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!