Hunting for the Perfect 8 Bit Art

I gave my 8 Bit Art another try this morning. I redrew a sketch of Paige into an angular style and then pulled it into Pixel Art and traced it. I decided that I liked the square eyes, but I’m really not liking the choppy line when I have a 45 degree line. I wondered what would happen if I added pixels into the drawing as I rendered it. My first attempt was interesting, but I realized before it was done, that there wasn’t a purposeful separation of value. And I also realized that as a process, it would be easier if I painted the squares on the entire background before I added the figure in the foreground.

My next attempt had me adding a lot of white to all the colors I made. And instead of trying to pop all of the colors like polkadots everywhere, I decided that each time I went back for more paint, I would change the color slightly and build upon my initial polkadot placements. Perhaps it would feel like the background was a bit more organic. I’d like to try this again but instead of a grid for the background, I think I might try a bit more of a random rectangular shapes that overlap.

Something else I’d like to try as well is having the figure’s color change slightly along the lines of the grid in the background. The tricky part of doing that is that there is a fine line between changing the colors at every grid line and making the figure in the foreground read easily. Maybe I could do it in strategic places….artistic placement of lines coming through.

On my first few layers of yellow for Paige, I could see the grid in the back. I continued to paint it out though. Although, I think I might want to try this again and leave some of those lines and color grids in the background.

I also wanted the background to fade more into the background. I took some transparent white and mixed it with a tint of grey, (it ended up being purple) and coated the background. It successfully pushed the background back and allowed Paige to come forward. I also added some more squares in the background that were not all lined up with the grid, painted the middles a mixture of white and transparent white. Then I chose some of the grid lines and emphasized them with pencil lines. I also tried to add squares like random pixels to the body and shirt of Paige. I’m really pleased with the outcome and I wonder white it might look like if I tried to add a real background to this sketch. Perhaps I’ll try this again with some of my sketches from my book Applesauce.

Yesterday afternoon, I also watched a presentation of another picture book illustrator. She shared that she will paint in watercolor but always takes what she has painted and compose the final piece in photoshop. I’m thinking that I could scan in what I did today and fix mistakes and try out different effects and I might be able to merge the traditional with the computer and get an effect that I like.