Gutty Kreum explores the digital backstreets of Japan and injects them with nostalgia and quiet beauty. He is a pixel artist with a deep love of Japanese culture, who has only just begun to explore his subject in person. Raised in the suburbs of Canada, his fascination with a world so different from his own makes his pixel landscapes feel surreal, even though they’re rooted in actual latitudes and longitudes. His works are windows into tranquil moments that you want to live and breathe in, with towering clouds that curl and billow around the moon.
In this conversation, Kreum shares his journey into the world of pixels, how gaming launched his art career, and how a gentle loop can take you somewhere else for a while.
Chris Kokiousis: How did you get the name Gutty Kreum? Where does that come from?
Gutty Kreum: [laughs] It’s from a random name generator. It holds significance to me, but at the time I was like, I want to create an alias for doing art because I’m not keen about using my real name for a lot of this stuff. So I just kind of put what I thought sounded interesting together, with the aid of a random name generator, and kind of went from there.
So yeah. No real significance at the time that I created the name, but now that I’ve done some things with the name, it’s a bit more special to me I suppose.
Chris Kokiousis: You’ve formed more of an emotional attachment to it over time.
Gutty Kreum: Yeah, yeah. I just found [with] the process for creating an alias…I mean, you could strategize about aliases, but it’s just the work that you produce that really matters.
“日没: 9PM Noshiro” (2021)
Chris Kokiousis: Yeah, absolutely. People worry so much about the marketing aspect of being an artist, and I think you’re a great example of somebody who’s just sharing work on a regular basis, just being consistent and being talented, and you don’t have to focus as much on hot takes on social media.
Gutty Kreum: Yeah, thank you. I don’t know what to think about social media. Like, I hate it, but you really do need it. And yeah, I hate marketing too, but that’s just sort of my personality. I don’t like constantly reiterating the same thing over and over again. Although you kind of need to do that.
I don’t know…I still need to figure out the whole marketing side. I don’t think that I’m doing as good as I could be marketing-wise with what I have, but it’s a clash with my personality.
Chris Kokiousis: Maybe we could talk a bit about how you discovered pixel art and the community around it. Was there a specific artist or a video game that inspired you to start creating in this style?
Gutty Kreum: Well, pixel art has been part of my escape as a child. Like video games. I grew up in the Nintendo / Super Nintendo era. There’s some great pixel art in those games. So that’s what inspired me to get into pixel art, but the artist that really inspired me to start creating was Waneella.
Chris Kokiousis: How long ago was that?
Gutty Kreum: It’s hard to remember off the top of my head, but probably around 2016. I had done art previously, like just post-high school. And then took a break for a number of years, just entering work, like doing not-art-related things as a career. It wasn’t until 2015 that I quit and decided to pursue art in some form as a career.
“青: 2PM Kanagawa, Tokyo” (2021)
Chris Kokiousis: So how did you get started? Did you start with a small grid and work your way up, and just do more and more projects? What was the process like?
Gutty Kreum: Pretty much that — I just started with smaller canvases and experimented around. I just kept doing art. If you keep at it and keep consistent, you will get better. And it’s one of those things where at the beginning you may copy a style to start learning, and then you slowly get better and better, and then you have to branch out into your own style.
And that’s probably the hardest part of art. Sure, you can do something, but to make yourself stand out, you need to develop your own style. And I don’t know if I have much advice for that. Do what inspires you — so, create art that would inspire you to create art. I don’t know…it’s hard to put into words. That’s for sure.
Chris Kokiousis: Yeah, how did you find yourself landing on a style? Like what were you drawn to that has come to be your signature?
Gutty Kreum: Well…almost all of my art is themed around Japan and based on real-life locations in Japan. But I think for my style, I really looked to the skyscape.
Because the location essentially is reality, and the colors kind of play on the reality, and then the cloudscape is an entirely different reality basically. So I set my style in the sky.
“After-Hours: Motoyama, Kochi” (2022)
Chris Kokiousis: I think that’s a really interesting piece of what makes pixel art so captivating for people. This idea of capturing a moment in time or a feeling that almost feels photographic. But by doing it in pixel art, you’re giving it this memory quality. Is that a big part of your process, in terms of going to real locations? Maybe you can walk me through how that process works, and why these locations are relevant to you or have weight.
Gutty Kreum: So I need to be inspired by reality, essentially. Like it’s really hard for me to do work if I can’t find something to be inspired by. And as for capturing moments and feelings and trying to put them to canvas, I have to go out in nature sometimes in order to get this sort of feeling that I want to put on the canvas. Or even walking around town or whatever. It doesn’t have to be out in the wilderness.
And for the Japanese locations, I’ve only been to Japan once so far, and I didn’t get to see too many places in person during that trip. So what my process is actually, I use Google Street View to find locations that inspire me. So I’ll load up a map of Japan and randomly try to look for a place that might be interesting, and then drop down into it and just kind of travel around until I find something inspiring in that location.
Chris Kokiousis: Wow, that’s so cool.
