First Attempt at Pixel Art

Recently I’ve been wanting to try out more things in my life. Perhaps not recently, I always have this urge to try out this “new” things that I haven’t done before and that they seem to be… I don’t know… interesting to me.

I was surfing the web (does anyone say that nowadays?) and saw some amazing pixel art around and I thought: this is really pretty and interesting, what if I try doing some stuff like this?

I guess that my interest for “drawing arts” isn’t new: two years ago I have done some illustrations just to try out and I actually enjoyed them - at least the process, they weren’t as good as they could be.

So, I started by searching online how to do it and I ended up installing a nice program called aseprite to try out this art.

At first, I thought about reconstructing some of the illustrations I’ve done in the past and I actually happen to like them. So I’ve started by doing so.

I reconstructed a wizard 🧙‍♂️ and a cat 😸 based on some work I’ve done before. Clearly both could have lots of improvements, although I’m really happy with what I’ve achieved in so little time.

After that, I moved to something bigger - but it will be the last one of this post. I’m showing you first the last one I’ve done but that I don’t actually enjoy that much. It’s the central building of my university.

Then - or should I say, before? - I’ve done something much more interesting: my university has two twelve floor towers, which are really beautiful. So I believe you already know what’s coming.

I started by drawing the tower itself and the windows. Then, I moved to the building in front of it and both side buildings. I’ve played with some shadows and also made sure that I created a visualisation of what’s inside the building.

Perhaps it could have been done better, although it looks good to me. After that, I moved to the sidewalk and the road in general.

Started by drawing the crosswalk, then the parking lots, the yellow marks and the green area.

What consumed more time was the car. Well… it didn’t consume more time, but it probably was the more “painful” and funny part to do at the same time. I started by painting it and then made the animation. But then I noticed I didn’t like the wheels. And since I did it in a way I had to change every frame, I had to recreate the whole animation. And this happened like 5 times.

Well… after creating lots of frames and moving the car forward in different speeds, I thought: “I’m not changing this any more times, let’s make it final”. I exported it to a GIF and shared it on Twitter, where I received some positive feedback ❤️.

tl;dr I’ve really enjoyed this experience and I’m looking forward to learn a bit more about this world and sharing the results here. What do you think?