Welcome to Lospec, a home for digitally restrictive art. We create online tools for people creating pixel art and other restrictive digital art.

Digitally Restrictive Art

In the early days of computers, memory and storage space were a valuable commodity. Old hardware had very little space, every possible bit had to be conserved. Screen resolutions were small, and could only display a limited amount of colors. Music was stored as a sequence of notes rather than a single audio file. Games and programs had a maximum amount of space they could use, and they had to work within that restriction. Games made for the Atari 2600 could only be 32 kilobytes in total, including graphics, sounds, programming, levels.

Some people might view these restrictions as inconvenient, something that can only hinder your creative process. But there are many benefits to creating art within restrictions. Sometimes they simply help your get over art blocks by giving you a place to start, or help you use a consistent style throughout a piece. They can also force you to think in ways you might not have before and find creative ways to represent your vision. Your goal changes from "how can I best depict this subject" to "how can I best depict this subject within these limitations". You start thinking about the design, and level of detail. You are forced to simplify and prioritize, and consider the piece as a whole. It changes the whole creative process and forces you to think about your art from a new angle. The process of creating pixel art is completely different from even similar art forms like digital painting.

Some artists may impose restrictions upon themselves purposefully just to take advantage of these benefits. Some restrictions are just a result of that art form, like the canvas size of a painting or material of a sculpture. In Digitally Restrictive Art, the restrictions are brought on by the fact that they are stored digitally and is usually based on how the data is saved.
Pixel Art - The most popular digitally restrictive art form, as it was the only option for graphics on early video game systems. Though it's not required any longer, many games today still utilize pixel art due to it's aesthetic appeal, simplicity, and relative ease of creation. A large community of artists and fans still exists around the net.

Voxel Art - A more recent creation which is essentially a 3D version of pixel art. Instead of being made up of squares, it is made up of cubes. It's visuall similarity to pixel art makes it look like something out of the early computing days, but in reality only recently have computers been able to handle voxels.

Ascii Art - Similar to pixel art, but instead of being made up of pixels, everything is made up of ASCII characters, like letters and numbers. Before computers could even display pictures, artists could create images out of text. It was mostly notably adopted by the hacking community for use in text files.

Low-poly 3D - 3D models are typically made up of thousands of polygons, connected at their edges to create 3D shapes. In modern movies and games there are typically so many polygons that you can't see them and they look like a smooth surface. But in the early days of 3d, artists were limited to very few polygons. Low-poly models are still occasionally used in games today for memory restrictions as well as aesthetics. A subset of low-poly 3D includes using pixel art for the textures, adding another layer of restrictions.

Chiptune - Storing audio digitally actually takes quite a bit of space. Rather than reducing the length or quality of a song, early digital composers created a way to store songs as notes, which are then played at specified times, essentially being performed live by the computer. There are many different formats of digitally restrictive music that offer a whole array of different features and sounds. Midi files for example have a preset group of instruments you can assign to each note, and MOD/XM files let you create your own instruments out of waveforms.

REXPaint is a powerful and user-friendly ASCII art editor. Use a wide variety of tools to create ANSI block/line art, roguelike mockups and maps, UI layouts, and for other game development needs. Originally an in-house dev tool used by Grid Sage Games for traditional roguelike development, this software has been made available to other developers and artists free of charge. While core functionality and tons of features already exist, occasional updates are known to happen.

http://www.mtmad.fr
Musée des Tissus et musée des Arts décoratifs,
Lyon - France

CryptoPunks - 10,000 unique collectible characters with proof of ownership stored on the Ethereum blockchain.

What you see above are the 10,000 unique "CryptoPunks" in a map-like interface. No two are exactly alike, and each one of them can be officially owned by a single person on the Ethereum blockchain. Originally, they could be claimed for free by anybody with an Ethereum wallet, but all 10,000 were quickly claimed. Now they must be purchased from someone on the Ethereum marketplace contract. Via this market you can buy, bid on, and offer punks for sale. The zoomable image above is connected to the Ethereum network and has been colored to show you the status of every Punk in the market. Punks with a blue background have been claimed. Punks with a red background are available for sale by their owner. Finally, punks with a purple background have an active bid on them. You can click to zoom in on a Punk and reveal its details.

See the marketplace instructions below to acquire your very own punk. You should also join the Discord Chat, which includes a bot that announces all bids, offers and sales in realtime.

Crytch is a web tool for creating and encrypting visual messages.

It transfers the idea of Visual Cryptography to letters and shapes consisting of multiple anchor points and connecting lines. As soon as one begins to enter a password, these points start moving on a variable matrix. That way, the password will never be stored on the server.

The correctly decrypted image is the only possible verification of a valid password. Thus, the exact point at which the original image is revealed can solely be determined by a human observer.

All text messages are displayed in a typeface speci­fi­cally designed for Crytch. In order to make it impossible to deduce the encrypted letter just by counting its anchor points, all glyphs consist of the exact same amount.

https://github.com/sirxemic/fractal-paint

Online little tool to create fractal-ish images from simple drawings using HTML5 canvases.

PabloDraw is an Ansi/Ascii text and RIPscrip vector graphic art editor/viewer with multi-user capabilities.

GrafX2 is a bitmap paint program inspired by the Amiga programs Deluxe Paint and Brilliance. Specialized in 256-color drawing, it includes a very large number of tools and effects that make it particularly suitable for pixel art, game graphics, and generally any detailed graphics painted with a mouse. The program is mostly developed on Linux and Windows, but is also portable on many other platforms.

Pentel brush pen on paper

Recursive Drawing is an exploration of user interface ideas towards the development of a spatially-oriented programming environment.

Recursive Drawing is by Toby Schachman for his ITP thesis project Alternative Programming Interfaces for Alternative Programmers.

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Hand drawn autobiography time-line visualisation.

The drawings below are a methodical interpretation of the first two chapters of A Thousand Plateaux : Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

Let's get flurrious, create snowflakes..

Draw from your browser sketchy, shaded, chrome, fur, long fur and web style.

Danish artist based in Copenhagen

Swedish artist

Glen Baxter, nicknamed "Colonel Baxter," is an English cartoonist, noted for his surrealist, absurdist drawings.

Plasticien, danseur