For this week, we were asked to introduce some risk to our creative practice, and one of the pathways of which was to create a new piece of work using a medium we have never worked in before.
Taking a risk
- I’m coming in with a hot take. For this project I chose pixel art for my medium because I absolutely hate it with a burning passion.
- Especially with the substanceless 8-bit retro gaming nostalgia movement I was subjected to being a child online in the 2010s. It’s the most boring aesthetic in the world – white boy 2d metroidvania style side scrolling platformer with the worn out chiptune music – the reason why the word ‘gamer’ used to make me recoil in fear. Ew!
- Like, this is what my family would be thinking of when I tried to talk to them about video games.
- I just didn’t grow up knowing video games as 8-bit, so all of this stuff would make me cringe so hard as a teeny little girl who grew up on the PS3. All the video essays I ever watched on video games as a kid had some older white dude with this exact aesthetic nitpicking a modern video game about something they don’t know anything about and always proclaiming ‘The classics were better because they did x thing 20 years ago!’ I was so sick of this kind of thing. I grew to hate the retro aesthetic!
- I’m going to confront this hate and see if there’s anything that can be appreciated about pixel art.
RESEARCH
- I got the idea to try making a piece of pixel art from when one of my twitter mutuals was talking about this game called Star Platinum released in 1996.
- Firstly, it’s incredibly obscure and I never was able to find much information about it online and I think it was japan exclusive, but essentially it’s a hentai visual novel combined with a hanafuda card game.
- The reason I found the art so intriguing for this game is that all of the images in the visual novel have a maximum of 16 colours. I found the art in this game to be incredibly beautiful despite its rewstrictions. I found the clever use of colour theory within each pallete super interesting. Let me show some examples.
- Like, look at this specific section where they used only 4 colours…
- I decided to try and make a drawing in the style of this game, using these restrictions, to see if I can forgive pixel artists for what they were dealing with however many years ago.
PROCESS
- I installed GraphicsGale, a pixel art software I had never used before. I couldnt figure out how to make a pallete, so I restricted myself using the colour count features.
- I had to look into pixel art shading techniques, namely dithering. Here’s a definition from google.
- This is what the game used to create the illusion of more colours than there were. In my case, I chose to strategically choose my pallete to be as usable as possible in other locations in the piece.
- As to what I actually drew, me, Cristina and a few others went to see Yeule in concert on that Tuesday so I wanted to draw her. She’s cool.
- I colour picked a lot from pictures we took at the show, and due to the extreme lighting it was pretty easy to pick multiple values and average them out for a certain area, as they could be reused elsewere. I also tried referencing similar poses from the game itself, because I’ve also never worked in this specific 90s exaggerated anime style before!
Here are some developments:
OUTCOME
This is what I produced in the end. It took roughly 6-7 hours. I did not expect that it would take this much time and effort at all! Maybe I understand pixel art a little bit better now. I’ve come to appreciate working this specific medium with these restrictions.