I've been working on this since this morning and for a decent part of yesterday.  I finally got a scanner and have been practicing drawing humans.  I finally decided to make a new pixel piece after a hiatus (where I've begun to do terrible but have gotten myself back on my feet).

I've decided to draw classic NES Link and attempt an action pose.


2x version for those with Firefox 3.
Original pencil drawing, the pixel version is flipped horizontally because Link is left handed and I didn't want to tick off purists.

I've gotten critique from a friend already and have worked on fixing a lot of mess ups, but C&C is still appreciated for the sake of improving myself.

Hi.  So I recently got a flash card reader for my DS Lite, and my first instinct is to seek out drawing apps (so far UAPaint is the best and intended for pixel art).

I wanted to use the CGA palette, using the bright turquoise and purple palette.  I don't know why this palette seemed interesting to me, maybe it's because it's as far from reality as it gets, or maybe because it just screams 80's in an embarrassing moment.

Apparently CGA's resolution has stretched pixels, but I have to play by UAPaint's limitations before anything since it only allows 256x192 maximum image size, thus why half the image is my reference.



This is still a WIP, and I purposely uploaded the very, very basic build of the CGA scene before I continued so that I could go step by step and correct mistakes early on that people catch onto before they turn into a monster.

My next step is to correct some mistakes I made by not having the larger, more detailed, reference on my DS available that UAPaint could load.  Now that I have that though, I can load it up whenever I am confused by a part of the image.

EDIT: Oops.  Pixel image is now a .png.

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This is with the above reference better taken into account.  Pretty much what I'm doing here is trying to represent with different colors, like the sky obviously being white, trees and grass being purple, trees and other plantlife that are sort of in the background being black, the building and road being turquoise (with the driveway that's clearly brighter in the reference as white).

I am hoping to refine this stage even further, and maybe get critique before I move on to adding more detail.

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I think it's at this point I'm ready to start doing real color work to give objects more identity, especially on the building which obviously needs work.  Texture and flashiness won't be a priority yet though (but there's still the possibility of me getting carried away.)

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Begin to try and get the windows and building into perspective better as well as give it definition (not too satisfied, but at least it's kinda better than just blobs of black that result in drawing the bench over the window bars), tried to define the yard under the tree by using a black line to separate it and the dirt (using the same color for dirt).  Drawn the blue area of the sky.

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I learned that I got the perspective of the building wrong.  OOPS.  That's fixed in this image, thankfully, and now the building looks much better.  I also began adding detail to the image, and went ahead and added highlight to the truck's mirror.   Decided to just use black for shadows on the curb since the turquoise just blended into the road and I was already using purple for the grass.

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Since nobody cared to critique it before I began polishing and adding a bunch of details (maybe nobody cared, or maybe I was doing well enough that I didn't need it.  Who knows?), I went ahead and did so, resulting in this image.  This is by no means finished, but getting there, of course.  I used dithering to give myself more flat colors, so to speak, and was the last thing I added (even after anti-aliasing).





EDIT: I deleted most of my WIP images to clean up my TinyPic space.

This isn't really a serious piece.  I just decided, "Hey.  Let's see how much I can shape that shoulder using just two colors."

So uh...  Yeah...  There isn't much.  Just a bunch of dithering

Not much to say about me.  Here's my opening image (zoomed by 200%).



I drew this character on paper first, scanned it into Paint Shop Pro 8, downsized the pencil image, created a new layer, then pixeled a black outline over it, so using a pencil image as a base would be the major non-pixel technique.

I screwed up during the layering process, accidentally drawing black outlines in the wrong layers (especially the background layer), so I ended up removing a lot of the image and keeping just the head and shoulders.

The only tool besides the eraser and brush I used would be the background eraser to help clean up a major screw up.

I didn't aim to use as few colors as possible, although I could probably use less on some of the outlines, if that is extremely important.

C&C welcome, and I'll see what I can do to improve the image.

EDIT: On the left, is the version with anti-aliased outlines only, and to the right is the one with the anti-aliased outlines and shades.