[Splenivore]

Pixel artists will probably use nearest-neighbor scaling to display their art on high-resolution screens (so one pixel would become a sharp 3x3 block of pixels, or 4x4, 5x5, etc). That is already the technique being used to create games with an “old-school” aesthetic on modern gaming consoles.

I don’t think that drawing 1920x1080 (or larger!) images pixel-by-pixel will ever be practical, and it probably wouldn’t even look like pixel art to the eye at that point.

[jordoh]

Using a vector representation may be a more practical approach as retina-style screens become more pervasive. Microsoft Research has an interesting paper on this from last year's SIGGRAPH: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/pixelart/

That said, once you switch over to more advanced scaling, the artist loses a lot of the fine control over the result that can really make pixel art shine.

[gdubs]

The technique in that paper kills the effect completely. Its a way to de-pixel the pixel art. Also, vector representations quickly become much more CPU intensive. Would be more efficient to scale the pixels as suggested above.