When Octavi Navarro is not applying his pixel art skills to acclaimed indie video games like Thimbleweed Park, the Barcelona-based illustrator and animator produces densely-woven scenes of characters living in diorama-style worlds which he publishes on his personal site Pixels Huh.

My inspiration came when I got into adventure games. I would replicate screenshots from games like Indiana Jones with Deluxe Paint Octavi Navarro

Like many other pixel artists, it was Navarro's love of gaming that drew him into art. He fondly remembers the second-hand Commodore 64 and cardboard box full of random titles his parents bought him.

Navarro recalls: "I do remember liking those published by Ocean - Robocop, Batman and Parallax being some of my favourites. I really enjoyed those C64 loading screens.

"But I'd say my inspiration came a bit later, when I was into adventure games, especially those of Lucasfilm/LucasArts.

"I remember replicating screenshots from games like Loom and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis with Deluxe Paint. I guess that was my first experience with pixel art.

"It's undeniable that it reached perfection as an art form on video games, and that our nostalgia for those games from the 80s and 90s is what keeps pixel art alive today.

"That said, I like to think that it has a lot of potential outside this field. Every day we see more and more great illustrators that choose pixel art as their medium without having a video game background, and that's great. I've made pixel art illustrations for book publishers, magazines and advertising companies so there's hope that pixel art will be seen some day as an open art form."

Matej 'Retro' Jan, who writes about pixel art on Medium, argues the storytelling approach Navarro employs in his Pixel Huh scenes would be a good fit for animations or books. This is perhaps particularly evident in The Fisherman's Daughter, Navarro's own personal favourite scene from the 46 he has published to date on Pixels Huh.