An aspiring game artist explores pixel-perfect expressions of 8-bit games.

Grassroots game artistry is nothing new. Mario has been a muse for many, and expressions have spanned every medium imaginable: we’ve heard dozens of 8-bit bands spawn at the advent of groups like the Minibosses. We’ve worn custom-stitched clothing and costumes – good, bad, and ugly. We’ve hammered together homemade recreations like Tetris tables and giant NES controllers. We’ve even put our taste buds to the test – game cakes are at least an everyweek occurrence on blogs. But in a rawer form, game art continues to hit the canvas, made popular by exhibits like E3’s Into the Pixel, the genre has seen an exponential surge of late, even into its own book, "I AM 8-BIT."

The perception of games as art is a growing concern among gamers and non-gamers alike -- not only as the hardware we play on becomes more capable of rendering the photorealistic, but as we recall the kind color palettes we grew up on with Zelda, Castlevania, and others. Bringing the games of our childhood into new contexts helps us explore what they mean today, and one upstart artist knee-deep in this cause is 22-year-old Jen Shaffer.

A native of Pennsylvania studying Game and Art Design at the Pittsburgh Art Institute, we sat down with Jen to gather insight on her recent side project, as well as her feelings on game art as a whole. For the better part of 2007, Jen has produced near-perfect recreations of 8-bit images onto the canvas, making them at first for friends, but now opening her studio to suggestions from the general public.

How did the idea to create pixel art originate? Some of your initial paintings were produced for friends, but was there anything else that drew you toward creating pixel art?

I'm sure the idea existed before this, but the idea (for me) originated from my friend who was doing character 8 bit paintings. He did them for himself and I wanted some of my own so I started doing them. What kept me working after I finished my first painting was how much fun they were for me to do. And when a couple of my friends came over and said how much they loved them, that started me painting them for my friends and branching out to bigger scenes on bigger canvases with more colors and more complex designs.

Can you talk a little bit about the process of mapping out the pixels, matching colors (there's mixing involved, yes?), and then filling everything in?

To start a painting off, I pull it up in Photoshop, grid off the whole painting in 5x5 pixel blocks, and then map out a grid directly onto the canvas using a T-square. Then I just go through and darken in lines where they should be. In the end it was a less stressful process than poking holes into grid paper which is what I was doing for my first painting. As far as matching colors go, I'm fairly good with eyeing up color, but if a particular color is causing me problems, I just use the eyedropper tool in Photoshop and I can figure out how many parts of what color need to be added.

How long do the paintings take, typically?

These paintings can take a while. I really work hard on them and I'm not satisfied until they are perfect. Different size paintings take different amounts of time, as far as both gridding and painting. The first Castlevania painting I did took about four hours to grid out and between 12 and 13 hours to paint. The second Castlevania painting I did is the same size as the first, but has considerably less detail. That took about three hours to grid out and five hours to paint. Smaller paintings like the Duck Hunt paintings take about an hour to grid out and maybe one to two hours to paint.

Along the same lines, what are the more difficult aspects of putting a painting together?

Sometimes in more complex images it's easy to get lost in all the pixels, even with an image in front of you to work with. Other times doing straight lines by hand can seem impossible for some reason. And when I crop an image, I really hate to cut it down in size or even adjust an image, but sometimes I have to do it to get everything on one canvas.