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!