Art

I suppose even for pixel art it’s sometimes smart to do a sketch before putting little blocks on a canvas.

I already made this pixel drawing in 2022, and I uploaded it to the Divoom community. Apparently, they’re having a lot of inappropriate artwork over there, since it has to be approved first, which takes a day or so.

I made this 64x64 pixels portrait before, and I thought my skill has advanced enough to try to improve it. It’s for the Divoom community, titled Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.

A shrunken and improved version of an earlier piece I did for Pixel Dailies, prompted “paperweight.” This one I did for the Divoom community.

For a contest by a user in the Divoom community. It’s my cat Maahir, a Muslim name which means skilled, skilful, proficient, experienced, clever, genius, and fits him perfectly. I used two photos as my reference, and the rest is drawn as in-betweens, with motion blur.

Only a week ago I reached level 7 in the Divoom community and told myself to pace myself with interacting with the app. How did that turn out? I’ve reached level 8 today. ’Nuff said.

My entry for Divoom’s 2025 Hugging Day, with the description:

There are other ways to show love than through embrace. Not everyone is a hugging person. Love isn’t an emotion; it’s a promise to take care of one another, despite what feelings are at play right now.

Seeing how much effort it took to make this animation, I gave it away as a free template to the Divoom community for use in someone’s own projects, with a requirement to mention my username in the description. We will see if this has any legs…

Some pixel art animation for the Divoom community I came up with in a few hours.

I can see where I went wrong here. I was trying to make my sketch look like the reference. I’m supposed to draw a generic head shape first, and only then modify it, adding its personality. I need to step back and squint, so the person goes away, and structure, generic building blocks, remain.

I’m sure there are many out there who are not able to imagine the human head as a compound shape, e.g. a rounded plate attached to a sphere with its sides cut off, or a complicated construction. Why not simplify even more, and build a head out of that? It could be a good intermediate step.

I’m trying to “get” the Loomis method of drawing heads from construction. I got as far as drawing a sphere, but still can’t see it as a three-dimensional object. It hasn’t clicked yet. I’m nothing but patient, though.

I had to confirm for myself that in order to grasp how to render 3-dimensional forms onto a flat plane, one has to understand how to render 3D forms as flat 2D shapes, and add shading and shadows to those shapes. Drawing from life (instead of photos) helps, but it is key to stay open-minded.

I probably should stick around level 7 on the Divoom community for a while, since being there causes me to neglect my portrait drawing skills. Priorities, priorities…

I turned a selfie into a 64x64 subpixel animation for the Divoom community.

Loomis states that we best construct the head “by drawing a ball resembling the cranium, which is round but flattened somewhat at the sides, and attaching the jawbone and features to it.” This proved to be very hard for me, almost impossible, because drawing by constructing is rather alien to me.

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.

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.