art blog(derogatory)
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blake kathryn
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Golden Horn
It's been a year since I've come back from my world trip, when I painted a bit more than usual. These days, I mostly create art for my game Pixel Art Academy, as I was a bit uninspired to do personal work. This made me that much more happy when I found myself enjoying painting this beach, on a short trip to the Croatian seaside at the end of April. I hope you will enjoy the 90s vibes!
Independent Games Festival 2026
It's GDC week—the time when a disproportionate amount of game developers migrate to San Francisco for what was previously known as the Game Developers Conference. Due to an apparent early midlife crisis, however (it has been going on for 37 years after all), the conference is now known as GDC Festival of Gaming.
Either way, like every year since 1999, Wednesday night brought with it the Independent Games Festival, an awards ceremony and celebration of the most indie of independent games. Which is pretty cool, because we now get to look at all the finalists that are done in pixel art(ish) styles and post them in this just-as-much-midlife-crisiing pixel art blog. Maybe you'll even find a new game or two to get excited about!
To make it even more fun, I'll include as many screenshots as each game got nominations for, starting with the absolute IGF winner …
Titanium Court
Seumas McNally Grand Prize (winner) Excellence in Design (winner) Nuovo Award Excellence in Narrative
Perfect Tides: Station to Station
Excellence in Narrative (winner) Seumas McNally Grand Prize
Morsels
Excellence In Visual Art Excellence In Audio
Loco Motive
Excellence In Visual Art
Öoo
Excellence in Design
Time Flies
Excellence in Design
Yes, Your Grace 2: Snowfall
Wings Award
BALL x PIT
Excellence In Audio
SPRKLS.exe
Best Student Game
Make sure to click the titles of the games that caught your interest to get to their nomination pages and learn more about them. Maybe even give them a go? They're all on Steam after all (although not all are released yet).
And if you're intrigued by the whole event, you can watch the recording right here:
First Sun
Inspired by my trip to the north of Sweden, beyond the polar circle. After a week of enjoying auroras in the sky with no sun in sight, on the day of our return, sunshine peeked out of the mountains and it felt like a warm hug of a friend you haven't seen in a long time.
In the sea of tutorials called "How to draw X" where X can be very specific thing such as "gems" or "produce", it's nice to see the other end of the spectrum where you go as bold as explaining how to draw "anything".
What is great about Saultoons' tutorial How To Draw Anything... is that it highlights an important point: you don't need a specific tutorial to figure out how to draw something. If you know your basic elements of art (line, shape, form, space) and the fundamentals deriving from them (perspective, anatomy), you can indeed draw anything, especially with a reference to know the subject's 3D shape and materials.
(Also, don't get me wrong, Saint11 and Slynyrd have done plenty of tutorials explaining fundamentals and overarching concepts, so it took them a while before they came down to the nitty-gritty of individual subjects. Plus, it's nice to see how they apply their techniques to specific examples. It's nice to have the whole range covered.)
It's not too often I get to write about a new old-school tool for making lo-fi graphics. Both because I haven't written a news article in ages (sorry!), but also since everything today is either a mobile app, a cloud service, or powered by generative AI. Who am I kidding, it's all 3 at once!
Lester, developed by Ruben Tous, an associate professor in the Department of Computer Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, is a classic, offline program that fills you with nostalgia just as much as the beloved animation technique it's built for. And I'm not just saying that because it has the ZX Spectrum palette built in!
The algorithms packed in the tool speed up production significantly as all you have to do is click on the areas of the input video you want to create clusters for and it can propagate them to all future frames. The magic is all open-sourced and described in Ruben's research article Rotoscope Animation through Video Object Segmentation and Tracking.
It takes a bunch of time to process the frames and the results aren't (always) perfect, but I'd rather get some extra work done while it's silently purring in the background and then clean up the base animation than manually color over each individual frame myself.
Good luck getting these 167 frames done by hand (although I do miss all the TV shows I managed to watch when doing repetitive tasks like that).
If you'd like to add Lester to your own toolchain and stand next to classics such as Prince of Persia and Another World, get it here (free, macOS/Windows).
Clouds practice #3
I did two studies of clouds all the way back in March and April 2018. Now that I've been looking at all the amazing skies during sunsets in Tahiti, I had to get back to it.
This time it's painted from my own reference with colors mostly picked plein air at a different sunset with similar conditions (Atari 2600 palette, as always).
California Sunset
First artwork of 2025. I tried to retain the expressiveness of my pixel paintings but also clean it up and make the clusters at the edges reminiscent of impressionistic painting where there are abstract blobs of color that slowly get representational towards the center.
