Pixel Art – The Thing

Pixel Art - "The Thing" by Chris Sanyk - 64x64

Notes

This one took a lot more time due to all the detail. Thing, the loveable orange rocky lug from The Fantastic Four is an iconic hero, and I thought it would be very challenging to get the look right in super low res. I must be getting better at this, because I didn’t hardly stumble at all, just worked my way through it, and got good results pretty easily.

  1. Started off with The Hulk as my base model, turned him orange.
  2. Found a suitable color to use for shading. I ended up going with two darker orange-brown colors.
  3. I don’t really know what The Thing wears, if they’re like boxing trunks or what, but the Fantastic Four blue is not hard to mistake for anything else.
  4. With the amount of detail needed to draw in the Thing’s rocky texture, it would have been possible to do facial features. I did not want to do that, because none of the other heroes have any facial features (except Spidey’s mask eyes.) I did just give a very weak impression of a nose and a jawline here. Because I’m doing shading elsewhere on Thing’s body, it forced me to do something for the jawline, or it wouldn’t have looked consistent.
  5. I kept the texture lines jaggy and short, and just kindof pieced them together. It really didn’t take too long, and I didn’t have to use Undo very much, which surprised me. In the torso, to keep it more solid, I didn’t connect the lines so much, and I drew them where they would also help define the anatomy and the major muscle groups. I liked the way that worked out. Once I had the internal shading lines drawn in, I went to the outside and added a few more orange pixels here and there, to give his outline a bumpier appearance.
  6. Overall, I’m extremely pleased with the effect I got, and it didn’t take me much time at all. Probably took longer to write this than it took me to draw it!

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