Pixel art

Work in progress. I’m working with a mouse in Multipaint on my RPi.

What is he so happy about? I know, and you may too, once I’m done pushing pixels and uploaded it to my blog.
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A “little” thing as a broken iPad won’t stop me from making art. I made this when the iPad was almost gone.

And the other piece I made with a PETSCII editor on my RPi, based on a piece I did earlier this month.

Not having a backup for my Raspberry Pi makes me a bit nervous, as it should
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Analyzing @hutaffe’s (free) avatar from Make A pirate was a bit convoluted on my part…

Anyway, 100 by 100 pixel art, scaled up 8 times, with 53 unique colors, in isometric perspective, so typical for 2D games nowadays.

There’s a story here, stereotypical even, though better than I can ATM. 💡👾

As Hanna-Barbera cartoons of the eighties have taught us, cats can without most clothes, except the most essential, like a hat or a cane.
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I find it always such a surprise how a pixel art drawing I made subtly (or sometimes radically) changes to conform to the rigors of the C64 multicolor bitmap.

Other than that, I used some of the edging techniques (sharp, lost and soft edges). So there’s that too. Happy 😊 camper here!
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Searching on Flickr for Creative Commons photos of kittens I found this cute black and white one. I used it as reference for my C64 hi-res bitmap pixel art drawing.

Sometimes less color is better. Especially if the one depicted is staring into your soul.
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I didn’t get to experiment with edges. Still, I drew something I love, so that’s good.

Maybe advice from an oil painter doesn’t translate all that well to pixel art. Pixel art has more in common with decorative art (like embroidery) than with traditional art you can hang on a wall.
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Public domain now?
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I suppose the lesson to be learned here is:

Don’t look into the spiral, or you’ll go cuckoo, bananas, Dada

A quick peek is no problem, though.
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Another day, another cat drawing. This time our more blocky version of a feline fellow creature. Sketch in ibisPaint X and final drawing in Commodore 64 multicolor bitmap (160 x 200 resolution, 16 colors). If I could, I’d knit him a cozy sweater.
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I think I’m starting to grasp how to draw in C64 multicolor. You get three colors that can be used anywhere, and per 8 by 8 pixels block you get to pick another color out of 16 possible colors. Careful placement of the pixels is key. If you do it right, you can have a very colorful image
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Another day, another cat drawing for the old Commodore 64
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I reworked an older self-portrait that I made last year as a pixel art drawing, and turned it into an image on the Commodore 64. I like that the limited color palette doesn’t seem to limit me as much as it used to. It takes some effort (well, a lot of effort), but I think it was worth the time.
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Here are some of the steps I took to create a multicolor pixel art drawing of a cat.

drawn in ibisPaint X in 4 colors

traced and redrawn in Pixaki

made into C64 runnable multicolor art with MultiPaint, loaded into VICE C64

It’s a process, taking many hours to complete. I think I’m improving.

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I fired up my art app and sculpted on a canvas the size of a retro-computer’s text character (8 pixel wide and 8 pixels high). I had to struggle, because the app wanted it to look nicer than it really was.

I suppose you can already guess what it represents. You can do a lot in 64 bits of data 👨‍💻🎨

I would prefer owning a Mac, but I simply can’t rationalize the “Apple tax.” I used to be Mac or Die. A computer is more like a way to access the Internet nowadays, anyway 👨‍💻👾

It’s all very technical, this Commodore 64 multicolor mode. I made a special 2x1 grid in my iPad pixel editor to help me, but still I need to check in an actual multicolor editor if I made a mistake. Anyway, I’m improving as a C64 pixel artist, and that’s very cool 👨‍💻

Since I took the picture myself, I can copy it, I guess.

Creating something colorful that can be displayed on a Commodore 64 by loading and running a file involved a lot of (impossible to automate) creative steps. It took me around 4 hours for this simple drawing of my cat Aziz. 👨‍💻

I found an image editor that is able to draw Commodore 64 multicolor images. It can load PNG images, so I could draw on my iPad and color in this Java app on my Raspberry Pi-400. Yay!

I’m still learning, though. Also found a SID tracker to compose music on the C64, and my musical knowledge is meh.