Tag: pixel art

Pixel Art – Catwoman

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pixel art "Catwoman" by Chris Sanyk 64x64px

Notes:

  1. Another female form, this one I think I like a bit better than the first female attempt that I made with Invisible Woman. The body is a bit more properly proportioned and is curvy yet chunky-square-y at the same time.
  2. After wondering about it, I googled and found that Catwoman does not in fact have a tail as part of her costume. I should have checked this before, whoops. It seems *really* impractical for a cat burglar to have something long dangling behind them that could trip them up when they’re trying to be sneaky.

Pixel Art – Invisible Woman

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pixel art "Invisible Woman" by Chris Sanyk

Notes:

  1. Invisible Woman is the first female superhero subject in this series. I thought I’d try starting from the generic male figure that I started out with, slim it down a bit, and add some curves and hair. This didn’t really work so well, I think. I need to reconcile the fact that pixels don’t have curves and figure out how to make a female pixel form that has suggestion of curves without actual curves. I will likely come back and try this again when I have had enough distance between me and this work to try again with fresh perspective.
  2. The other thing about Invisible Woman is that, well, she’s Invisible. She’s usually drawn as a ghostly outline. I think the dotted line achieves this, but man is it difficult to make adjustments if you change something after you’ve committed to the outline. Get the shape right first, then worry about the outline. Otherwise it’s just one big cascading off-by-one error until you re-do the whole thing.

Pixel Art: The Penguin

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pixel art "The Penguin" by Chris Sanyk 128x128px

Notes:

  1. The all-black tuxedo look makes it hard to put detail into his clothes. I opted to give him a red bowtie and cumberbund, and matching ribbon for his top hat. The cigar ember is the same red. The handle on the umbrella matches his cigar.
  2. I shortened him and made him a bit more stout, but I’m not sure that I pulled it off too well. He still doesn’t look very rotund to me. I think the tails I added to his tuxedo jacket ended up having an effect of elongating his body, which offset the extra width I added to the body.
  3. I gave him a few extra pixels at 32×32 on his shoulders, to give a more stooped, hunched appearance.
  4. The monocle, I felt, looked too much like an eye, so I added the other eye using 128×128 pixels.
  5. For some reason though, I just don’t feel like this one is right. I haven’t captured the essence of the Penguin, his malevolent greed, and his sneering spiteful glare. I think I’m going to have to let this one sit for a while and keep looking for a way to get it right. Quite possibly just starting over and trying again.

pixel art "The Penguin" by Chris Sanyk 512x512px

Here’s another attempt that I just made. This time I started over from a blank 16×16 base drawing, and used a much wider figure. The first attempt was based on a shortened, widened Superman figure, but I think this one came out better. The legs are spread wider apart, and I made the pants dark charcoal gray instead of black. I made the hair grey and the pointy nose more pronounced. This one feels more influenced by the Danny DeVito movie Penguin, while the previous one feels more like Burgess Meredith from the 1960’s TV Batman.

Pixel Art: Silver Surfer

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Pixel Art "Silver Surfer" by Chris Sanyk 512x512px

Notes:

  1. Silver Surfer took two clicks with the fill tool to convert IceMan to what you see here. So, not a whole lot of effort here, and still the same problems. For the style I’m using, I think keeping things simple and not messing things up with trying to do reflections is probably the best solution.
  2. Silver Surfer is highly reflective, but not translucent.
  3. Unlike IceMan, he’s not faceted, but smooth and curved. So reflections on a smooth surface using square pixels are going to be even more challenging.

I’d love to hear your suggestions on how to do that.

Pixel Art: Ice Man

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Pixel Art "Iceman" by Chris Sanyk 512x512

Notes

  1. Ice Man is especially challenging. He’s translucent, and reflective, neither of which I know how to do effectively yet. I’ll have to work on this more.
  2. I used such a light shade of blue to convey “ice” that I felt he needed an outline, so I used a very thin outline in a slightly darker shade of blue, at 512×512 resolution.
  3. The pixel art trope for reflective things is to do some highlights and cross hatching. I didn’t attempt that, not for any real reason, other than that the style I’m working in demands keeping things simple, and highlights and reflections are a bit more than I want to do at this point. As an exercise, though, it would be worth playing with it just for the experience. I’d really like to hear suggestions for effective techniques for hinting at reflections and highlights.
  4. I’m not sure what can be done to simulate translucency. I could always use an image format that uses alpha channel and set it at a suitable value. Since my background is flat white I don’t really have anything to show translucency against. Of course, if I changed Iceman’s pose to show limb/body overlap, that would be a good opportunity to use it. I guess dithering with the alpha channel is one potential approach, as is simply hand-blending the under color with the over color. That would work for a static image; for a moving image that travels over a dynamic background, real alpha transparency would be in order.

I’d really like to hear from more experienced pixel artists on this: what would you do?