Exhibit / draw it
Pixel Workshop
Every era drew its pictures under rules set by the hardware. Draw something in full colour, then switch era and watch your picture squeeze itself into the old limits. Or start in an old mode and learn to draw inside the rules, as the artists did.
How to draw
With a mouse or finger, drag across the grid. With a keyboard, tab to the picture, move the brush with the arrow keys (hold Shift to move four dots at a time) and press Enter or Space to paint. Choose Pen, Fill or Eraser, pick a colour, and switch era whenever you like. Undo goes back one step at a time, including era changes. Save PNG puts a picture file on your own device. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored on our side, and there is nowhere to type words.
Era
Tools
Colour
Keep it
Saved to this device only, as a picture file with big crisp pixels.
Five sets of rules
Vector glow, 1977 to 1982. Vector screens had no pixels at all: a beam drew bright lines straight onto dark glass, usually in one colour. We fake it here with glowing dots, so you get two colours, dark and lit, and the glow does the rest. The hall on vector games explains the real thing.
A 16-colour home computer, early 1980s. Memory was so scarce that some home computers stored the shape of the picture and its colour separately. The shape was one bit per dot: on or off. The colour was stored once for each 8 by 8 cell: one colour for the dots that were on, one for the dots that were off. So the screen could show sixteen colours, but never more than two in any one cell. Draw a red line through a cell that already holds blue and yellow, and something has to give. That is attribute clash, and the gold lines on the grid show where the cells are. Some machines also made both colours in a cell share one brightness; we leave that rule out.
Four-shade handheld, late 1980s and the 1990s. A famous kind of pocket console had a small reflective screen that showed four shades of one greenish grey, and no backlight. Without colour, artists leaned on outline and contrast: a dark edge round everything that matters, one shade for shadow and one for light.
An 8-bit console, mid 1980s. The console knew a master list of about fifty-four usable colours, but its background could use only four small palettes at a time, each with three colours, plus one backdrop colour shared by all. Each block of the background chose one of the four palettes. On the real machine a block was 16 by 16 dots; our grid is smaller, so a block here is 8 by 8. Paint a colour the block’s palette does not have and either the block borrows another palette or one of the palettes changes, everywhere it is used. Designers drew the whole screen with those four palettes in mind.
Modern full colour. Any colour, anywhere. When artists draw big pixels today it is a choice of style, not a limit, and the earlier rules are still worth knowing because they explain why pixel art looks the way it does.
Stamp this exhibit
Drew something you like? Take a stamp for your Passport. It is saved in this browser only, and nothing is sent anywhere.
Play the history
One cabinet from each era, so you can see the palettes you just drew with in motion.