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.

If you’re rage-quitting from a service, and think that’s going to influence the maintainers, think who the service will be maintained for after you’ve left—spoiler, not you, who left and is of no longer a concern to anyone but yourself.

It seems I’m on my way back from a hip injury. I may even run the Rotterdam Marathon this year, though with readjusted expectations. I couldn’t put in the hours and am seriously overweight now. Still, it’s nice to enjoy life again without constant pain. Against expectations, it made time fly.

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.

It isn’t hard to find articles on what to draw (drawing ideas). The hard part is to make a drawing that is as specific as possible, since anyone can draw a tree shape as an oval on top of a rectangle. Making it then more look like a tree like no other tree is the challenging part.

Listening to the series about sexual depravities and general mischief of Roman emperors in the The Rest is History podcast makes me think of the current (clearly) autocratic leader of America. I wonder, will he become the first US emperor?

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.

我在中国除夕夜获得了跑步锻炼的徽章！

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.

Yesterday was a bit awkward, and I still feel a bit uneasy. My central heating needed maintenance and the repairman had a few issues. First he misidentified me as woman (I need a haircut, badly). Then he criticized me for not having children, mentioning proudly his dad fathered 35 children. Ugh!

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.