Share and talk about your visual art

Sounds like you and my mother have something in common

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filling up this thread with faces and i d on’t give a shit

EDIT: improved

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Thinkin bout halflings after reading a bunch of Forgotten Realms books…

feel like pure shit just want to bake and eat teacakes and have massive breakfasts with them!!!

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i was deeply missing shooting medium format film so i went back to some pics i took with those heavy, beautiful cameras in high school (over a decade ago now, so many bittersweet memories of former friends) and now i miss it even more.

the last photo is disconcerting, it feels surreal…people nestled into each other on all this concrete, it seems unnatural, but that’s who we were at the time, or at least what i dragged everyone around me into. i don’t talk to anyone in any of those photos anymore, but back then we were kids loving each other and wandering all around this miserable place under the cover of night just to see what we could find in the areas nobody paid attention to. there wasn’t much there but we made the most of it.

there was such a naivety and bliss to it all that i have completely lost and do not know how to rediscover even a shred of. i haven’t photographed with serious intention since 2016, when reading deeply about human experimentation in wartime took away whatever shred of innocence i had left (trip to japan to try to understand what japanese identity is and what it means for me as a mixed person → researching japan’s history of imperialism and colonialism → reading about unit 731). i had a mental breakdown that lasted about three weeks where my coping mechanism was losing myself in archived final fantasy xi forums from 2003-2006 and imagining a better adolescence. i was in another country with no responsibilities and countless rolls of film in my backpack and yet all i could take photos of was of the same building every sunrise right before i slept.

i can’t tell if this was cathartic or not but it at least helped me put form to some shapeless thoughts. thanks for reading. i am not happy but i want to be.

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final version, i think. can’t think of any more fussing to do, last bit was to try to highlight the eyes a bit more since they seemed a little small when the image was at avatar size.

if anyone wants to know what i did in GIMP to make the image look like this, i’ve forgotten most of it already but it involved lots of blurs and noise and color adjustment and shit

the eyes part was really weird actually- i did some motion blur horizontally and vertically, then sharpened it to the extreme and it made a reallllly weird lookin shape. no idea why. then i reblurred it and pixelized it. lots and lots of fussing, that’s me

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Working on a bit of a personal project to get back into monster design, pixelart, and animation, and wanted to work within fake hardware limitations for it. So, i decided to create a 255+transparency color palette as my “console” palette that all of my sprites will pull from.

here's my journey to get to the final palette, for those interested

I do my pixel work in pyxeledit, which has a nice feature in its palettes which lets you fill the empty tiles in a palette with a gradient between two of the colors you already have in it. so i went ahead and set out some simple gradients between some colors with really simple RGB values so that i had something to work off of, which i could edit to turn into my final palette. i didn’t save that, but i DO have this early-on image which shows most of the rows still in that state:

So from there I did my initial first pass. Basically, i just went through every color except for the pure grays at the top, altering their saturation, brightness, and bringing in slight extra tones from nearby colors. i also made the cool and warm grays at the bottom with the same exact gradient technique i started with. you’ll also notice i cut out a whole row of green, replacing it with the browns near the bottom. (i knew this wasn’t going to be the final palette, mostly because i realized the gradients i made to start myself off with were a bit too bland for what i wanted, i want a palette with a bit of an energy, which while broadly applicable potentially, mostly would just have what i want for this project.)

from there, with the context of seeing a more functional, real palette in front of me, it was easier to futz with the colors and make them have more of the feel that i want. i wanted more pastel, less saturation, in general - though i still wanted a good handful of vibrant colors. so, once again, i went through every color, adjusting them to fit what i want. i also completely redid the row of more brown tones near the bottom, focusing a bit more on having a cool feeling, because i want this palette overall to be more cool-dominant than warm. i also cut the toned grays in half and added the row of pastels to the bottom.

my final pass was a superb amount of nitpicking which didn’t change much, but it changed enough to matter to me. mostly in the reds and greens, i went ahead and altered a handful of colors to pull in more cool tones and lean off the saturation a bit. also i reordered the colors cause the greens being out of place was really bothering me.

and there we have it! i definitely wouldn’t try to convince anyone that it’s suitable for everything, but i think it’s pretty close to exactly what i want for this little project. at least, close enough that i’m not gonna fuck with it anymore, hah. the goal was for it to be mostly cool colors and have a healthy bit of pastels, and for the sprites to end up feeling a bit … uhh … internet, for lack of a better term. anyway, it was a good learning experience making this thing

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That’s a nice palette. Thanks for sharing your process. I’ve only dabbled with making my own palettes in the last year or two (with much smaller numbers of colors) and haven’t done it enough yet to start thinking about developing a workflow so I appreciate seeing your method. You’ve given me a couple ideas for the next time I sit down to play with colors.

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yeah this is very much my first time doing a palette on this scale, so i was very much working out my flow as i went. i’m glad me working through my own process could help you!

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digging a little deeper into this, bit by bit, getting inspired by bits of architectural thought i’ve been encountering lately and recontextualizing my old work with a strong lean in a direction that is beginning to feel like “dreams of spaces”

still exploring the balance i want to have: distressing vs calming, concrete vs abstract…having a great time with art for the first time in years. i remember in the past my film photos were described to me as “photographs of a dream” or “what memory looks like” and i’d like to find a way into that space again but from a different angle

these photos don’t all fit together by any means…i’m just “sketching” rn

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sodium gloaming

a favorite moodspace

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the decline of sodium lamps is my personal modern tragedy

yaru these all own but this one specifically

tricked my perception on first glance into thinking it depicted like a shining monolith or something. king shit

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thank you for the thoughts! that sense of disorientation is one that doesn’t come quite so naturally to me (i prefer photographs with a calm to them) but it’s a thread i want to pull on further

i’m destroyed by the decline of sodium vapor lamps myself in the same way i was by the discontinuation of the high-speed slide film provia 400x back in 2012 – it’s the end of a palette i love to see the world through

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given that sodium lamps’ whole character was due to them being essentially monochromatic, and given that i’m fairly sure most LEDs are monochromatic, i want to believe that there’s still options for us

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Mmm whole grain
Make me miss my toy camera experiments.

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Would like to play this Neverhood expansion

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I mean I had a game idea I’d been kicking around for a while that kinda was like this but for a lot of reasons I don’t think it’s going anywhere. Turns out claymation on that scale is a lot of work, even when you think you’ve found ways to theoretically make it easier.

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I really love this

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Guess who’s still playing both sides

Pretty good don’t you think

The album can be found here

I think the art and the music are a pretty good fit.

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[staind voice] it’s been a while since i’ve done any sprite art that wasn’t related to slimegirl in some way

preview

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