Pixel art
Art drawn pixel by pixel on a deliberately tiny grid with a small palette and hard edges. The look of 8-bit and 16-bit games.
See it
What it is
Pixel art means placing individual pixels on purpose. Shrinking a photo gives you a pixelated image, which is a different thing and looks it. The constraints do the work: a canvas measured in tens of pixels (a 16x16 icon, a 320x180 scene), a palette of roughly 4 to 32 colors, and no automatic anti-aliasing. Any softening is hand-placed, one pixel at a time.
The craft has named techniques worth asking for: dithering to fake gradients from two colors, manual anti-aliasing on curves, selective outlining (colored outlines instead of flat black), and keeping line slopes consistent (1:1, 1:2, 2:1) so edges do not develop 'jaggies'. Era anchors help a model land the look: NES for chunky 4-color sprites, SNES and Genesis for richer 16-bit ramps, and modern high-resolution pixel work like Celeste or Dead Cells.
Gotcha: scaling. Always scale by whole-number multiples (2x, 3x, 4x) with nearest-neighbor sampling, and set 'image-rendering: pixelated' in CSS, because browsers smooth by default and turn crisp art to mush. Related trap: never mix pixel densities in one scene. A 2x sprite next to a 1x interface element reads as broken even to people who cannot say why.
Ask AI for it
Make this as true pixel art on a small canvas (say 64x64 for a sprite, 320x180 for a scene) with a locked palette of 16 colors. Place pixels deliberately: hard aliased edges, no blur, no gradients except hand-placed dithering, consistent line slopes so curves read cleanly, and selective colored outlines rather than flat black. Target a 16-bit console look (SNES era). Export scaled 4x with nearest-neighbor only, and keep every element at the same pixel density.