Art

Somewhat inspired by micro∙blog’s April 2024 photoblogging challenge. 64 x 64 pixels, 11 colors.
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I’m still struggling with this portrait of Clara Serena Rubens by her father. It feels like I’m stuck, can’t draw portraits, while I know I’m reasonably good at drawing portraits, even if I say so myself. Maybe I should put it aside, as a mistake.

Was looking for a good ink drawing to recreate as pixel art, and found my own ink drawing from 2011. I believe I have improved somewhat since that time. There’s also a process video. 200 x 200 pixels. According to Apple Screen Time it took me 2h34m to draw.
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I found these 25 faces and tried to recreate them faithfully in pixel art. Below it is an animated GIF of the time lapse creating the drawing.
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Pixel art of a symbolic face I modified and colored with this color palette, using this reference. 64 x 64 pixels.
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Pixel art of a cloud using a vibrant color palette.
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I’m not very good at planning. Animators are supposed to plan ahead. So I end up with a mess.
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Animation is such a different beast, and it is sooo time consuming on an iPad. Unfortunately, this is only traced, not animated.
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I might be over-analyzing this cartoon drawing a teensy tiny bit. The idea is to make an animation out of it, using some real mutt running, inspired by the work of the great Eadward James Muybridge.

Next up, a running skeleton of a real mutt, and apply that to the cartoon mutt’s skeleton.
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This took quite some time, and I used a “Muybridge cheat” to speed things up. It’s called Z’brah, for obvious reasons. No? The pattern on the cube is based on zebra striping. I suppose not so obvi. Well, it kept me on the straight and narrow while it was being made.
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If I’m correct, the woman runner in the photo is Claudia Gelsomino in her 2014 New York Marathon. Doing these more realistic pixel art drawings is tough, yet rewarding.
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Using this reference I drew this baboon, using a bit of tracing to get the rough proportions correct. 200 by 200 pixels, 12 colors.
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I used this reference and this vibrant color palette to draw a pelican in pixel art.
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Inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s April Showers, drawn in Game Boy compatible pixel art.
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Using this as my reference I drew a road race car. Perspective is always a hassle, so I took quite some liberties. I expect my next will be much better, with this one under my belt.
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A bed seems simple enough to draw in isometric perspective, until you actually do it, as I did. I need more pixels, but that’s silly, since seasoned pixel artists do not, although they do need more colors. Also, funny how details get lost in downscaling.
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Did some random characters.
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Here is the final pixel art piece that is compatible with the Nintendo Game Boy. Many thanks to these photographers who allowed me to create sprites based on their kitten photos: ①, ②, ③, ④, ⑤, ⑥, ⑦, and ⑧
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WIP pixel art. The main focus points at this stage—besides finishing the piece—were variety and cuteness, so it’s more interesting to look at. So I replaced the same backgrounds on each of the eight frames with new backgrounds. And oh, I added a sixth 24x24 pixels kitten sprite 🥹 Only two left!
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WIP pixel art. I’ve added my .aseprite files to a Working Copy repository, so I can revert to an earlier version. With all this editing I already lost a version of the current project, maybe caused by an iPad app error while saving, or—more likely—PEBFAC, problem exists between finger and couch.