Back

My dad has this very old piece of cross-stitch art in his house. Every time I see it I'm struck by how much it anticipated 1990s pixel art on 16-bit micros like the Amiga, simply because the artist was working under similar constraints: a low-resolution grid of square pixels, and a strong incentive to use as few _different_ colours of yarn as possible, with much less constraint on what those colours should be – just as the Amiga and similar machines let you have a palette of 32 colours on screen at once but they could be chosen from a much larger space.

And the artist has used the same stylistic tricks to compensate for those limitations as Amiga artists did, or at least some of them. I could easily imagine someone having drawn this in Deluxe Paint, and perhaps even used it as an interstitial image in the middle of a period-themed Amiga game, with some important plot dialogue subtitled on the bottom.

I keep thinking it would be kind of cool to digitise it back to pixels + palette. But for proper style the result would have to be stored in an IFF ILBM instead of any more up-to-date image format.