PM's General Spriting topic

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What Gors is trying to say can be summarized in the following link:
http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_po...?TID=11299

Specifically,

http://www.pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_po...318#139318

Why not all digital art is pixel art
Pixel art is set apart from other digital art forms by its focus on control and precision.
The artist has to be in control of the image at the level of the single pixel, and every pixel should be purposefully placed.

Other digital art forms use many tools you won't find in pixel art. The reason pixel artists don't use these tools is because they place pixels in a manner that the artist can't predict. These automatic tools blur, smudge, smear or blend the pixels. Any tool that places pixels automatically (which means the computer makes decisions about the placement of pixels rather than the artist), is generally frowned upon in pixel art. Remember, pixel art is all about control.

You'll often hear people going around complaining "This isn't pixel art, it has too many colors!" This isn't because there's some unwritten rule in pixel art that says "it's only pixel art if it has [X] number of colors", you're allowed to use as many colors as you want. The main reason that people complain about color count is that a high amount of colors can indicate the use of dirty tools. Dirty tools create a lot of new colors in order to achieve their blurring, smudging, or transparency effects. People also mention high color counts because larger palettes are more difficult to control, but we'll get to that later.

So if I don't use any blur effects or filters or fancy tools, it's pixel art, right? Anything made in MS Paint will be pixel art?
No. It's not the program that determines whether or not it's pixel art, it's how it is made.

Every pixel does not literally need to be placed by hand
The job of the pixel artist is not to manually place each and every pixel. You aren't expected to behave like a robot, filling in large areas with thousands of single-clicks of the pencil tool. The bucket tool is fine. The line tool is fine. What's important is that the artist has control of the image at the level of the single pixel, not that you create the image one pixel at a time.