Short and Sweet WTF

My very first pixel art—though not in order of completion, I’ve finished others since then, two of which you’ll be seeing in upcoming posts. But I’m super excited to share this one with you because it’s what got me sucked down the rabbit hole of pixel art.

This piece was an adventure because first of all, I didn’t intend for it to be pixel art, and second of all, I didn’t actually know HOW to make pixel art. So there was a lot of flailing and learning, working on other pieces to practice skills I needed for this one, so on and so forth…but I got there in the end!

Here are some things I learned during the process of making this piece:

• Patience! As you would probably expect 😂
• If you just take a pixel/bit brush and scribble with it…that’s exactly what it’s going to look like
• Only make things as complex as they need to be
• Look for patterns in the negative space as well as the positive space
• Take breaks often to rest your eyes and brain
• Save multiple versions every so often so you can revert if you mess up (for example by making it more complex than it needed to be)
• Taking shortcuts will bite you in the butt more often than not
• And last but not least, the somewhat trite-sounding but nonetheless extremely true statements: 1. anything worth doing is worth doing well and 2. Slow and steady wins the race.

Here is the first saved version of this piece just so you can see where it started:

And here is the second saved version, so you can see how far it came:

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time!