I brought up the dreamcast game, Elemental Gimmick Gear, in an earlier journal to see if anyone had played it. It seems like it went by pretty unnoticed. It was a big part of my childhood, and I've always loved it despite its shortcomings. Awhile back, out of curiosity, I looked up some reviews of it. They're all pretty favorable, with some understandable critiques for the clunky battle system and sub-par graphics.

Wait a second...

Sub-par graphics? I've always thought of E.G.G. as one of the prettiest games of its time. In fact, most of the reviewers agree that it looked great. They also all agree that, because it was 2 Dimensional, it was far behind its time and therefore inferior. It's pretty much universally rated badly in the graphics department. And that really bothers me.

In my experience, the art that goes into a game is far, far more important than the technology that backs it up graphically. A lot of games with great "graphics" are just plain boring to look at, and easily forgotten, because they had crappy art, and no amount of High Dynamic Range and motion blur could save them. Art is always more important than graphics. So why is it that games are always rated on the latter, rather than the former? It's ridiculous.

I think it's this obsession with technology in games that spearheaded the death of the platformer on consoles, which is only now seeing a small resurrection in the former of indie games. The industry kept pushing ahead with 3D, until anything in 2 dimensions was considered inferior, without question, and therefore couldn't be marketed as well or sold for as much. Some companies tried to re-imagine the platformer in 3D, with varying degrees of success. Nevertheless, the general popularity of the platformer waned drastically with the loss of simple control schemes and addition of troublesome cameras.

It's a damn shame, too, because I love platformers. Always have. They're a form of entertainment that don't really have any sort of real-life equivalent. Strategy games can be replaced by board games, RPGs with books and movies, shooters with paintball. There's really no equivalent to the simple fun of a 2D platformer, and its a damn shame that our obsession with technology has all but removed them from the industry.

Well, I already linked one way, so I suppose I'll have to link back the other way.

I've had an account on Furaffinity for awhile. I hope it doesn't come as a big surprise to you all that I'm a furry. I mean... seriously...

Anyway, I original created the account to dump sketches on, and a lot of the old posts are old sketches I did, but I've actually taken to using it as a music account lately. I've done a lot of music in the past year, and have had no way of uploading it on deviantArt. So it's all been dumped on FA. Obviously, the older you go the lower the technical quality will be for the music. Still, I think some of you might enjoy it. And I know I have furries watching me, so some of you might be interested in the sketches.

You can check out the account here: [link]

Well, that's all. Finally a journal that's not a rant, eh?

This'll be a short one.

I like to look up music on youtube. I kind of ignored well-known music for the first 15 years of my life, so I've been catching up for the last four. I'd have to place Classic Rock up there as one of my favorite genres. Recently discovered Bad Company (I've got a piece of pixelart coming up soon that was made largely while listening to their eponymous song). I've also been listening to a lot of Queen lately.

And there's something that irks me about the users of youtube. Half of them feel the need to bring up Freddie Mercury being gay in their comment. Either that or something about aids. And it's usually not just a passing comment. It's usually something pretty nasty. Some even try to act as if they weren't homophobic, by appending something like "Oh, but I don't care that he was a fag" to their comment. I see the same shit on most of Elton John's music.

Why the hell do people care? I've never known anybody as openly homophobic as some of the people on youtube. Maybe it's just that I live in a small city in the northeast. Maybe it's just that as soon as somebody jumps on the internet they stop caring what people think of them. I don't know. It just bugs me that somebody should even care, much less ridicule a great singer for being gay. It's, quite frankly, bullshit.

Well, that's it. Just something that's been bugging me lately.

Why I like Clean Pixels

I like clean pixel art. Always have, always will. For a long time I went out of my way to avoid dithering pieces altogether. The pieces that I saw dithered on Pixeljoint by newer members were often awful, grainy, nasty little monsters that looked like they suited to exfoliating your skin if printed out on a sheet of paper. I always hated that "dithered" look.

Over the years I've gotten better at recognizing good dithering when I see it. Those pieces that I hated back when I started were obvious cases of overdithering. A lot of new pixel artists get the idea in their heads that it is absolutely necessary to dither everything in their pieces. The result usually ends up with an entire picture that would've been good, if not for that nasty, bumpy texture all over it that doesn't fit the context of the image. If you use dithering to color in a suit of armor it will end up looking like a shiny pillow (even worse if you pillow-shade it o_O).

