Link's Awakening

Link with the Master Sword

Okay so this sprite is actually not from Link's Awakening -- it's from A Link to the Past -- but since I haven't done much painting in the past 6+ months, the title felt appropriate.

This is the second installment in a 3-sprite series I'm doing for decor in our basement. The first was the Samus sprite I made for my husband's birthday back in September - after that, he asked if I could to a couple more iconic SNES images to hang up in our retro gaming-themed basement: Mario's salute upon level completion from Super Mario World, and Link hoisting the Master Sword from A Link to the Past. It's taken me a good long minute to get back to painting, but I figured this would be a good one to ease me back into it.

The first thing that threw me off was the size of the pixels - I figured it should be the same ratio as the Samus sprite, if they're all going to be together - but Link is just so..tiny! By comparison. Also, I couldn't quite get a good measure on exactly how big the pixels were on that one, even using a ruler. It seemed like maybe 0.4cm x 0.4cm, but not quite...so at the end of the day I went with 0.5cm x 0.5cm and called it good. Size-wise I do like it, though Link is definitely still quite a bit smaller than Samus and I'm not sure how they'll look together on the wall. We'll find out once I get it framed and we find a spot for these.

 

Otherwise I'm pretty happy with how the colors ended up - I did find several different sprites with different palettes, and -- this is hard to admit, but -- I've never actually played much of this game, so I had to defer to my husband for which one looked "right." In the end though, it looks good enough for me, I think.

The one thing I'm not totally thrilled with is the background. Green of course seemed the obvious choice for a Link sprite, and I wanted to make sure his hat stood out so I made sure to go with a lighter shade for the background. And I am happy with the shade I ended up with. What honestly happened, though, is I didn't mix enough paint and I was kind of rushing by the end, so it ended up more watery and blotchy than I had hoped.

In the end though I do like it, and it was a good first step back into this hobby. I really did forget how much I enjoy making these, and I really hope to devote more time to it going forward. I'm planning on doing the Mario World sprite next to complete the series, so I will be sure to post a picture of the completed trio once I get them framed and mounted.

Yoshi with Egg

This one was another gift - this time for a friend of mine who loves Yoshi and loves teal.

Yoshi with Egg

Went a bit heavy-handed on the water for the main sprite - which I'll chalk up to having a few too many drinks during painting. I actually kind of like the effect that came out of that though, and I feel like it works decently well here because of the large areas of single color. I do think I prefer versions of Yoshi that add in a few different shades of green, and I almost ended up with that look here even though there are only two shades (one for him and one for the egg).

I had picked up some different shades of green from an art supply store since my last Yoshi attempt, which made it far easier to get colors I was happy with. It's still proving to be one of the more difficult colors to find the right shade for, however, so I'll have to keep experimenting. 

Still trying to figure out how to get nice gradients in the background without such strong brush strokes. I decided to go for a more of a washed look in general for the background here, and while I do like it, it ended up buckling the paper quite a bit because I used so much water. I'm not sure if that's got more to do with the quality of paper or the technique, or both. Working on this one really reminded me that I would like to spend some time really working on watercolor fundamentals one of these days.

Samus

This one was a gift for my husband's birthday. I played a bit of Metroid on the NES as a kid (and all I really remember is JUSTIN BAILEY for some reason), and love modern day Metroidvania games, but Samus isn't a character I would necessarily think to paint for my own collection. My husband, however, has always been a huge fan of Super Metroid, so when his birthday rolled around, this felt like a no-brainer.

Samus

It actually ended up being a lot of fun, and took me several nights to completed. There were a lot of different colors, and I opted to go for a sharper and more "pixel perfect" sprite, saving the fluid watercolor strokes for the background. I also had to work with much smaller pixels than I had been for most of the previous paintings in order to fit the size of the paper I have. Although it took a lot longer to graph the smaller pixels, I do love the way it turned out. It was the first painting I put in a frame, and I love the finished product. 

There was also an added challenge of the fact that Samus isn't outlined in all black the way a lot of characters are. I usually do black first so that I can get my bearings and have a good feel for the area I'm working in.  After that I work in like colors from light to dark, as that seems to work best for avoiding color mixing and allowing mistakes to be corrected to some degree as the painting progresses. 

I did have a decent outline after beginning, but even getting that initial black layer done took a lot longer than with previous paintings since there were so few continuous lines.

It was also pretty difficult to match the colors very well on this one. I had a couple of different printouts that showed the colors with pretty different shades, and of course neither one really matched exactly what it looked like on screen. And since this isn't a game I've played much of, I didn't have that instinctive visual memory to go off of. In the end though I think it matched pretty closely, and I have to keep reminding myself not to overthink it too much when I'm in the weeds. They always seem to look a little better when finished!

  

Mog

Ah, Mog. I don't know why but I've always loved this little guy. I used this image for a forum avatar for years, so I knew early on I would need to paint it.

