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Two of the eBoys look over one
of their riotous cityscapes. You
can almost feel
the intense energy. Click to enlarge.
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There’s a group of pixel artists who have made it big in the real world. Three men in Berlin and one in New York call themselves eBoy, and they make pixel art that has appeared in magazines, on albums, posters, Web pages, commercials, and in other places besides. Formed in 1998, eBoy’s mission
is simply to give the four artists
a “stage and a shared identity
and a shelter from all the killers
out there.”
eBoy’s work resembles, but does not spring directly from, video games. Only the New York quarter of the team draws from a childhood of gaming; the other three grew
up in East Germany where video games weren’t quite as well known. Instead they draw from other
pop-culture elements, such as television, advertising, supermarkets, and Lego. Their art runs the gamut from simple faces, animals, and rampaging beasts, to giant cityscapes filled with isometric buildings, vehicles both worldly
and fantastic, designer trees, and the occasional nipple.
The appeal seems universal—even viewers without a background in gaming enjoy it. eBoy’s tactics are simple. Their smaller pieces are a mix of hard edges and complicated designs rendered simplistically with oversized pixels and a very spare use of color. Larger works dish out a dual assault of this attractive simplicity with riotous complication, offering hundreds of simple, often monochromatic pieces combining to create an enormous whole.
Their art often brings immediately
to mind an era of games gone by. There’s a familiarity, almost like déjà-vu, about their pictures. It’s the pixels and the geometric precision that cause the recall. Games like Sim City look almost but not exactly like the cities created by eBoy. All of us have seen icons that look, at first glance, like some of the rogues in eBoy’s bizarre galleries. It’s an illusion, however.
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eBoy’s works are playful, colorful, and wonderful. Part toy landscape, part video game, and part cultural statement, each image grabs your attention and holds it tight. Click to enlarge.
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There never was an era in games that mixed the primitive graphic approach eBoy employs with the number of hues and shades they rely on. These creations spring
from an age that video gaming skipped, an age of unlimited color and resolution without even a nod toward realistic use of perspective
or proportion. And yet, for all the reasons that eBoy’s work couldn’t have come from games, they still look like they do—and that is part
of their unique appeal.
There’s a growing demand for the kind of art eBoy creates. Their client list includes an impressive array of global companies. Amazon, Coca-Cola, Renault, Adidas, and MTV are but four from an impressive roster. It has been remarked that eBoy might have been right at home in the 16-bit era of gaming. Their work evokes the very best qualities of the old school. They’re simple, they’re complex, they’re colorful, and they’re large. There’s no doubt they might have been comfortable designing game graphics back then, but it doesn’t really seem they’re having out of their element now.
It’s an interesting phenomenon
that pixel art, created at first solely for video gaming, has moved on, beyond the games, and is now found in great numbers on home pages, magazines, and grafitti. Even unanimated, these chunky stacks
of blocks are breathing with a life
of their own. You can find them everywhere, drawn by anyone,
and with newer techniques and better tools, they’re looking better than ever before.
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