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How can millions of lighted dots create images?

Seurat's inventive style of painting caused a sensation, and spawned a new type of art called pointillism. Over a hundred years later, this same optical illusion is the key to another art form: raster images. Instead of the tiny paint dots in Seurat's pointillism, modern raster images use millions of points of light that, when viewed all together, make a picture. These points of light are called pixels.

These pixels are pretty amazing. Each tiny square can display over 16 million different colors, and when combined with other pixels, make up everything from that cool photo you took on your smartphone to the blockbuster special effects in your favorite Hollywood movie.

Two girls taking a selfie
The camera on your smartphone stores your pictures as pixels. 		          Science fiction space scene made with cgi
Many modern movies are digitized, and artists edit the pixels of each frame to adjust color, replace backgrounds, and add special effects.

In this lesson, you'll learn the basics of how to create, select, and edit the pixels inside raster images to make your own art.

Question

Where are some other places you can find images made of pixels?

If your television is less than about ten years old, its screen is made up of pixels. Many movie theaters now use digital projectors, which present movies in pixels. Large electronic displays, like the advertisements in Times Square, are made of pixels. And of course, the screen of the computer, tablet or smartphone you're using right now to view this course is -- you guessed it-- made up of pixels!