Drawn and Pixeled Tiles - when and how can they be used together?

When I look at the resources I have for tiles, I am not always good at recognizing those that are pixel art when they are very small.


But I think I have the general idea of it, or am getting it slowly anyways.


So when/how can they work together?


I have heard people talk about changing saturation and contrast to help XP tiles work better with VX tiles - but isn't XP stuff pixel art? Or just some XP stuff?


And when things are small, does it matter much about the pixel art thing, as long as the colors aren't glaringly different?


And actually the real question I have is - when you have all these cool (e.g.) sci-fi tiles that are pure pixel art, do they have to go with only pixel art for the rest of the tileset? Throughout the game?


I am trying to put together some tilesets for my students to see, and I am wrestling with this a bit.


Thanks for your input.

Personally, I don't think it's a good idea to mix them at all. They stand out as being different and it will give a game a sense of inconsistency.


Though it's true that some people may not notice, there will be people who do. It's not just the colours that are the issue, so fixing the colours alone won't be enough to make them able to stand together on a map. It's the aliasing and shading styles that really sets pixel VS painted styles apart, like VX vs XP.


In short! if you have some cool sci-fi tiles that are pure pixel art, you should stick to pure pixel art for the rest of the tileset.


((Although, it might be neat to see a game callback the old school cartoon thing - where backgrounds were shaded beautifully minus the one thing the character was going to interact with - and use painted/aliased styled tiles for the background and then pure pixel stuff for interactable items. That might be kinda neat! So yeah, like anything, there's bound to be exceptions for stylistic choices, so long as they are consistent exceptions.))

I don't think the tiles can ever be mixed, but mixing drawn tiles and pixel sprites seems to work just fine. I wonder, though, if you enlarged the pixel stuff then made it small again to introduce a little anti-aliasing, would it work or would you just get a mess that no longer fits in the tiles?

well when i think about this the first thing that comes to mind is to look for pixel density or how the image is Textured forgive me if my terminology is wrong
 
but generally when you look at any image when the pixels become more individual in nature to create an image most people will say looks "Drawn" but when the pixels begin to group in larger more obvious clusters then they will say it looks "pixelated" even though hypothetically all images printed/represented on a computer screen are pixelated 
 
this isnt a tileset so to say but lets look at this image

one looks like it was drawn image while the other looks pixelated but infact they are the same image only the grouping of pixels is more apparent, Because of the density of varying pixels these two images would not look good together in the same space unless the one of lesser "Quality" was a decoration and not a main focal point 
now lets look at this

these are 4 sprites from 4 different games all at varying degrees of density from left to to bottom right lets call them A-D. The first (A) being the least dense and the last (D)being the most,

when we look at the first image we don't notice singular groups of pixels so much not that they're not there but at this resolution they look buttery smooth 

with the image to the right of it(B)its almost the same thing albit slightly more chunky however not so much that its noticeable, but when you look at the bottom two(C,D) you can see the associated pixels in larger clumps giving the image a more pixelated look although all these images  are the same size only A and B would look good together side by side

if you were to put A and B next to either C or D or even C next to D difference becomes immediately noticeable and breaks continuity you can apply this same theory when looking at tilesets, tilesets with a low level of density or highly textured will look good next to other tileset of low density/texturing  like wise tilesets with high density will look good next to another with the same or slightly varied density  (Barring the color and theme match up lol)

of course theres ways to get around that but that lays more with design choice and placement then art style 

hope this helps /makes sense lol