Pixel Joint
Part 2: The Present
Retronator Community Feature
Welcome back! We continue our journey into the wonderful community that is PixelJoint. In case you’ve missed the story so far, here’s Part 1.
For the last one and a half year, Retronator has been bringing PixelJoint’s monthly top 10 artworks to Tumblr viewers. Accompanying this article are the best of the best from those 150+ award-wininng art pieces (according to my very subjective selection).
In the mean time, let’s explore what PixelJoint has to offer besides the awesome monthly awards.
In all these years, the gallery is still the heart and soul of the site. Hall of Fame offers the selection we’ve explored in Part 1 and is a great way to lose a couple of hours if you’ve never been to the page.
For returning visitors, the Weekly Showcase highlights top rated artworks in the last 7 days. There’s a good chance you’ll see some of them in the following monthly top 10.
Finally, Newest Pixel Art brings a mix of everyone’s latest from the masters to newcomers that aspire to join them one day.
A big plus is that the gallery is currated by the more experienced members; only decent entries ever see the eyes of most visitors. This enables PixelJoint to be a gallery in the traditional sense, with a quality standard and its own (broad) flavor of pixel art that adheres to limitations of early raster drawing tools.
Another feature that gives the site its heartbeat are the Weekly Challenges. Every week (no kidding) a theme is announced with various limitations to canvas size, use of transparency and animation. Entries vary in quantity from anywhere between 10–50 and users vote to award ribbons to the top 3.
Speaking of awards, PixelJoint’s points system is an old, but welcome way of tracking your progress in the community. Besides a nice trophy display, members are given ability to award more points to the best artworks and curate the public queue.
The lingering community projects offer a diversion into the site’s past, while links provide a useful resource of everything pixel art, from tools to tutorials and random things from the internet. It’s nice to see that links are still actively coming, although you have to remind yourself to check for new ones, since they’re not featured on the front page.
On the bright side, the front page is full of news items! Although half of them deal with weekly challenges, the rest is a good overview of what’s going in the scene. Stray Pixels (formerly Pixelpourri) offer a monthly bag of latest pixel art games and tools as well as reminders for PixelJoint related events.
The site’s interviews offer an interesting reading about some of the old-school masters: Jalonso, Fool, Gas13, Jinn, Mrmo Tarius, Vierbit … While I’ve covered a few of them myself from a visual perspective, the interviews provide a nice counterpoint by highlighting the people behind the images.
Finally the Forum is home to many a lively debate, an active Job Offerings section, and the birthplace to some amazing pixel art collaborations.
The isometric projects are one of the most rich, imaginative pieces, uniquely diverse due to the many contributors, and cohesively held together with fine-tuned low-count color palettes. They are the pixel art equivalent of world wonders, with each being a concentrated effort of a large group of artists, multiple years in the making.
All in all, PixelJoint is an essential home of pixel art on the internet. Many newcomers would need a much higher dose of self-awareness before submitting their works to the gallery, but when you are ready, becoming part of the exhibited works and eventually climbing into the monthly top 10 is a milestone in anyone’s pixel art journey.
Sunday pixel art appreciators might find scrolling past one of my monthly PixelJoint posts sufficient. For artist though, a regular visit will offer inspiration, resourceful readings in the forums, and in the end, meeting fellow friends and colleagues in trade.
That’s it for now folks. Head over to PixelJoint (if you haven’t yet), as I head back to Europe for a warm vacation in my motherland of Slovenia. When I’m in the air, Retronator will turn 5 years old, so expect a nostalgic trip down memory lane in the next installment of this thing I like to call Retronator Magazine.
Pixelatedly yours,
— Retro
