Duce
Week #14
Duce's real name is Ari Seppä and he's from Finland.
His works date back to 1990.
Duce is a member of BlackLight Inc. and Extend.
I started playing around with pixels in 1990 with Amiga500 & DeluxePaint. First attempts were ugly as hell and hopefully I’ve lost em somewhere during the years. No one should ever see those. really. I got my skills improved when I started to know demoscene a bit better and met bunch of sceners in 1991. Actually Argon/Extend happened to be my room-mate when I entered high school.
And then I met Electric/Extend and saw him doing crazy pixelling with KoalaPainter & joystick. I was truly amazed! Beside pixelling, Electric also astonished me with his drawing/inking skills, and from all the way back those days he has been some kind of an idol for me.
But at that time I was more interested in pixelling with Amiga and inking disk-covers, and somehow though C64-format could be way too difficult for me. Didn’t tried out C64 pixels until 1993, and for unknown reasons I never finished it. Then after years of inactivity, Electric convinced me to start pixelling again and especially on C64. And I was hooked! Sounds bizarre, but I really enjoy all the restrictions and fixed palettes and all that “push that limit even further”-mentality. Like, there has to be some sort of challenge and then you really have to get focused on every single pixel on the image, and for me it’s like being on a Zen-mode.
While pixelling my adaptation of Ffffuuu-meme, I had some kind of an epiphany that you actually can put lot of colors together in HiRes-mode. After that enlightenment I’ve pretty much kept my pixels in HiRes-mode only, and getting $d016-tweak aboard has brought some more twist on it (literally).
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Almighty God
Week #12
Almighty God is an artist from Spain.
His works date back to 1993.
Almighty God is a member of Excess and Sputnik World .
Homepage
Well, really I've been in the Commodore 64 scene since the '80s in the very beginning was just swapping and enjoying games etc. But I was really amazed by the intros and demos, so I wanted to be part of that so I start pixeling. I've done pixel arts in the Spectrum, MSX, Amiga and of course mainly in Commodore 64. Really Commodore 64 is part of my life and it always was. For me is very relaxing and fun pixeling and creating stuff in a machine that makes you think a lot to achieve a very nice final result. I like topic ideas from movies, magazines etc. And I try to do some kind of experimentation also inspired in other scene artist and stuff to get very different results.
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Valsary
Week #11
Valsary is an artist from Poland.
His works date back to 1994.
Valsary is a member of Elysium and Booze Design.
It all started back in 1992, when I first time experienced painting in Deluxe Paint on Amiga at my school friend's place. I was shocked by the possibilities! As an 14 years old teenager I never before thought I could use my computer to anything else than
playing games. At that time I had only a Commodore c64, but I realized that I could use this little 8-bit computer to paint with as well. I have to mention that since my early childhood I loved to draw, with varying result of course... To be honest I was
was kind of dissapointed when I for the fi rst time tried to paint in Art Studio. The restrictions of the c64 graphics were pretty annoying, and I produced a lot of bad and ugly pictures, but as we all graphicians know - practice makes a master. After months
my technique improved and the pictures were good enough to show in public
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redcrab
Week #10
redcrab is an artist from Sweden.
His works date back to 2011.
redcrab is a member of Goin' Sideways and Genesis Project.
Pixel graphics, and 8bit music has always fascinated me! I thought for very long that I loved games, but now I know that I often played them just to be in that universe!
For me creativity always comes from restrictions -no matter what I'm up to. The c64 is all made up of quirky restrictions and I love it! I think making graphics like this is more like solving a puzzle. I always hunt for some new way of going around the limitations or even use them in my favour! I just can't stop making petscii just for this reason.
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Rail Slave
Week #9
Rail Slave is an artist from Wales, UK.
His works date back to 2016.
Rail Slave is a member of Hokuto Force and EXclusive ON.
I'm a bit of a late starter to pixel art and not entirely comfortable in this hall, among the all time greats of the scene.
Most of my pieces have been very ambitious vehicles and themes with which to learn and essentially "fast track" myself to where I should be; As such, I like to have a variety of things that I'm currently studying in them, such as material's or ambitious lighting arrangements.
I was introduced to the scene itself by Ptoing who was always encouraging and taught me take a bit more time with everything at the pixel level and well as introducing me to the greats like ILKkke, Electric, Joe, Mermaid, Carnivius, all for different reasons.
Out side of the scene I have been very influenced by Music, particularly the attitudes to hidden expression of the 50'S Avante jazz scene, 80's underground punk and allegorical Christian writings of the early Church.
