Pixel art. Wow, this was rather complicated to make! Today’s Pixel Dailies theme was “puzzle.” I made a solvable jigsaw puzzle of Qbert
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Pixel art 🚧 I suppose I drew a horse-drawn “mobile home,” aka gipsy caravan.
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Pixel art. Now I’ve included the description of the Pixel Dailies theme daily in every piece for some time, I suppose it’s time to develop my own (more readable) pixel font. I had an impromptu font, but it wasn’t all that good. This one is—or seems to be—a lot better.
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Pixel art for Pixel Dailies, theme “rainbow tree.” I never heard before of an Eucalyptus deglupta, aka rainbow tree.
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Pixel art 🚧 Today’s practice piece is probably again more elaborate than the actual Pixel Dailies piece. This one is based on Vicky the Viking.
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Pixel art. There’s a lot to know 🙇‍♂️ about lines—curves in general—in this art form, as it is a basic component of drawing and drafting, and the separation the human vision system perceives between differently colored blocks. Smoothing is done selectively with anti-aliasing.
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Pixel art. Today’s Pixel Dailies theme was rather late (hence I had to rush it), and called “cute but deadly.” I opted for a cute knife with a curly pink heft.
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While waiting for the new Pixel Dailies theme, I explored the magic of bitmapped text, as applied to pixel art. I wrote in Adobe Fresco, posterized to 5 levels, then pixeled the letters pixel-by-pixel, with imagination. It hasn’t received anti-aliasing, which is tricky.
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Pixel art. I refined the previous drawing, and made it into a funny statement. It’s a non-serious 😉 Star Wars/Trek 🌌🖖 crossover. I find it curious how publishing makes me see any flaws I didn’t notice beforehand.
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Pixel art 🚧 So this is my practice piece for today, being the 8th day of April Fool’s Month. It’s called “Obi-Wan 💩🪐” It was a lot of running around, but I’m still pleased with it, in a funny way.
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Pixel art 👾🚧 On the 8th day of April Fool’s Month I chose Obi-Wan to be my only hope 🌌 It’s not finished, but the head is. I didn’t trace, which explains why it took 2.5 hours to draw it. It’s drawn in Pixaki, an iPad app.
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Pixel art. Today’s Pixel Dailies theme was “robes.” I know little of clothing, so this was an impossible challenge for me. Ah well.
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Photo of Aziz (means sweatheart). As the true sunbather 😎 he is, he jumped right up once I opened the sunshades. The other, Maahir (means the excellent, distinguished), jumped right next to him, but found it too cramped a space, so he left the spot in the sun🐱

Pixel art 👾🚧 Intuitively, both Idefix and Apple’s quote seemed appropriate for the 7th day of April Fool’s Month. BTW, I’m still waiting for today’s Pixel Dailies theme.
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Pixel art. Today’s Pixel Dailies theme was “tower.” The restriction of exact dimensions didn’t feel restrictive, so I added animation in the 20x60 pixels frame.
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Try on an Apple device to read MB with voiceover. Most images have alt='' in their html image containers, or not even that. For the visual impaired this means either “no image”, or a filename, respectively. This while @manton has added an interface for the app #beInclusivePeople

Pixel art WIP 👾 🚧 On the 6th day of April 🤡 Fool’s month, I’m sure the Pixel Dailies art prompt will be challenging and grand.
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Pixel art. Today’s theme of Pixel Dailies was “embankment.” I kept it simple.
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Pixel art 🚧 Continuing April Fool’s Dayish silliness. Not knowing what today’s PD theme will be is perhaps twice as fun as knowing.
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I’m still present on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, but I don’t frequent those places anymore, for various reasons. One common reason is that they use public bookmarks, also known as “likes.” Because of the glyph (heart or thumbs up), people seem to equate this feature to a token of appreciation, or even approval. While this is great for the platform owner (read: user engagement and stickiness of the platform), and the giver of said tokens (positive social interaction and a feeling of accomplishment), for the receiver these tokens are rather impersonal and meaningless.

At the moment, I’m trying to improve my skills on pixel art. Unlike traditional art, there doesn’t seem to exist a formal education for this art form (some even don’t consider it art, but that’s another story). So most pixel artists are self-taught, which is totally fine. However, artists need feedback about their art, which they can get from other artists, by example. By studying other artists you can learn a lot about the art in general, technique, subject matter, etc.

So I joined Pixel Dailies on Twitter. This is a daily art prompt (called a theme) for pixel art. You can post your attempt on Twitter with a hashtag #pixel_dailies So I did, for more than a month. I noticed some (slow) change in my behavior. I kept looking for statistics, specifically how many likes each piece got. I didn’t look at other artists' pieces, just at how many likes my piece got. I suppose this is how Twitter tries to draw people in, by an obsession over empty social interaction.

So I stopped, cold turkey. This wasn’t helping me at all. Now I need to wean myself (again) of an addiction to likes.

Likes are, in my opinion, meaningless and hollow because of lack of context. Likes can be out of pity or even habit. They can be a sign of approval, and withholding likes can be seen as a micro-critique. I just don’t know, unless the like goes with a comment. The only comments I got were similar to like your work. While this is encouraging, sweet and polite, no word about what specifically they liked about my work and what they possibly didn’t like, so I could possibly focus on that next time, if I agreed.

The problem, of course, is that people feel tongue-tied because all conversation on Twitter is in public. All too often a gentle back-and-forth between two people is spoiled by bystanders (and bots) who use it to create a debate, or—hopefully in their thinking—drama, as to relieve boredom (supposedly, because I don’t know them and their circumstances either). So hitting the “like” button is safer for everyone, but, because it’s rather meaningless in low specificity, the effect is the opposite from what the sender might expect. It annoys the artist, specifically this artist.

Perhaps I’m expecting too much from places like Twitter. Twitter isn’t an artists' community, of course, but rather a hen house, a place where like-minded people seek confirmation of their thoughts and ideas, or act out their petty behavior towards fellow humans.

Anyway, this piece of text was about likes, and how I came to experience that I don’t like them. If you don’t want to interact with specifics, only through empty tokens, why interact at all, aside from addiction to likes?

Likes on social networks, in my experience, are a bug, not a feature.

I’ll keep using Twitter for the daily art prompt, and look at other artists' art, but I’m no longer posting pixel art that is taxing my artistic skills. Sure, once I’ve established myself, I might again use Twitter to interact with art lovers. However, that’s far into the future. Right now I need to focus on my skills and how to improve them. Spending hours on Twitter isn’t going to accomplish that, I’m afraid..
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