Mog

This was probably my most fun painting to date. First of all, there wasn't a readily available pixel guide online for it, so I had to hand-roll one. This lead to some fun problems to solve, including what software to use for image manipulation, how many colors do I want to use, and what's the best way to make a guide for myself? I'm really excited by what I ended up learning, and it kind of opened up a world for how I can take higher-res or even photographic images and turn them into painting guides.

The software question was interesting. Back in the day, I used to use Photoshop for image manipulation, but I just don't want to spend that kind of money on hobby software right now. I half-assedly used GIMP for a long time, but it felt clunky and I couldn't figure out half of what I wanted it to do easily, so I got frustrated. After a brief Reddit search, I decided to try Krita, which turned out to be amazing. Easy to use, polished, and - best of all - free. I highly recommend checking it out.

Zero

Zero (Mega Man X3)

My kids were really after me to make more paintings from Mega Man X, so I decided to give Zero a shot. This one took me quite a while to finish, as I really didn't have much chance to work on it. This is the first one where actually occurred to me to take progress pictures as I was going along. I actually really like seeing the works in progress, so it's now something I plan to do regularly.

I ended up being a little more deliberate on the pixels with this one than I was when I did X, and I feel like it ended up pretty close to how I'd like these to look - pixelated but also a bit washed. I've found it pretty hard to replicate this but I'm hoping that with more practice I can get into a good groove.

I'm also pleased with the background here. Green to me was an obvious choice for the color because of his beam sabre, and I felt like I got a good marbled effect without it being too heavy on the brush strokes. All in all, this is one of my favorites to date.

First Paintings - July/August 2018

Getting Started

Super Mushroom

When I first decided to start messing around with watercolor pixel art, I figured it would be easiest to start simple. I had never really painted with watercolors before (outside of the little 8-color palettes with the crappy brushes we had as kids), so I had no idea how the colors would sit, or even what I really wanted any of this to look like. I started with the easiest thing I could think of - a Super Mushroom.

I liked it. Pretty basic, looks fine. Was trying to keep the pixels a bit blurry because I wanted it to be more fluid than just painting straight squares. I felt like it should feel more like watercolor than acrylic, and I was happy with how it turned out. I did figure out that for white spaces I would be better off erasing the pencil grid than painting white over it.

I showed the painting to my kids, and my 6-year-old insisted that the next painting I make should be a "bad guy." He started to request various Mega Man X mavericks, but I told him I needed some more practice first. So he took pity on me and told me I should just do another mushroom, but make it purple instead of red, so that it would be a poison mushroom.

Poison Mushroom

Fair enough.

This time, I decided to be more deliberate with my lines and shading, to see how it looked in comparison with the first one. It ended up looking more like something done with colored pencils than with paint, and I didn't love it. I decided I preferred the blurred look and would go for that from here on out.

Simple Mog

I was also on a pretty big Final Fantasy VI kick around the time I started painting, and I really wanted to do a moogle. Really, I wanted to paint Mog's avatar from the character menu, but that seemed like a tall order at the time, so I decided to just do a simple sprite for starters. Honestly I kind of phoned it in on this one - these small sprites went together quickly and I spent more time mixing colors than actually painting. It was good enough, but really made me decide I wanted to start working on bigger pieces. This was also the first time I really had to think twice about what to do for the background color. I was just trying to mix it up I think, but really not thrilled with how it ended up. I don't think I'll do the two-color thing again, or if I do, I'll blur the lines a bit more.

Trying Some New Things

The obvious choice for me when I decided to try something a little bit bigger and more complex was to make Mega Man X. I made this exact sprite using perler beads several years ago so I figured it shouldn't be too bad. I specifically tried to move quickly and not overthink the lines and colors in an attempt to make a more fluid, less "blocky" piece. I actually went over the whole sprite with plain water after it tried to try and blur the colors a bit; something I might try again in the future, if I can get over my fear of messing up something I spent a lot of time on. The background color felt obvious to me here, and I really tried to utilize light and dark shades a lot. In hindsight it looks really unpolished, but I liked the attempt at a more interesting background. 

Mega Man X

Overall I'm happy with this one. I messed up the pixel counts once or twice, but I don't think it's obvious when you look at the whole thing. My kids loved it, and fought over who got to hang it over their bed. The requests for other X characters started flooding in, but they all just felt exhausting at the time. I decided to do something with a bit of a smaller color palette next instead.

Yoshi

Yoshi really made sense to me for the next painting - cute, not too many colors, and my daughter loves him. I quickly realized that, with my limited set of water colors, it was going to be hard to achieve the right shades of green. I spent more time than I'd like to admit trying to make lighter greens from darker ones. Adding white, yellow, blue...nothing seemed to make it right. In the end, I did the best I could, and I think it looks okay - better on a screen than in person, but not terrible. Really helped me realize though that I'm going to need to buy more colors than this watercolor starter kit came with. 

Again I got off with the pixel counts in a couple places, but I'm pleased that it never seems obvious when that happens. I'm a little happier with this background than with X, but still feels like I need to figure out what I'm doing there overall.

All in all, I had a lot of fun with these paintings, and I'm excited to try more different things moving forward!