As we see in our guide to video game art styles, pixel art is alive and well in 2025 despite its association with retro gaming. Now it turns out that pixel art doesn't even have to be made from pixels.
If you're like me and see retro game graphics as an art form, then Vojtěch Luksch should be on your radar. The Czech artist takes inspiration from games as varied as Grand Theft Auto, Broken Sword and Doom. But his pieces aren't digital art – they're hand painted onto embroidery.
Vojtěch graduated with a Masters in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno. In recent years he's been experimenting with painting over existing embroidery to create what he calls embroidered pictures.
The texture of the underlying embroidery makes the pieces resemble pixel art, which makes the technique perfect for reconstructing retro game art in a way that makes it look even more nostalgic than the original thing.
The paintings can sometimes confuse the viewer, making you wonder if they're trad or digital art. And they often provoke a mix of feelings.
Incorporating iconography inspired by shooting games over quaint cross-stitching, some pieces like the one above sit uneasily between the cosy and the brutal.
The results will bring back memories for anyone who recognises the retro video game references – the piece above gives me Lotus Turbo Challenge 2 vibes. The compositions also find an unexpected romanticism in scenes from old games, turning them into landscape art.
But Vojtěch's artwork is just as likely to remind people of their grandma's stitching, and this mix of ultraviolence meets grandmacore raises some interesting questions. Is it a vandalism of a traditional craft or does it revalue it and close the generational divide?
For game art inspiration, see our piece on some of the best indie game developers, and get a load of ZOE Begone!, a retro shooter with hand-drawn enemies.
