From cross-stitch to wooden pixels: the long story of making pictures from squares

We tend to think of pixel art as an invention of computers. We remember the big squares on old game screens and assume they were the start of this language. But making pictures from squares is far older; we are taking it off the screen and making it by hand again.

With thread: cross-stitch

In cross-stitch the thread count of the fabric forms a grid, and the stitcher puts each stitch in a square. The pattern is a squared drawing, read from a sheet of paper and carried onto the cloth. A cross-stitch is exactly one pixel: on its own it is nothing, side by side with others it becomes a flower or a word.

With knots: kilims and carpets

In a kilim or a carpet every knot is a square. Masters often carry the patterns in their heads rather than on paper, but the grid the knots are set in is a pure pixel grid. That is why the diamond and star motifs of kilims are built from straight lines, square by square. Our carpet and kilim pieces are a tribute to that tradition.

With stone: mosaic

The mosaics of Zeugma are built from small pieces of stone called tesserae. Every stone is a square, and the colour of each was chosen with care. The famous Gypsy Girl mosaic in the Zeugma Mosaic Museum in Gaziantep is a face assembled stone by stone eighteen hundred years ago. We have rebuilt the Gypsy Girl in wooden blocks: pine instead of stone, but the same patience.

With a screen: pixel art

In the late 1970s and the 1980s computer screens could draw with only a small number of squares. Artists turned that limit into a language: saying a lot with few squares. Today pixel art is loved as an aesthetic born of a limitation.

Where we come in

Ahşapix adds its own small square to the end of this long story. The stitch in cross-stitch, the knot in a kilim, the stone in a mosaic, the pixel on a screen: what they have in common is that small things placed side by side become a large picture. Ours is a 1.5 cm pine block.

You can read a more personal version of our story on the Our story page.