Well, since I set it up also as a WIP thread, here's what I've been working on for the past week:



(EDIT: replaced with the most recent palette change I've come up with; it's much brighter but still has a pastel feel to it)

It's about 60% done.

Yes, please don't comment on the implied sexiness. Because it really was more intended for Scootaloo to show off her cutie mark, not her inner thigh cutie mark, if you know what I mean.

Anyways, my goal is to be done with it by 10:00 PM Friday.

EDIT: I'm shaking my head in sadness and excitement as I look at how far I've progressed in just a month with this. This pixel is just over half done and it's already the best one yet. I'm excited to see what I'll be like in another few months

I've been reading this lately: http://www.huevaluechroma.com/index.php

Considering I've been in a "crash course" on color theory for the past few days, it's been hitting me as rock hard information and I'm having a slightly hard time digesting all of it, but I've made it at least 20% through it and it's a more advanced look at color theory (claiming to be a bit over the heads of some artists, but under what a scientist who does studies on this type of stuff would expect) I'm going back and applying what I've learned from it so far to my WIP, which hasn't gotten much further yet.

<EDIT: Removed the tons of progression images in this post. Two posts down are some of them, plus earlier stages, in a GIF>

Okay, 18 hours of work at an end.



dA link -> http://fc00.deviantart.net/fs70/f/2012/163/5/d/pixel_art____scootaloo__the_orange_haze_by_theashbad-d539plk.gif

Well, 12 hours after submitting it, and it already has 1000+ views and 120+ faves on dA, and 60+ comments. :notbad:, I'm excited. In addition, I submitted it to EqD, and from what I've gotten back so far, it's been approved and is added to the "images to be posted" queue on the site. Doesn't sound like a big deal to non-bronies, but it's something that makes bronies' jaws drop to the floor. Getting something accepted by EqD will launch a piece of pony art/fanfic/media/song/etc. to instant view spam/fave spam. They only accept the *really* good art entries, so I'm surprised they wanted this. I guess it's an accomplishment of sorts to actually get in their queue.

And, unrelated, someone elsewhere on the internet asked for me to do a complete progression GIF of this. It's not very long (only 16 steps), when if I saved along the way in separate images more I could have shown a lot more in 30+ frames. I guess you can say that each frame equated to an hour of work.

It's really cool to watch it progress like that, and it looks really great! Keep up the good work (and make me a tree)!

Thanks! As for a tree... I think I've improved a lot over the past month of doing pixel art, and art in general. I'm going to take a one week hiatus from pixel art (during which I'm finishing out school, and I'm going to practice my skills in non-pixel art, mainly in color theory and working with different perspective), after which, I'm seriously considering drawing a tree.

Possibly with a pony, specifically, Applejack, along with it. But a tree nonetheless. That way I can practice my ponies, and make a cool tree in the background at the same time

\o/ Made EqD's daily DrawFriend. I'm #30. Incidentally, PixMeister made it too, he's number #21 http://www.equestriadaily.com/2012/06/drawfriend-stuff-477.html#more

Been a few days since I've done anything pixely -- But, an interesting plot for this week's weekly contest on PixelJoint has been announced. http://www.pixeljoint.com/2012/06/18/3802/Pixel_Art_Challenge-_Splitting_10s.htm

Essentially, I have to have a picture that has two distinct halves, but somehow flow together into a single picture. Unrestricted canvas size. The palette is what's really interesting and weird, though.



16 colors in total, if you don't count the repeats of the black and mid grays. The top palette has to be used for one half of the picture, and the bottom palette has to be used for the other half. No transparency, Animation optional.

My "brilliant" idea is to have a picture of Twilight Sparkle (best pony):



Staring at her voice actress, the very prolific Tara Strong:



Which will be interesting since I can draw ponies no problem, but when it comes to humans, they're not my forte. It'll be a matter of 20 minutes for me to sketch out an idea for the Twilight part of the picture with Pencil+Paper, but much longer to work with Tara. Not only to get an absolutely perfect facial structure, but also to make her look serious and have long flowing blonde hair.

Another problem will be the contents of the palette. There's little in there that can be used for either skin coloring, or purple for Twily (there's only one purple shade, and there's no straight-up tan or even orange/yellow shades). This is going to be a fun, hard exercise with limited palettes it seems. Either I'm going to have everything have non-canon colors, or use some interesting dithering to create the illusion of skin/multiple purples by mixing the browns with that light green and with white, and by mixing the purple with the multiple blues and the white.

