Book Review: Pixelscapes by Waneella

Valeriya Sanchilo, aka Waneella, is a pixel artist who started sharing her work online in 2013 and after more than a decade later, she has developed a huge fan base for her art.

Pixelscapes is a 224-page hardcover artbook published by Thames & Hudson. By the way, the page numbers in this book are kinda difficult to find.

This book has the story of how Waneella got started with pixel art, her difficult childhood, her fascination with computers and video games, how she found inspiration from her musician father and artist mum. There was a time where she wondered how creating pixel art could actually be a job and actually earn money, and that's when one of her artworks got viral online and opened more doors to opportunities.

Waneella has also shared her workflow with some step-by-step pictures.

Her art is beautiful, but more importantly her art is very different from other artists. Pixel art is quite niche but when your art is good you can still attract a huge audience around the world. The thing that I like about her pixel art is they remind me of the pixelated old school videos games. So there's actually this sense of nostalgia that I can sense even if these aren't actually video game artworks.

Her use of colours is good but she gravitates towards the darker mood, mysterious and sometimes dystopian. That's her style but it would be interesting to see some of the scenes in more cheery colours. There are several pieces where she experiments with different colour schemes using the same setting.

If you study her work closely, you can see that she spends a lot of though on the staging, perspective and scene design. The viewpoint is always carefully selected to tell a story. And with pixel art, there is a lot of simplification going on so that's always interesting to see.

This is a wonderful artbook and it's always great to see art that looks and feels different.

You can see more art from Waneella on Instagram, Twitter and her website.

Here are direct links to the book:
Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.de | Amazon.fr | Amazon.it | Amazon.es | Amazon.com.au | Amazon.co.jp

This book was borrowed from Basheer Graphic Books for review purposes. You can order the book from them. Check with Basheer on Facebook.