Rene van Belzen
Rene van Belzen

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  • Studying shadow on a ball in pixel art. This isn’t easy, and probably full of mistakes.
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    pixel art of a ball with a shadow

  • Pixel art for r/SketchDaily. Alt theme Olympics. Game Boy Advance pixel art (240 x 160, 32 colors).
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    pixel art of olympic rings with 5 favorite sports in them, gymnastics, track and field, water polo, volleybal, and swimming

  • Pixel art for r/SketchDaily, alt theme The Matrix. I decided to make a simple animation with some text and graphics. However, the subreddit doesn’t allow animated GIF, it seems, so I shared one frame instead. Game Boy image format, 160 x 144, 4 colors.
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    pixel art animation of an expanding square, a choice between a red and blue pill, and the cryptic text You Are the One.

  • Practicing pixel art… I continued working on yesterday’s pixel art in Pixaki (it rocks!) To do it justice I’ll need a proper pixel editor like Aseprite, the industry standard. Ah well, tools not art make. If I happen to become a pro, buying a Mac will make much more sense.
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    pixel art of my cat Aziz, both the original and his head 3 times enlarged, pixel-wise

  • When I saw Pixaki could use the iPad’s pasteboard, I tried copy-and-pasting existing pixel art into Procreate, which has an 1-pixel brush installed. I enlarged the original three times, recreated the color palette, and drew over it in a new layer. I can see that having value, though it’s very slow.
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    screenshot of Procreate app on iPad, showing pixels drawn over 3 times enlarged original.

  • Did a quick search on payment processors and the industry leaders are Stripe and PayPal. For micro-payments (which I’m interested in, anything less than $10 USD, for letting people support my art), PayPal seems best suited, esp’ly for someone outside the US, as I am. Stripe beats PayPal otherwise.

  • To prep for a free draw (not based on reference), I did a few pencil sketches to explore the drawing space of anthropomorphized bears. It was only a shallow exploration and even didn’t get my feet wet. I liked the idea of actual gummi bears (the sweets) instead of the Disney ones.

    pencil sketches of bears from imagination and some stylized bears pencil sketches with some stylized bears

  • Free Draw Friday on r/SketchDaily! Continued my “Famous Bears” of last Tuesday by refining the five I already did, adding four more, and do a free draw, based on the Gummi Bears. I gave up on guessing a drawing time, who cares? It was so much fun! Exhausting, though 🥱 Can’t keep up 10 hrs per day.
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    pixel art of nine portraits of famous bears, and one free drawn bear, based on the Gummi Bears.

  • Work in Progress pixel art for r/SketchDaily Free Draw Friday. I fixed some of the problems I discovered with a fresh look. There’s just one portrait to go. Alas, my ambitions are thusly high, that it might take the rest of the day to pull it off.
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    pixel art with 9 famous bear portraits from tv series and movies, and one portrait still to be drawn

  • 🤣 I hope I can get away with pixeling Po’s silly nephew Fo. I was trying another facial expression than in the reference, which went somewhere in the totally-off-model territory. It’s part of a larger pixel art piece for tomorrow.

    pixel art of bad lookalike panda bear Po

    In other news, I seem to have misplaced my bottle of alien gummi juice.
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  • Seriously considering stopping drawing for r/SketchDaily, since ten hours a day for a silly art challenge isn’t proportional; it’s totally out of whack.

  • Today’s theme for r/SketchDaily is: Heavy Metal. To generate 1.21 Jigawatts you’d need something with a bit more kick. Game Boy Advance pixel art (240 x 160, 8 colors). Partially traced (save time), mostly drawn from imagination. Drawing time: ± 6 hours. 🙄 If I only had a time machine…
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    pixel art movie scene of Back to the Future, with Doc Brown thinking of the answer to What is the Heaviest Metal in Existence?

  • Some of the items on my Bookmarks page were there because of clumsy tapping. The UI of the iOS app is clearly not tested with an iPhone SE 2020. It’s too busy underneath a post on the Timeline.

  • Work in progress on a pixel art piece for Friday August 18, 2023. It’s a continuation (and refinement) of the piece I did for r/SketchDaily on August 15. The advantage of more time is a disadvantage at the same time, more can be added. Not always a good thing, as the initial vision could be lost.
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    pixel art of portraits of seven famous bears from books and movies. Three portraits are still empty.

  • Today’s r/SketchDaily theme is plumbing. KISS is a wonderful principle, lost to practice. Game Boy artwork (160 x 144 pixels, 4 colors). Drawing time: 1u40m.
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    Game boy pixel art with a pressure vessel, some plumbing and liquid pouring on the floor. Cat is laying on the plumbing.

  • Today’s r/SketchDaily theme is “🧸 Famous Bears." I was only able to do 5 out of 10 famous bears because I didn’t have enough time. Still, I was enjoying the 64 x 64 pixels portraits so much, that I’ll finish it coming Friday. Drawing time: 7u20m for the whole image, around 50min per portrait.
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    pixel art with several identical Teddy bears at regular distances, and partially drawn portraits in pixel frames with the name of each of the five famous bears.

  • Work in progress for today’s r/SketchDaily theme “🧸 Famous Bears." I spent over 3 hours just collecting the references, and setting up the 512 x 512 pixels base image for ten 64 x 64 pixel art clips, to be filled with glorious pixel art imagery. Days are too short to pull off stunts like this…
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    pixel art with several identical Teddy bears at regular distances, and empty pixel frames with names of famous bears.

  • Today’s theme for r/SketchDaily is Beehive. I drew Brigitte Bardot in a The Simpsons art style in pixel art that could have been draw on a Game Boy Advance (240 x 160, 16 colors). Drawing time: 2u57m.
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    pixel art cartoon in Simpson art style with woman in red dress showing off her beehive hairdo, surrounded by flowers and bees

  • Another self-challenge, this time from Pixel Dailies, theme Gengar. I really didn’t like visiting Twitter (now X), but, luckily, PD is now on Discord too. Drawing time: 1u40m.
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    pixel art of running Pokémon character Gengar

  • Today’s theme for /r/SketchDaily: The angriest looking fish you ever saw. Pixel art drawn from imagination. Size: 240 x 160, 16 colors. Drawing time: 3u6m.
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    cartoony pixel art of an angry fish