Rediscover the world you have lost.

We know what a NES game looks like. Much to the consternation of classic PC and arcade enthusiasts, Nintendo's hardware dominates our collective memory of the "8-bit" aesthetic; when an artist, game developer, or barcade owner invokes "8-bit" art, the imagery they rely on comes not from the Apple II, BBC Micro, or PC-8801, but from the 56 colors possible on the Nintendo Entertainment System. When Final Fantasy recalls its late 80s heritage, it pulls its spritesheets from the NES, not the MSX2. When Capcom needs to print anniversary merchandise for Mega Man, they draw not on the richer colors of the Wily Wars ports, but on the harsh azure and cyan of the NES originals. Shovel Knight wears its NES inspiration proudly and makes few deviations from that aesthetic, sharing almost every color in its palette with DuckTales, Castlevania, and Batman: The Video Game. Many of these recollections distort the visual reality of the NES with RGB colors--

There are two fundamental approaches to pixel art, both addressing the same problem from opposite ends of a resolution. The traditional approach is to build up your sprite at its target resolution, magnifying your view field to place one pixel at a time, building up from the darkest colors to your lightest. (Unless you're working with the Game Boy Color, in which case it's a lot like watercolor: start with the highlights and paint down to your dark stuff.) This kind of pixeling is appropriate for very low-res work, it's what you see in Shibuya Kazuko's Final Fantasy party sprites and other "super deformed" RPGs; most console games through about 1994 were done like this, while various handheld games continued to be animated this way until around 2010.The more modern approach is to paint with flat colors at very high resolution and scale the sprite down to the target res before converting to an indexed color palette and creating the final pixel art by cleaning the result.