Pixel art is made with dots or small shapes placed very closely together.
A lesson in pixel art, regardless of the students' ages, should include a brief history of art that led to the development of pixel art and visual examples. Methods of making pixel-style art can vary depending on the age of the student and the time, space and materials available. Projects can be small or elaborate and can involve use of either common materials, such as pencils and paper, or can be more complex with the use of paint and canvas.
Early Childhood and Elementary School
Show young students a picture as it would normally be seen by the naked eye. It can be a newspaper image, photograph, a computer-generated image, or use George Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon On The Island of La Grande Jatte." Then, show what it would look like close-up. Finally, show students what a small piece of it looks like blown up so much that individual dots, or pixels, are visible. Talk about how pictures are made of small pieces. Give young students a drawing page, perhaps from a coloring book, and ask them to fill in the outlined shapes with dots that are placed very close together. An older student can create her own coloring page and use color for variation. Replicate your visual presentation by hanging the completed pictures on the wall and ask students to look at them from a distance, then move closer and closer until they can see the dots.
Middle School and Junior High
Present a short history of impressionism and how the most famous impressionist artists, Claude Monet and George Seurat, painted landscapes purposefully using small dots and dabs of paint. Discuss how times have changed and evolved to include computer-generated art. Compare examples of Monet's work to contemporary pixel art. Have students draw a pixel art landscape on graph paper by filling in each tiny square with colored pencil. Upon completion, individual squares of color should be visible, but when viewed from a distance, they should resemble well-blended landscape drawings.
High School
Present the same history of impressionism, including examples by Monet and Seurat, but present a more gradual evolution of pixel art, including works by Roy Lichtenstein. Facilitate a discussion of the historical importance of newspaper and its replacement by computers. Present computer-generated images as normally viewed and in successive close-ups. Students will take a photograph and then, assuming each student has access to a computer, will zoom in on it until it becomes distorted and pixels are visible. This can be printed, matted and framed.
College
Present a history and brief biographies of artists whose work are preludes to pixel art of today as well as current pixel artists. Students can write a report on the evolution of pixel art including visual examples. Students will create an image on a computer, zoom in on it and print it so that pixels are visible. Students can then be asked to replicate that image by hand using paint, colored pencils or markers on paper. The final result will be a diptych: computer generated pixel art photograph beside a hand-drawn "pixel art" piece.
