Starting Pixel Art: A Taste
I’m still very new to it all, and have lots of thoughts and feelings about my attempts at learning it.
The short of it is, I sure need to learn a lot, but I’m having lots of fun trying my hand at it.
My first attempt. Heavily influenced by the FF4 overworld style.
My first “original” work. Based on me wearing a hoodie. I kinda really like that it’s a fat guy pixel art, and not big-headed. Feeling the limits of small 16x16, and not loving how static-y some parts are.
This started out based on my wife, but the color of the hair would have been the same as the eyes. So I started tweaking it. Ended with very different hair color, style, and my wife gave a great idea of the “pom pom pig tails”.
This was my attempt a a skinnier character, see how that’d look. I started without muy direction, ended too similar color scheme as “hoodie-guy” above. So changed the color, and changed the hair, ended up looking like a detective long haired sorta guy. Lots of characters that sort of look like it. This sprite more than any really drove the point home, that I am not talented enough to get a good looking detailed sprite at 16x16.
I started playing with other kinds of pixel art somewhere in the middle there too. Trying to build out a world tile set. Here they are, in a very disjointed world.
After drawing these I wanted to see if I could get portraits for them going. Making them more “alive” and personalized. These portraits are the thing I’m happiest about. They really made me want my sprites to look more livelier. I based the dimensions based off of the portrait dimensions for a FF-game… I don’t remember which.
After those portraits, I really wanted to try at having bigger sprites, so I could try to make these sprites more lively and detailed. First tried skinny guy, seeing as he’s really the one that lacked the details the most.
Hoodie guy (aka me) getting the bigger sprite treatment. Allowed me to put the facial hair in that I couldn’t fit on the 16px model.
Cutie girl detailed is still pending. But here is some more tweaks and tiles for the pixel art world I showed before, with all the sprites involved so far, and a new house which is based on my childhood house. I really liked the details on that house, as I showed it to my brother, and he knew right away what it was. But after building the larger sprites, I may need to resize the world too, and the size of those tiles. TBD.