Pixel Art: The Riddler

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Pixel Art "The Riddler" by Chris Sanyk 16x16px

Notes:

  1. With The Riddler, I decided 16x16px was plenty enough. Could I have given more detail by dropping down to 32px or 64px? Sure. But as you can see, you don’t need to.
  2. I could still do so if I wanted to change the feel of this. Comparing to some of the other characters I’ve done recently, he seems (and is) lower res and less detailed. Next to them, he’s a little out of place.
  3. But by not going into as much detail here, I’m making a point. I’d been doing the last few at a higher level of detail to challenge myself to work at that detail level. But it’s even more challenging, sometimes, to not allow yourself to go to a lower detail level, and force yourself to work at a chunkier resolution. Being able to do either well is challenging, just in different ways. If you always drop down to more detail all the time, try challenging yourself sometime and take that option away, and see how you work with it.

Pixel Art – The Punisher

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Pixel Art "The Punisher" by Chris Sanyk 512x512

Notes

  1. Another difficult solid single color outfit, all the more difficult because it’s all-black.
  2. I bit the bullet and used some tiny pixels at 512×512 resolution to provide outlining.
  3. The gun was pretty cheaply done, since I didn’t bother changing the arm angle. It looks like he’s not holding the grip of what appears to be (maybe) a revolver. The way the arm/hand is angled, if he was holding the grip, the barrel should be pointing down.

Pixel Art – Cyclops

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Pixel Art "Cyclops" by Chris Sanyk 64x64px

Notes:

  1. This one took me only about 5 minutes.
  2. The only 64×64 pixels I used are on the chest logo and on the belt.

Pixel Art “Venom” 64×64

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Pixel Art "Venom" by Chris Sanyk 64x64px

Notes:

  1. Venom was super easy!
  2. I just blacked-out the Hulk and added a little detail.
  3. The toughest part was the mouth, but it wasn’t too hard and it was a lot of fun to make the crazy tongue and teeth at 32px and 64px resolution.

Pixel Art: Colossus

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Pixel Art "Colossus" by Chris Sanyk 64x64px

Notes:

  1. I based this one off of the “normal” man figure that I used starting with Superman, but I bulked up the arms and upper torso.
  2. Colossus’s arms and legs texture is problematic to render at low resolution, so I dropped down to 64×64 to add the necessary detail.
  3. Looking at his waist, it looks like when I dropped down to 32×32 I probably should have done a little smoothing in that area, to match the smoothing that I added on to his shirt.

Pixel Art – The Rhino

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Pixel Art "The Rhino" by Chris Sanyk 64x64px

Notes:

  1. The challenging part about the Rhino is that he’s all one color. Overlapping is unavoidable, and you can only use so much shadowing.

Pixel Art – Dr. Doom 64×64

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Pixel Art "Dr. Doom" by Chris Sanyk 64x64px

Notes

  1. The first one I’ve done that I included facial features. I could have left it without, really.
  2. The green on green tunic/cape made this one a little more difficult than most.

Pixel Art – Joker

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Pixel Art "Joker" by Chris Sanyk 64x64 px

 

Notes

  1. The light tone of the Joker’s bleached skin made it necessary to use outlining to get the hands to stand out enough. I also outlined the neck and jawline but not the face.
  2. The hair is a bit difficult.
  3. If you google image search for “Joker” it’s almost ALL Heath Ledger, a tiny bit of Jack Nicholson, NO Casear Romero, and the occasional Batman The Animated Series. Wasn’t Batman at one time a comic book?

Pixel Art – Robin, The Boy Wonder

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Pixel Art "Robin" by Chris Sanyk 64x64px

Notes:

Rather than spend a bunch of time writing words, this time around, I thought I’d show what the evolution looks like from 16×16 to 64×64:

16×16

32×32

At 32×32, he’s really good enough. I think the extra detail at 64×64 enhances but isn’t essential.

Pixel Art – The Thing

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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!