In newer pieces I've employed dithering a lot more. It's absolutely necessary if you want to conserve colors. But that's really not the reason to dither things. The best reason to dither something is to give it texture. Alternating colors close together by using different patterns can do wonders when trying to represent a material in pixel art. That's why I always cry a little on the inside when I see somebody who uses the 50% dithering pattern exclusively. I found this tutorial by Derek Yu to be incredibly helpful at learning some basic dithering patterns other than just 50/50. If you're a pixel artist and want to use dithering to smooth out the transition between two colors, definitely employ some different patterns.

Then there's stylized dithering, my favorite kind. Using different shapes, like circles and crosses and slashes in your dithering can add some really neat textures to the objects in your art. Just be sure your final texture matches the object you're using it on. I have some examples on my site.

Ultimately, I still like clean pixel art a lot, in which little to no dithering is used. When doing a piece in pixel art, you should always consider what it's being done for. If it's for a game, consider the mood and setting. Dithering tends to cause a grittier final product, whereas clean pixel art is often used for games that are more upbeat or stylized. It's also a good idea to create pieces that use all styles of shading/color transition where appropriate. Shiny, flat objects shouldn't be dithered much, where bumpy, textured objects can benefit greatly from some sweet dithering.

Anyway, just my 2 cents on dithering. Might be helpful to some of you out there starting out with pixel art. Mostly, I'm just writing this because I'm engaged in a piece where I'm doing a ton of dithering.

Favorites
I don't favorite a lot of stuff. I also don't watch many people. The latter is a result of not liking my dA message box to have anything in it when I get online. The former, because I tend to only favorite art that blows me away. I treat my favorites box like a collection of art that somehow inspires me. You see a lot of really high quality digital paintings in there, because that's the kind of art I'd like to produce, but can't. When I favorite something, I'm not doing it for the artist, I'm doing it for myself. There are, of course, some exceptions.

As a result, when someone gets a favorite from me, it usually means I greatly, greatly appreciate their artwork. Unfortunately, most of the artists already know how good they are. Many are professionals. Once in awhile I'll stumble upon someone new who is excellent, but people like that don't tend to remain undiscovered for long.

I'm fairly sure most people on dA don't look at the concepts of favorites the same way I do. There are many people who have 20+ pages of favorites, all of varying qualities. Maybe people do it in the hopes to get recognized by the artist. I know I've gotten favorites on something, and visited that person's page not five minutes later to see ten or twenty other favorites newer than mine. It really devalues the honor of somebody "liking" your artwork. It makes me think that the point of favoriting wasn't because they liked what I did, but because they wanted me to see their page and return the favor.

There's not really any point to be making here. Just curious to know if my view on favorites is as unusual as I think it is.

Community
deviantArt is a community. It's the MySpace of art websites. I'd be curious to know how many accounts there are on this website that exist solely for the purpose of trying to network with better artists.

The power of the community is immense. I've seen fairly mediocre artists get on the front page simply out of connections. People who watch others tend to get watched back, building their network and visibility regardless of the quality of their art. The focus of the site slowly becomes more on who you know and how much you can be seen than it does on improving your skills as an artist.

That being said, I'm not entirely sure why I'm here. I joined up in September over 4 years ago. Luckily, pixel art is a fairly small community on dA, and the moderators often frequent PixelJoint, a site that is structured to focus on the art and never on the gallery stats (as such, it doesn't have a pageviews system, and people usually have small buddies lists). I was able to get the meager amount of pageviews I have now thanks to my first Daily Deviation, given to me by ShoneGold. After even a small amount of networking, meeting up with Flashy (who's musical skills I admire very much) I was suggested for another, and my pageviews have rocketed to nearly twice the amount they were at since before then.

I'm not here to network. I generally just use the site to show off the things I create from time to time, and look for great art once in awhile. Nobody that has watched me or favorited me should take offense to me not returning the favorite. The whole networking thing just isn't for me.


Wow, that was tl;dr if I ever saw tl;dr. Just felt like rambling I guess.