I enjoy art quite a lot. I enjoy looking at art, learning about art and creating art. The creating part is what I’m having difficulties in. I have a lot of different interests in art. I love watercolor, oil and acrylic painting but I have more to learn about using each medium. I have a good amount of practice with graphite drawing but I’m sure I need improvement. I especially love drawing the figure. I’d really like to produce digital illustrations using Photoshop and Illustrator. Pixel art is just so awesome I want to create my own but it’s time consuming and I think I need a better grasp of art concepts to come up with anything decent. I think, because I have so many interests in art, I have a hard time improving in any of it.

I think the best way to improve each skill, I need to dedicate a week for each. One week I’ll concentrate on graphite drawings and then I’ll dedicate a week to watercolor painting. You get the idea. I’ve found a way to improve my figure drawing skills by doing 30 second gestures of poses at Posemaniacs everyday. I’ve done plenty but I think I still need improvement. However, I started strong and drew everyday, now I draw when I remember to or have nothing else to do.

I’d like to say I’m passionate about art but if I don’t bother finding time for it (there’s never NOT enough time) then I’m not really passionate am I? I’m not exactly a driven person so I definitely need to find the motivation.

Are you interested in creating different types of art? How do you find time for each? Is dedicating a week good enough? Please share your tips and experiences.

Canvas size:

Exactly 150 width x 50 height

Colors:

Exactly 8

Other requirements were no transparency and no animation. The theme was music – we had to pixel someone listening to music. I thought creating an image of a belly dancer was perfect. It’s kind of a self-portrait because whenever I listen to belly dance music, I start dancing – even in my chair. Plus, I have aspirations of becoming a performer.

Anyway, here are the different phases:

I really have to thank the talented pixel artists at Pixelation for the development of this piece. I received plenty of feedback about anatomy and colors. The best feedback I got were edits of my piece by other artists. The edits allowed me to see the possibilities and drawbacks of my version. Well, enough blabbing! Here’s the final version:

I learned something about color usage in pixel art. I didn’t think to use the colors for the flesh in other parts of the piece like the flourish. This also applies to using colors other than flesh tones on the body like the purple and pink hues.

This practice really fueled my determination to give pixel art another try. The experience and new information I have will allow me to create better pieces in the future! Look out!

We were supposed to create a logo using our PJ usernames and were restricted to 32 colors, and a max height of 100 pixels. I was quite inspired by this masterful lettering by Alex Trochut. I basically started with a square and formed the letters within the box. I’m pretty happy with the letters, except for the “R”. I’m not quite sure how else to draw it, however.