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Prowler
Week #8
Prowler is an artist from Sweden.
His works date back to 1993.
Prowler is a member of Nectarine.
The Amiga and the C64 were central computers in my life when growing up and learning about drawing and design. Whenever doing pixel art I often end up with a strong influence from those childhood memories - early games, cracktros and demos. It might explain the general "retro"-feeling. I always seem to end up, in most pixel art pieces, with something that isn't a problem when working with other media.
Pixel art has always been the playing ground where the abstract meets reality. Pixel and colour limitations set a unique and clean look that gives pixel graphics it's special look. I still very much enjoy it!
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Gas13
Week #7
Gas13 's real name is Aleksej Garkushin and he's from Russia.
His works date back to 1997.
Gas13 isn't currently a member of any group.
Homepage
My story starts back in 1997. The only computer I had was ZX-Spectrum
and I was more interested in demoscene than playing games. Adventurer
e-zine started a contest "The best cover for the magazine". And not that
I was good at art, it's just my coding abilities were quite poor and my
music was even worse. So I decided to give it a try just to test myself.
My entry was nothing special. Still it wasn't that bad - I got the next
issue's cover. I am an artist, a pixelartist! Well, to be honest - all
the contestants entries were on the next cover. But that's how it started.
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Slayer
Week #6
Slayer's real name is Tomasz Pacyna and he's from Poland.
His works date back to 1993.
Slayer is a member of Ghostown and Speccy.pl.
Homepage
In pixel art, mastering the technique is necessary, but it’s not enough. For me,
the most important thing is the mood and atmosphere. I like when the image
gives a pause for thought. I’m not sure why, but the darker sides of life always
seemed more inspiring to me. Transience, isolation, loneliness, the fragility
of human existence, the futility of human endeavor or inability to understand
another human being.
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Isildur
Week #5
Isildur is an artist from Poland.
His works date back to 1991.
Isildur is a member of Samar Productions.
My first computer was a C64 bundled with a datasette and some pirated tapes full of games.
Before every game there was an intro of a group of crackers like Fusion, Ikari + Talent or Fairlight.
At this point I realized I wanted to be amongs the people who make these small, beautiful pieces of art called intros.
I didn't realize how long it will take me to join this extraordinary community.
Since then I knew that Scene will always stay with me, like my best friend.
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STE'86
Week #4
STE'86 's real name is Steve Day and he's from United Kingdom.
His works date back to 1986.
STE'86 isn't currently a member of any group.
In January 1986 came the life changing day, when a friend of mine gave me a copy of KoalaPainter [...] and suggested that I had a go at doing some artwork on the C64. I had been aware of the work of Bob Stevenson, Mat Sneape, Tony Crowther and others from Compunet since the latter part of 1985, so I knew what was out there in the UK and decided to have a go. I was totally blown away by this new media, the colour, no mess, no clean ups after work and the ability to experiment and undo when it went wrong.
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Carrion
Week #3
Carrion is an artist from Poland.
His works date back to 1991.
Carrion isn't currently a member of any group.
For me art is doing common things in not common manner. We have the same rules/limitations/possibilities in C64 graphics world like we had 20 years ago. Maybe we have some new graphics formats but the main rules are the same.
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ptoing
Week #2
ptoing's real name is Sven Ruthner and he's from Germany.
His works date back to 2004.
ptoing is a member of Funkentstört.
I like restricted pixelart in general, but I think that the C64 has an amazingly fun set of restrictions. The palette has a good and fairly even range of lumas, a good amount of variety (yes, I like the browns and greys), and you got neat tricks like the PAL-blending. On top of that you can do neat stuff with the hardware sprites and borders as well as raster bars and flickering (both with or without d016), which allows for a lot of possibilities for intetresting hack modes. That combined with the base restrictions of 3 colours + fixed background per 4x8 in MCOL (my favorite mode), or 2 colours per 8x8 in hires, makes for a really nice set of directions.
When working with restrictions there is something you could call "dialogue between machine and artist" going on. You have an idea, but the machine does not always let you do it exactly how you wanted, so you have to find a compromise. That is what I find most interesting about restricted pixel art.
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Joe
Week #1
Joe's real name is James Svärd and he's from Sweden.
His works date back to 1987.
Joe is a member of Wrath Designs and EXclusive ON.
There is something lovely about the restrictions and the 16 colours. They make you think differently about how to compose an image, compared to when you draw by hand, paint etc. It makes you focus on the economy of an image.
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![Frontier [reu] by Joe](/gallery/_commodore/png/44.png "Frontier [reu] by Joe")
