I wondered what would be a good animation for my Pixoo64 LED cloud display? I guess a cute cat on a floating cloud. Maybe this is the direction I should be going. It should also appeal to a younger audience.

Just three rapid sketches to keep at least some focus on portrait drawing. I can feel the New Year euphoria quickly fading. There are so many things that need “immediate” attention, since it’s a new year, and people like to try new things, so there’s a need to remind potential customers what’s up.

The state of self-checkout, as I experienced it, as a customer. I see more personnel for assisting (and policing) customers than in stores with human cashiers. Long lines are replaced by busy checkout areas; the waiting time in line is replaced by busywork with checkout tech. It seems a failure.

I made two pixel animations, one to note that I have reached level 6 (whatever that means) in Divoom’s pixel editor, another to celebrate the occasion.

One should often lower one’s expectations, since excellence isn’t sustainable. If your low-effort results are still “passable”, imagine what your maximum efforts will going to look like. So doodling has its place; it’s non-committal practice, here with the POSEmuse app.

I thought I’d try some naive drawings according to Andrew Loomis. Clearly, I need more practice to be able to draw heads using his methods. The heads aren’t stick-figure quality, neither what a serious beginner-artist would do, but somewhere in between. I’m missing something.

An app called POSEmuse wants you to trace nude images. Since those are seen as NSFW by non-artists, I put some clothes on her. It’s playtime for her pets too.

Today something very simple, more like doodling. Circles are important, though, because they are so useful in designing a drawing from imagination, or drawing the “unseen” part of a head, so the seen part makes more sense to the artist.

This was a lot of fun to do, but it also took a loooong time to make (several hours). Some are “better” than others, but the hard ones were the most fun ones to draw. I can see I need a construction method for the head.

Based on yesterday’s find that more is better, I created a new canvas in #pixquare to give me room to sketch eight portraits in ibisPaint X. I used the CC Search Portal to find creative commons portrait photos, of which I added eight to my reference window. Now the only thing left is… sketch.

It is said that if you’re not good at portraits, quantity goes over quality. Better to draw three mediocre rough sketches, concentrating on construction, than one failed drawing you never want to see again. Also, they increase in quality as I keep drawing. Maybe long sittings have a place too.

Being broke scars a person mentally for life. I know this from personal experience, having been without money several times, living above my means.

I solved the problem with fuzzy imported 64 x 64 pixel images into the Divoom pixel editor, by chopping up the original animation into four separate 32 x 32 animated GIFs, and per frame move each 32 x 32 layer into its correct position. It’s a real hack, and rather bothersome.

Today’s sketch is a digital portrait sketch converted into 3D perspective. I suppose I should’ve redrawn it with this sketch as a template. However I was short on time. It’s also my interpretation of today’s prompt in the Sketch-a-Day app.

Another day, another portrait sketch. This time I did try to pay attention to the whole torso of the person, and delay the drawing of the face. It still feels a bit “mechanical.” The face is posed differently from the reference, if that’s of any concern to you.

Redid face and overlaid the photo to check my proportions. There were a bit off. Worse than that, I had missed the foreshortening of the person’s right shoulder. I should’ve sketched an overall posture before dealing with the face. Other than that, I’m happy with the result, not perfect, though.

After 45 minutes of slogging, I noticed something was off, so I stopped to get some distance. Am I going into details too soon, or am I not understanding what I’m looking at, or both? I guess I’ll cheat by putting the photo underneath to compare. Then I’ll redraw the sketch with what I’ve learned.

I should return to drawing portraits instead of all this busy-work with the Divoom community, which feels to me like a popularity contest, similar to Instagram and the like. I’m getting only marginally better, which is to be expected. I’d rather improve at my skill than being inundated with likes.

I drew Spyro the dragon, an old Playstation game character, in 32 x 32 pixels, which wasn’t easy. I both limited the color palette and animation, so I could do it within a day. Drawn in Pixaki on iPad, imported into Divoom’s pixel editor, and exported as a frame hanging on a wall.

I did an image search on a Yorkshire Terrier as pixel art to find a better color scheme, after applying that, it actually looks like the dog.