Pages such as this have very screen-friendly artwork on them, with nice shading and black pixel-perfect outlines on the cartoons. Are the creators of this kind of stuff simply talented and experienced artists, or are there graphics applications out there that are geared to pixel art?
It’s both, but mostly artistic sensitivity.
For example, the mainstay of professional image processing, Abobe Photoshop, has linked program, ImageReady, that’s designed to handle web images. The better and more computer-saavy the artist, the better the result. The programs don’t create nice art automatically.
“Pixel art” as you phrase it, is widespread, though. For example, nearly the entire movie “The Lord of the Rings” was run through computers that adjusted the color. When the 35mm film was converted to a computer format, it was turned into pixels.
Every format: TV, computer screen, paper, has limitations about what colors it can use. One great advantage of recent computer advances is that the change from one “space” to another can now be predicted and controlled. It’s a powerful advantage to pixelized artwork.
Just use any available paint program and use the “Zoom In” Feature until you get to pixel level.
The important thing is that since everything is tiny and pixellated, ala NES or SNES - style graphics, you can’t put in a lot of detail. Therefore, what you DO put in is what matters most to the image. Since there’s so little space, you need to make it count towards the overall look of the picture.
It looks to me that this particular artist has used a drawing program that lends itself well to pixel art. Indeed, it’s so regular that I imagine he or she has zoomed in and drawn it pixel by pixel, rather than say to draw it in pen, scan it in, and then reduce the range of colours to solid blacks and whites only.
Some people have amazing patience when creating their own unique artistic style. While others, such as I, can be lazy and want the computer to do all the hard work.