Pixel Art

I've been playing around with pixel art for a couple of years. Now I am no kind of artist *at all*. I've learned how to make those 88x31 buttons and I've found a few pixel art tutorials and made some, I think, cute things. Honestly, I feel like I'm at about this level of artistic ability:

I had been doing the daily challenges on Pixil Art. I keep meaning to get back to it consistently but my brain is flighty and I keep forgetting about it. I don't think I'm very good but I figure that if I keep practicing (or maybe even remember to practice!) then I'll get better. The challenges are also good for me because I find that I am surprisingly left-brained and literal sometimes and I'm hoping that this will be an exercise in thinking outside of the box. For example, one of the challenge prompts was "skeleton" and all I thought about was a human skeleton. But after looking at the other entries, people drew all kinds of skeletons! Not all of them were human and there were lots of different styles. So I'm hoping I can train my brain to look beyond the obvious and think of a spin on things.

One of my first forays into making my own pixel art was after I found this tutorial. (Just a note- this site has since gone down and for some reason the Wayback Machine capture has a dark background which makes the text almost impossible to read. You can still read the tutorial by highlighting the text with your cursor.) This was my creation:

Oh wow, that was so fun to make! I wanted to do more but a lot of the tutorials I've found for pixel art have been under the assumption that you're making artwork for a game. Or I find very in-depth tutorials that overwhelm me with detail on shading and light sources and all kinds of other stuff. I just want to make kawaii little objects that blink and bounce. I kept looking and found another tutorial that showed how to make a donut and cup of coffee.

Well, that was fun! Except the donut looks more alarmed than adorable but I can work on that.

Here are the rest of my pixel creations. I think I'm happiest about the muffin - he's just so darn cute!

I have finally gotten confident enough in my pixel skills to make things for several different pixel clubs/cliques and even to resurrect a couple of cliques. Links to all of those are at the top of this page.

I'm also making some pixel art just for the heck of it, not because it was a daily challenge on Pixil Art or a lesson. Witness my KitchenAid mixer!