Last week was crazy full of pixel art titles so it's time for another Pixel Art News!
Featuring: 🔪 RetroRealms 💾 Saveseeker 🌆 Devil's Hideout ⛏️ Odd Realm 🛡️ Knights of the Road 🏹 Arco 💎 The Crimson Diamond 🏝️ Castaway 🥕 Gourdlets 💖 Wholesome Games Steam Celebration 🎨 Pixelorama
After the exceptionally long PixElated Festival episode we're back with a more chill look at the upcoming and newly released pixel art games (lots of cozy stuff in there this time).
9 years ago (minus 2 days), I posted this image to announce the launch of my Kickstarter for a game called Pixel Art Academy, an adventure where you would become an art student and learn how to draw.
While the path hasn't led all the way to the city of Retropolis yet, 2 days from now, on the 9th anniversary of the Kickstarter launch, the game's Learn Mode will launch into Early Access on Steam. It's a smaller version of the full game I imagined, but the good part is that you will be able to start learning with it straight away.
Check the trailer below and wishlist on Steam to be notified when it launches on August 5.
My big coverage of the PixElated Festival is here!
See which games impressed me the most with their art style and then go find your own favorites on the Steam sale page.
my friend made a game about learning pixel art that will go into early access this August! I want to check it out on stream! let's play, chill and chat 🐸
This has been amazing and nerve-wracking to watch! Luckily, the game didn't break and only one tutorial lesson was really bad (as I already knew), so I think it was a success?
9 days till release …
I hope you will enjoy doing pixel art in my cozy pixel art game.
Wishlist here.
This is it! I can officially announce that my game Pixel Art Academy: Learn Mode will launch into Steam Early Access on August 5!
It'll be the 9th anniversary of the Pixel Art Academy Kickstarter that day and about 1.5 years since I decided to take the educational core of my adventure game and release it as a standalone, downloadable Learn Mode that focuses just on the educational parts without the story elements.
The reception of Learn Mode has been great so far and people seem to enjoy learning digital drawing and pixel art fundamentals through a video game. Whew! I'm far from done though, but the first chapter focusing on lines will be getting released now before I finish the other 6 out of 7 elements of art throughout Early Access.
Here's the release date announcement trailer and don't forget to wishlist the game—or play the demo—on Steam if it looks interesting to you!
Guess what, Pixel Art News is back! … For the Summer.
Those of you who have been around the block for a while now—in particular in 2017—will remember my monthly YouTube show where I covered upcoming and newly released games along with random pixel art bits and pieces and a DIY section.
I'm not committing to reviving it, but I will create a few episodes this Summer, calling it #SummerOfPixelArt (it's not really a thing, I just made it up). On the plus side, I record it weekly now on Twitch and you can even catch individual news as shorts on places like TikTok and Instagram.
In the latest episode, among other things, I give recommendations of important pixel art games for their art direction + they are 50% off or cheaper on Steam Summer Sale. This includes tumblr folks such as @dpadstudio, @thimbleweedpark, @danfessler, and @johanvinet!
I've done 4 episodes so far, here are the other 3 you have missed if you don't follow me on YouTube, X, or Facebook where I also upload them.
Also, here is the episode cover again, featuring key art from Pathway, as otherwise this post won't appear on my front page. Whoops!
When I was watching the trailer for Arco at Summer Game Fest, I thought to myself, those trees sure look like something Franek would draw. Sure enough, the environment artist from Kingdom: Norse Lands is indeed one of the 4 developers behind this story-rich tactical turn-based RPG, mesmerizing us with breathtaking scenes of grandiosity.
I played the demo on Steam (macOS, Windows) and enjoyed the unique fighting system, a blend of turns and active pause. You plan your moves based on telegraphed actions and watch the turn play out in real-time. As for the full game—potentially coming out this year—I'm looking forward to experience the Tarantino-esque intertwining of the "3 tales forged in bloodshed, laced with magic, and united by revenge."
Noah Cai, better known as Pixel Architect on YouTube, has been posting inspiring devlogs of Chef RPG to his channel for almost 4 years now. As a former architectural designer, he brings a specialized set of processes to his ever-improving pixel art skills.
Chef RPG is clearly inspired by Stardew Valley, expanding it with many activities such as hunting and cooking mini-games as you manage your very own restaurant in a quaint, seaside town.
We just received a new trailer for the game along with a September 12 release date (Early Access). You can wishlist the game on its Steam page.
