Art

The Tenth Doctor gets a strange signal on his T.A.R.D.I.S. monitor: “What. What … WHAT!?”

I hope you don’t mind I’ve used your avatar for my little pixel animation. @peterw

In prep for reaching level 10 in the Divoom community (probably early next week), I’ve upgraded 🤖 yesterday’s Doctor. It’s a still from a 24 frames animation, running on my Pixoo64 as I’m typing this. Me happy 😊

Sneak peak of an animation I’ve been working on today.

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.