029 // Distractions V: ‘Descenta Vertiport’ (redrawn)
Last week, I told you I would finish (or try to) a pixel-art version of an old doodle from years gone by, and I did! You may see that image in the post here.
I also said I would share with you some worldbuildy, background fluff to do with the pictured place, and this has been postponed for reasons related to my mood.
I promise I will do it soon. I just needed to get this short-ish rant out of my system.
There are still some tweaks I should do, and will likely do later. For now, I think I have reached the limit of what this doodle can teach me.
The redrawn image has 51 colours, which is more than I would have liked and probably I could merge a few to get it down to 48. It has no transparent pixels.
You know that feeling you get when you finish a piece of artwork, and there are a lot of parts of it that you feel really good about individually, but, somehow, they fail to come together the way you would like?
I do.
One of the great and terrible things I have found with pixel art is that, in ‘normal’ illustration, every element becomes some kind of artistic statement, whether it is a subtle one like a lit turn signal on a bus in the background, or the little bit of stubble forming on the bottom of a character’s chin, or how many stars are visible between a gap in the clouds. These elements say something about the piece, and although there is sometimes value in adding them when they do not have much to 'say’, it can be either as detail (gainful) or as noise (degenerate). These elements can be large (how much traffic you choose to include on a busy street in the foreground) or they may be discrete (two people talking but only one is making eye contact), but they are almost always separate.
With pixel art, every pixel, or cluster of pixels, is effectively an element, and therefore, a comment. While regular illustration can end up being like writing an essay– sometimes with a word limit, sometimes without, always on a topic– pixel art, especially large scenes or long animations, is a doctoral thesis. The structures are usually much the same and you tend to be bound by the same format issues, but it becomes important to labour each point. You write until it is done, but avoid wasting words because you are only allowed a 254-word vocabulary (or 255 if the entire thing is a single paragraph).
None of your undergraduate essaywriting tricks work anymore, either*.
Let me also state for the record that I have neither written a doctoral dissertation, nor am I a particularly talented or accomplished pixel artist, and anyone who should take these words over-seriously does so exclusively at their own risk. This is just the sense of it this doodle left me with.
I am not displeased.
* Except for the thing where people say you cannot use the word “I.” This is bullshit and it always has been.
