I participated in Octobit
this past month. I really enjoyed drawing something every single day. Also, I
loved interacting with the other artists who were participating, on social
media and Slack.
#0 Beginning
To start, my cousin, Ben, and I had a hack day. We built a computer program to
convert images into an image with a limitted color palette. This is the result of
applying a "neon" palette to an image of me that Alexandra and I took at Finnriver
cider out on the Olympic peninsula. I really liked how it turned out, and made it
my profile image on Twitter.
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#1 Gameboy
For my first "real" octobit image (if following the theme makes it real), I
applied the same program to the same image using the Gameboy color palette. I
didn't like how blocky some of the areas turned out, so I hand-dithered it
around the beard and hair.
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#2 Reptile
Based on
this
image of Sobek, Egyptian crocodile diety, first published by Jean-François
Champollion.
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#3 Molusk
Oysters! I tried to imagine what it is like for them to be alive and
feeding. I drew and animated this, and most of the other Octobit drawings
using version 3 of Pixaki. It's really great
to be able to make art all on my iPad.
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#4 Music
A zombie cellist for October. Based on this
photo of the Philharmonic Orchestra of Jalisco by Pedro Sánchez.
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#5 Boom
A cannon, ready to fire. Based on this
photo of the Tsar Cannon by Wikipedia user Graham Colm.
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#6 Fishermen
Technically the people in
the photo I
based this one off of are USGS researchers taking a sediment core. I liked
it because it had a nice crane on the fishing boat, and I had just seen some
fishmen loading / unloading their boats at Fishermen's Terminal in Ballard.
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#7 Nostalgia
For me nostalgia is working in my parent's garden.
Nostalgia is almost synonymous with retro-gaming. I enjoy my memories of
playing hours of Donkey Kong Country, Genghis
Khan, and Duck Hunt, but the garden feels more like home than a video game.
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#8 Dogs
Woof! I drew this one entirely on my phone with
Dotpict.
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#9 Desert
These penguins technically live in a desert. All of Antarctica gets very
little precipitation. Another one drawn entirely on my phone with Dotpict.
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#10 Dessert
Yum! This animation is one of my favorites for the month. I'm an ice cream
hound.
This is the first time I drew a sketch using a regular drawing tool (either
Paper or Procreate, I forget which) and then used that as the reference for a
pixel art drawing. See the sketch
here.
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#11 Heavy
Based on
an image by
Anna at Old World Wisconsin. I first encountered this when searching for
images
of oxen on Wikipedia.
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#12 Birds
Some Stellar's jays at different sizes.
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#13 Cold
A minimalist snowman. Not even a complete outline.
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#14 Superhero
Nikola Tesla, not your conventional superhero.
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#15 Cozy
I started this drawing in Dotpict on my phone, and then I imported it into
Pixaki to add some lighting effects (just the fire colors at 50% opacity) and
animation.
This seems to be the people's favorite. It got a lot more "likes" on Twitter
than any of my other drawings. I wonder if using multiple apps helps make for
better drawings? Maybe it just means I spent more time on it?
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#16 TV
Our TV antenna was on our silo. I loved to watch it move after we made an
adjustment.
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#17 Grandparents
This may be the most personal of any of my drawings. I drew a pixel art
portrait of each of my grandparents. Red grandpa was a pro golfer, red grandma
has some great stories about working on the mink farm. Blue grandma makes
lovely paintings on gourds, and blue grandpa is a retired fire fighter. I love
them all.
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#18 Summer
Summer means grilling: burgers and corn on the cob. Drawn in Dotpict.
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#19 Fear
I didn't want to draw anything too scary. One of my sisters sent me a link
to a video collection of cats afraid of cucumbers.
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#20 Space
The Apollo 17 Saturn V rocket, ready to launch. Based on
this photo.
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#21 Vehicle
Horse based on this
photo by Wikipedia user Ealdgyth from the horse collar page.
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#22 Poison
Practiced more with smoke on this one.
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#23 Underwater
A swimming barracuda. Based on
this photo by Wikipedia user Laban712.
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#24 Weird
There was an article recently about how kids can be really mean to robots. I
imagined where the roles are reversed and humans are the "weird" looking and
acting people.
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#25 Time
Tea time! I live by timers.
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#26 Magic
Okay, so flying machines are science, not magic. The fact that we can fly still
feels like magic. Based on
this
photo of the Wright Flyer at Fort Myer in Virginia.
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#27 Heavenly
One of my cats loves to pull down towels. He's naughty but heavenly cute.
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#28 Fire
This one was inspired by a Dan Mangan song.
He retweeted my tweet!
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#29 Sleep
Sleepy kitty. Based on a photo I took. I changed some of the proportions to cartoonify it a bit.
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#30 Portrait
A portrait of Myke Hurley, from a clip in his first vlog where he had the camera in portrait-mode.
I think he liked it! He commented with
5 heart emojis on Instagram 💟. I hadn't
really done much "fan art" before. This is fun!
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#31 Horror
Another one that I didn't want to be too scary. This is based on
Edvard Munch's "The Scream" painting.
Also, I find it ridiculous that Apple renders the
"weary cat face" 🙀 as a scream, very much
like the person in the painting.
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I will continue making pixel art, but not every day. It was fun for a month,
but too much to keep up with. I like to make other things, too.
Thanks to everyone who liked my art this past month! I enjoyed meeting so
many other people in the Internet community.
I interacted more with the rest of the pixel art community by doing octobit,
too.
Special thanks to the developers of the apps that I used for this project. It
was so nice to be able to draw on my phone and my iPad with great tools.
-
dotpict - I've tried many Android
apps for pixel art, and this is the best.
-
Pixaki - The best pixel art app
anywhere. I'm so grateful that the developers let me in the beta program
for version 3 of the app. Making animations was so fun! I'm also happy
they retweeted one of my sillier
behind-the-scenes drawings.