Gutty Kreum: Yeah, so that’s really helped, and I do actually have a trip to Japan coming up in November. My second trip in 10 years, so I’m looking forward to it [and] taking some pictures as well.
Chris Kokiousis: Amazing. So you land on a place or a scene, and then that forms the basis for a drawing in pixels?
Gutty Kreum: Yeah, I can spend like two or three hours just traveling around trying to find a place that gives me inspiration as the basis for that piece. And then I’ll try to inject a feeling or memory that I’ve had into that piece through either the use of color or the sky, to create an overall sort of mood, and then give it some animation and solidify that memory or feeling. At least that’s what I hope I’m doing.
“Serene Memory: Kyoto” (2022)
Chris Kokiousis: Yeah, you definitely are. I guess to talk more about Japanese culture and how that is a throughline for most of your work — can you remember when you first became infatuated with Japan?
Gutty Kreum: It was a combination of things, including video games. When I was in elementary school, we had a teacher from Japan, and my parents invited him over for dinner. And he set up a slideshow presentation of Japanese culture to introduce us to it, and I found that fascinating. I don’t know how it came up in the conversation between my parents and him, but at one point he was saying that ‘Japan is for the Japanese,’ [laughs] which I found pretty interesting and I don’t know, that sort of mindset drew me even more into it.
So yeah, I found it fascinating from when I was very young, including the video games, the culture, and the architecture and Japanese gardens. Everything sort of drew my attention to Japan.
Chris Kokiousis: And it’s interesting because a lot of your work is in very quiet cities, or suburban, or a quiet scene somewhere in Japan, usually without any people. What about that is intriguing to you?
Gutty Kreum: I suppose you probably guessed now that I’m a huge introvert, so I don’t like crowds of people. I prefer to kind of have an experience by myself, so I suppose I put that into the art. To me, it feels more significant if it’s just you taking in everything and interpreting everything, outside of the influence of anyone else’s opinion. I guess that’s also kind of hard to put into words, but the feeling of loneliness and exploration I kind of find fascinating.
“月: Okura, Yamagata” (2021)
Chris Kokiousis: Yeah, the beauty of solitude and enjoying a quiet moment. I can appreciate that too, especially when traveling. But when you did go to Japan, what were some of the highlights and how was it different from what you expected?
Gutty Kreum: Yeah, it was amazing. I don’t think that it missed my expectation; I think it was pretty much straight on to what I expected. But that trip was basically curated by my partner’s sister who was living in Japan at the time teaching English. And she set up everything and basically drove us around. I was only there for 10 days, but [she] took us around as much as she could. So that was a different experience than just, well, I’m gonna go there and just figure it out and explore on my own.
Chris Kokiousis: Let’s talk a little bit more about the game side of things. You sell pixel art assets with your same alias, that anybody can buy and use for their own games. After having done that and contributed to the gaming community, are there any cool stories about other people who designed games with your art? How has that contribution connected you to the gaming community?
Gutty Kreum: At first, creating game assets was a necessity for living. Because prior to that, I was doing the same sort of animated illustrations I do now, but not able to make any living off of them whatsoever.
To back up even before that…when I quit my non-art job in 2015, I said oh, I’m going to start to make a game. And after spending a while developing some pixel art skills along the way, doing all the assets for that game, I obviously came to the conclusion of how hard it was to make a game on your own.
Chris Kokiousis: What kind of a game was it?
Gutty Kreum: It was a side-scrolling platformer. I was really inspired in the past by Cave Story. That was one of my favorite indie games. So I was trying to build an epic side-scrolling game that had some RPG elements and big exploration hubs and stuff.
I think it’s the same sort of story that a lot of people have when they’re making their first game by themselves, is the scope. There really is no scope. So unless you sit down and write out exactly what’s gonna happen, chances are you’re not going to get super far with it.
So that sort of fell apart. I don’t know if it was a year or a year-and-a-half into it, [but] I just thought, Well, I need to start making an income and I can’t just be on the savings from my previous job.
I can’t remember the exact year, but then I started thinking about game assets like, well, I’m sort of familiar with creating all the assets I used in my game. So maybe I can make a living off of creating the assets to help other people make games, as opposed to me trying to make a living off my own game…So I was able to start earning an income off of that. And then after that was established, I got introduced into the world of NFTs.
“奇妙な雲: Adachi City” (2020)
Chris Kokiousis: It’s really interesting, what you said earlier about [how] you couldn’t make any money from digital art. But the only thing you could make money from at the time, pre-NFT, was this concept of selling digital art in bundles for a specific purpose of making a video game. People are willing to spend money to buy that. But the idea of buying digital art just for the sake of art is still, for a lot of people, a very difficult concept to wrap their head around.
Gutty Kreum: Telling people that [ask], “What do you do in real life?” “Oh, I’m an artist that uses my art and creates NFTs”…that’s pretty hard to explain even now to most people.
Chris Kokiousis: To go back to what you were saying about how you were creating these bundles of digital art assets for video games — do you feel like that helped you wrap your head around the NFT concept? How were you introduced to it?
