The look

  • A visible square grid with hard, unsmoothed edges.
  • A palette of roughly eight to thirty two colors across the whole image.
  • Banded shading, with each tone occupying a clear region.
  • Stair-stepped diagonals and rounded shapes.
  • Eyes and mouth built from a handful of pixels rather than drawn.

Where it comes from

Pixel art is the visual language of early raster displays, where the number of addressable dots and the number of available colors were both fixed and small. Artists worked with that budget rather than against it, placing single pixels to suggest a curve or a highlight. Museums have since treated the results as design history: the Smithsonian American Art Museum surveyed four decades of video games as an artistic medium, with a focus on striking visual effects and the creative use of new technologies, and the V&A exhibited videogame design as a discipline. The style survives because its constraints read as a choice now, not a limit.

What it suits

  • Retro gaming profile pictures
  • Chat stickers and small emotes
  • Stream alerts and channel badges
  • Printed sticker sheets

How to shoot for it

  • Shoot straight on and fill the frame with your head and shoulders.
  • Choose strong color separation between hair, skin and top.
  • Skip thin accessories; anything narrower than a few pixels vanishes.
  • Use flat even light, since banded shading cannot show a subtle gradient.

This look is not in Toonsta today. It is described here so you can recognize it; the closest Toonsta styles are listed below.

Related styles

  • Voxel art avatar: A voxel art avatar rebuilds your face out of stacked cubes, the way a low resolution 3D world is built.
  • Retro cartoon filter: A retro cartoon filter flattens your photo into the look of television animation: a heavy black outline, a small set of flat colors filled inside it, and almost no shading.
  • Pop art portrait: A pop art portrait flattens your face into printed poster color: four or five saturated blocks, a hard black outline, and visible dot texture standing in for skin tone.

Sources