Before trying the pixel art projects of this week, I would have never imagined they could be so much fun. The first exercises looked a lot like the first week of the project, in early July. The idea was to get back to the basics, practice a lot of shade variations. That would be very important to create the pixelated portraits of the following week. I thought this would take a lot of time. And, indeed, it took an awful lot of time to make progress on them. But they were worth it!
I have to say that I really looked forward to this week. The pixelated portraits are not realistic portraits by any means, but they’re portraits anyway. And they look great! I guess it should be easy to generate images like this with a website or an app, to get good models for new drawings in the future. At this point, I was more concerned with getting the technique right. There was a lot of square counting and calculation. Maybe there was an easier way to go about it, but that’s how I did it!
On Day 65 I finished the building with trees and the Dragon Ball capsule spaceships. I added the final details and some color. The rest of Day 65 and Day 66 was about interior design or something like that (little house plans). Between Days 67 and 69 I started practicing the pixel art, but with exercises. It was all about shades of blue, patterns, and some color combinations. I think that was useful preparation for what was going to come.
I started the first pixel-art portrait on Day 69. I didn’t know how many days it would take to finish the whole thing (eight days, in the end!). The first couple of days were super slow. I tried to be very precise with each and every pen stroke. Then I noticed that was just too much attention to detail. It was unnecessary to put in so much extra time. At naked eye, the difference was barely noticeable, so I decided to go a bit faster.
Week 10 Drawings
Below you can find the daily drawings. Each day, I’m practicing for an hour. Sometimes, I fill one or two pages. But there are days when I work on more detailed stuff, and maybe it’s just half a page 🙃. As soon as I reach the one-hour mark, I put the pen down and take the photo of the day. Click on the thumbs to see the larger pictures:
Diary in German + Drawings (Week 10)
That’s all for now! 😊