Gutty Kreum: I was introduced to it in 2020 by another pixel artist, Kldpxl [Khaled]. I knew him from before, because I bumped into him doing landscape pixel art. And he said he got into the NFT world, and he made a document explaining how it worked and what NFTs were. And I thought it was awesome and thought I might as well give it a shot. I think my first application was to SuperRare, and then to MakersPlace, and then just went from there.
That was my introduction to NFTs…a nice document from a fellow pixel artist friend.
Chris Kokiousis: Yeah, it’s really nice to have a friend as a gateway to help you understand this kind of stuff. Otherwise, it’s a more difficult road just reading things online and hoping that you figure it out.
Gutty Kreum: For sure. But that allowed me to continue doing what I wanted to do, which was just create these digital memories and digital feelings and put them out there for whoever wanted to collect them…
Also, I like to create places that I’d want to explore myself. So it’s like, can you sit in this world for 10 to 15 seconds? If so, then good.
“記憶: Wajima, Ishikawa” (2020)
Chris Kokiousis: And I think some of the most successful NFT artists have really figured that out, where essentially people want to collect artworks that they feel like they could live in. That they could transport themselves to just by staring at them for a while. And the fact that it’s on a loop, it’s like a self-contained scene — a self-contained world.
Gutty Kreum: I think that the loop is really important, too. To have something feel like it’s a place you can stay in for some time, it needs to loop as seamlessly as possible.
Chris Kokiousis: Right. Yeah, I was spending time with your artwork today as a refresher, and there’s that one piece [“夏: Nara”] that I think you actually took a photo of in Nara. That one really stood out to me, for how the leaves were moving and how it just felt like a real photo.
Gutty Kreum: Yeah, that one had so many layers. My style has obviously changed from that point; that one’s an older piece. And I have a few other pieces that are way more focused on realism.
But yeah, I think I used Adobe After Effects at that point. I was using After Effects for animating each individual leaf — like I’d cut it out and then paste it on its own layer, and then get some wave warp animation or something, and try to get it to look as realistic as possible for each piece. And then for some of them, you import it back after you’ve gone through After Effects and then touch it up by hand in Aesprite. And that would be frame by frame at that point.
But that one’s special though, because that one was entirely inspired by a picture that I took from a walk to Nara Park to go see the deer from the station.
“夏: Nara” (2021)
Chris Kokiousis: Yeah…really beautiful. You can tell how much time went into it.
Maybe to wrap up our chat with a little nostalgia, what are your favorite games from the pixel art era?
Gutty Kreum: I have a lot of them — like Final Fantasy II on the Super Nintendo, which I think is Japanese number IV, that was one of the first games that I played on the Super Nintendo. That really stuck with me. And then Final Fantasy III on the Super Nintendo was the biggest one to me.
A lot of people are like, oh Secret of Mana is one of the classics, but I didn’t even know [at the time], but I was playing Secret of Evermore on the Super Nintendo.
Chris Kokiousis: Ha nice, that was a good one.
Gutty Kreum: Yeah, that was my introduction to that sort of series with Secret of Evermore, and that was a big favorite of mine, too. And then EarthBound was also a really big one. Street Fighter II Turbo I played a lot. Super Punch-Out!! was also amazing…
But yeah, I play video games now, but not as often as I did as a kid, and it feels a lot more guilty.
Chris Kokiousis: Me too…It’s hard to combat that feeling of guilt like you’re wasting your time, but it’s like, what the hell. People watching a TV show for a hundred hours is perfectly acceptable in society, but for some reason games are treated as this time suck.
Gutty Kreum: Yeah, it’s been that way ever since video game consoles have been at home, really. But what’s your small list of favorites from back in the day?
Chris Kokiousis: You know what I find myself playing the most on the SNES Mini, is F-Zero, honestly. Like anytime I pick up the SNES, I play that at least once for a round. I really like futuristic, super fast racing games, especially that one.
EarthBound I played a lot as a kid and I loved it. I was replaying that last year over the Christmas holiday. So I was like, all right, it feels less indulgent and nicer to play around the holidays when you’re winding down the year.
Gutty Kreum: Yeah EarthBound’s amazing. I remember back in the day, my friend had the strategy guide — the guide that came with it that had like the scratch and sniff monsters in it.
Chris Kokiousis: [laughs] Oh wow, I didn’t know about this.
Gutty Kreum: Yeah, except unfortunately, everything over there smelled like cigarette smoke, so the guy was just scratch and smell cigarettes, basically [laughs]. I think a lot of the games that you mentioned also have just amazing music that outlives the game entirely.
Chris Kokiousis: Yeah, Chrono Trigger, I was really into the music as well. I didn’t even play through the whole game. But I was like, damn the music is cool. EarthBound had the craziest music…just so weird.
Gutty Kreum: Yeah for sure, and you mentioned F-Zero at the beginning. That’s one of the games that I don’t know if I entirely under-rated, but I never saw the draw. But the music I would listen to any day. Like “Big Blue,” there’s an iconic track from it that’s just amazing.
