Pixel art

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m always amazed how different a 32 x 32 pixel art piece looks from its reference. The color choice might not be the best, but I’m sticking with this pastel-colored palette, which probably demands a more stylistic approach than the realism I’m aiming for.

I found out that the Divoom pixel editor prefers 32 x 32 images for import. The 64 x 64 image import leads to fuzzy pixels. Of course, for animation this isn’t a big deal, since sprites are often smaller than 32 x 32 pixels. And I can import 32 x 32 as 64 x 64 pixels if I don’t mind the fuzzies.

I’m learning how to get a color palette from an image in Divoom’s pixel editor. So I created an image in Pixquare and imported that, so I could pick and add colors, and created this post’s animation from that. Since it took so long, I guess I’ll stick with this palette for a while.

I made the animation from scratch in Divoom’s pixel editor (the frame is from the app itself, of which on the display on top the tv set I changed 2021 in 2025). It took a really long time for such a simple 64 x 64 pixel animation.