You Smell Like Pixels!

 For reasons I don't feel like elaborating on, I wasn't feeling great this evening, so I excused myself and focused on trying to do some drawing on my iPad. A friend recently made some awesome pixel art, and I had asked for some tips, so he kindly streamed an hour long tutorial on Twitch. 

Unfortunately, I arrived into the stream minutes after he had wrapped the pixel art tutorial portion, but thankfully, you can save the videos on Twitch, and he kindly did for me. 

I watched the VOD a few weeks ago and had wanted to doodle around with something to practice, but just never set aside the time. Tonight, I decided to check the video again and try drawing a pixel portrait for a brightly coloured character.

I chose Bear, from the Henson Company's extraordinary puppet based series, Bear in the Big Blue House. Bear is a full body puppet with astonishing facial expressions, entirely from control over the eyebrows, nose and mouth. 

So, I grabbed two photos of Bear, one standing tall in a well lit promotional photograph, the other a screen shot of Bear happily smiling open mouth, but his colours are a little muted. 

Using both photos, I built a bright and varied colour pallet from the promo, and sketched the basic form from the screen shot, on a teeny tiny 64x64 pixel canvas. To put that in context, a canvas that is just the size of my iPad screen is 2388x1668 pixels, and my tablet can handle much bigger canvases than that with ease. 64x64 is really, really small. My brush for painting Bear was a single pixel, or as close as you can get on Procreate, the app I use. 

Below are my versions 0.1 to 0.3. 

V0.1 is very flat, just using a very limited pallet to set down the overall colour and form. 

V0.2 adds highlights and shadows, with gradients of colour. I achieved this using a Screen layer for the lighter tones, and a Darker layer for the...well...darker colours. 

V0.3 is where I stopped before writing this post, and mostly just tries to adjust Bear's eyes to less sad out sleepy, and more excited, or at the very least, happy. 

Not bad for a first attempt. 

Education Through Games

My kids are big into their tech. 

It’s been fun watching my daughter develop her skills with my phone or iPad, and more recently, the Switch. Practically everything she can do she learned herself through trial and error, with just a little nudge from watching me. She knows the PIN code to access my phone and iPad and can get to the apps she wants and jump between them. 

When Covid hit, I invested in some good art programs and educational apps for her to discover. My favourite is a very colourful and engaging app to teach programming that builds in complexity at a very manageable scale. Ada really loves it. I watched her start by randomly placing the instructions until she got the little critter to its home, and move to understanding the effects of the various commands and place them correctly. As the game goes on, they add new commands she has to experiment with to discover their result. 

We still try to limit their screen time over a week, but some days they spend more time on them than others. At least it’s partially educational. 

EDIT: I had to manually adjust the date so that this post appears as a November Post. The clock on my blog is still set to Ireland time, so it initially showed up as a December 1st entry. It’s still very much November 30th where I am, though. It also means that all previous posts show up as a day late, but I’m less concerned about that. 

Mini Games

I've been enjoying playing a couple of cerebral puzzle games on my tablet recently, mostly on my way to or from work on the bus.

I grabbed a cool shadow manipulation game called Shadowmatic, which I played a lot of until I got completely stumped. It was frustrating when I could see the shape I was supposed to make, but just hadn't twisted the objects to just the right degree. Still loads of fun, and absolutely beautiful to look at.

Rop is another puzzle game about positioning nodes and attached ropes to create set shapes. It starts off very easy, but gets difficult after a while. Or, it did for me. Claire is more spacially aware than me, and cruised through the whole thing.

And finally, the madness that is AlphaBear. This is a game where you're given a bunch of letters and you have to form words out of them, sometimes under a time limit, building bears as you go along. It's cute, fast and I'm terrible at spelling. It's free to play, with some microtransactions, but so far, all that has meant is that I'm forced to play in small bursts and let my credits recharge over time, which actually suits me well.

These make up the vast, vast majority of my gaming recently. Perfect in short bursts, or in one hand while entertaining a baby with the other.