronator Magazine published sort of the ‘best of the best’ anthology of some of the coolest pixel art of the decade. However, in this post, we’d like to take a look at only some of the best PixelJoint contributors and show some of their amazing work.

Most of these incredible artists actually work in gamedev and have contributed to some amazing indie games. So, without further ado, here are our pixel art geniuses.

N.B. This is completely subjective and we can’t fit all the great artist in our post. If you have suggestions, feel free to share them in the comments section.

Little is known about this guy, except for the fact that he is 100% awesome. He’s coming from Serbia and he’s working as a graphical designer. His professional life revolves around graphic design and IT support, but deep down inside he’s in love with beautiful pixels. His tool of choice is Grafx2. You can find some of his amazing works over here. 

Chern Fai Chow

We’ve actually featured his new game before on 80.lv. He is working on his own little pet project. He’s worked on various big pixel art project, including the famous Scribblenauts series and my personal favorite Drawn to Life. Follow him on Twitter and subscribe to his blog. There’s a ton of great stuff there, especially if you are looking for advice.

AlbertoV

AlbertoV is a guy from Spain. His real name is Alberto (yes, it wasn’t hard to guess). Together with his brother Dani, they run an indie studio DYA Games. It’s a small company, that so far has only two titles Super Star Path and Bot Vice. But the real treasure here is DYA Games’ YouTube channel, where you can find a lot of great educational videos for pixel art lovers.

Thomas Feichtmeir

Thomas (@cyangmou) is a professional pixel artist and animator. He mostly works with pixel art, but he does build a lot of great 2d art as well. He lives in Austria and works in gamedev. Here’s a couple of sentences from his Devianart bio:

Thomas Feichtmeir actually worked on Tower57 – an awesome pixel art shooter with destructible environments. 

Skydsgaard

Skydsgaard is a great artist, who’s currently working on a very interesting project Irkalla. It’s sort of a tactical action shooter with heavy mechs and beautiful pixel art animations. Follow this guy on Twitter.

Junkboy

Junkboy is actually Markus Toivonen. He’s the art director at Mojang (yes, they’ve created Minecraft). Apart from voxels, Markus really likes pixels and he creates incredibly fan projects. His blog is absolutely amazing and his pixel art retro images will make you weep.

Simon Stafsnes Andersen

The works of Simon Stafsnes Andersen. Find more of his stuff here.

Simon Stafsnes Andersen (Snake) is a famous pixel artist, who worked on Owlboy. In his free time, he creates various 2d pixel art homages to classical games.

Yuriy Gusev

Octavi Navarro / Pixels Huh

You can find more of his works here.

Army of Trolls

Army of Trolls is the portfolio of London born, videogame obsessed artist Gary J Lucken. Working from his Computer in Bournemouth, Dorset, UK, surrounded by Japanese toys and piles of old 2D videogames Gary produces a unique brand of colourful artwork heavily influenced by the videogames, toys and pop culture he loves so much.

You can find more of British artist’s work here. 

Paul ‘Max Marshall’ Conway

Paul is an amazing artist with great style and beautiful animation skills. He’s also working with gamedev and is trying to release his own game. You can read our interview here.

There you have it. Obviously, you have some additions, thoughts and other stuff, so please share them in the comments.

Author: Kirill Tokarev