Just a rambling of what I'm up to, I guess.

Well, started the conceptualization for Twilight's part of the pixel:



Obviously just a rough draft to work from, it needs to be a lot more interesting. I'm going to play tricks with dithering and the colors to add all sorts of effects on the pixel version, which I started on tonight.

Well, finally converted it to a very simple lineart form, and then played around with it for a while. Here's what I've got after a little bit of playing around.



Not like it's nearing completion or anything, this is just an hour's work in MS Paint for a rough first stage. I'm thinking of playing around with styles and forming a weird new one that mixes simplicity/paper cartoons with detailed shading and the such. Experimentation++, I guess.

Are you planning on drawing the rest of the body?

Rather unlikely, my idea since I decided to not make this a contest entry is to have it be of her reading a book by candlelight, with the candle's flame and the shading the flame's light affects part of an animation. Of course, just one idea of like 5 I've come up with for the direction for this

This should be interesting. I am a terrible artist, personally, and I always enjoy seeing the amazing things people can make. (If you need proof for how bad I am, my Portal 0.2 drawing from HCWP is here.)

(Yeah, I can do a bit better than that in reality, but not much. :S)

Anyway, pixel art tends to amaze me slightly more than "natural" art. Every detail alters the outcome dramatically, and strong consideration needs to be taken into place. One out-of-place thing might not ruin a "natural" image, but it would do so to pixel art. I definitely think all art takes serious talent, but it's just a slightly different kind of talent with pixel art. Your picture of adult Scootaloo was great, and definitely deserved to get on EQD if you ask me, Ashbad. I also hope that you can get some recognition with the contest on PixelJoint. I think your idea will make for a really neat entry.

Thanks for the compliments

While I'll definitely admit that most art concepts from more traditional forms of art coincide with those of pixel art, pixel art definitely has it's own toolbox of skills needed and techniques used. The one thing that sums up what makes it different than normal art, is the word "restrictions". A pixel artist constantly tries to push their constraints to be smaller and smaller. An example is the constant goal to get a low color count. Really great pixel artists can get more clarity and much more detail in a 128x128 pixel space and an 8-color palette than most digital artists can do in a 256x256 pixel space with unrestricted to use 24-bit depth color. For example; I've been working more on improving the scootaloo pixel lately; since I did a lot of blind anti-aliasing tricks, my color count skyrocketed from 16 colors to 32 colors. Recently, I've been able to get it down to a more impressive 26 colors with essentially no difference in look (if anything, it actually has a better clarity now).

The word "talent" always makes me cringe a bit, because I feel while talent plays into things, like anything you need to practice and study the art of others to get anywhere. You better believe I've been pracicing drawing ponies quite a bit until recently

I've been offline most of the weekend due to downed power lines and verizon's lines. I only just got power back last night, and since my laptop was essentially empty on power I wasn't able to start pixeling until last night. I'm probably not going to be online until Monday or Tuesday, so for now I'll post what I made in the past hour of it:



It's about 15% done now, started on the shading and did some AA. Working on a low color count, so I'm still only at 8 colors (I was smart about my palette, so all of my AA colors actually are used as full colors elsewhere in the piece) I'm planning on the animation to be Twilight against the night sky, looking at fireflies (animated.) I'm gonna work on it for 8-9 hours tonight now that I can recharge/work on my laptop, so hopefully the next post with this should look a lot better.

Well, didn't play with it as long as I hoped for today, but I have been able to keep the color count down at 9 still. I'm do a lot of dithering tricks to keep it so low, but by the end it'll be about 16 I'm sure. Anything above that wouldn't cut it, I'm trying to really go for as minimal as possible.



I'm putting off playing with the air until the last possible moment.

Dithering is taking me a lot longer than I expected, but I think it's coming out well:



I'm off from work on the 4th of July, and since this is 4th of July inspired (I always attribute fireflies to the 4th, since I go see fireworks at a local park and there's tons of them there) I'm hoping to get it done before fireworks that day. Still have a *lot* of work to do at this pace...

Wait, that's a *firefly*?

Nope, it's an luminescent hovering sofa. Pretty dangerous stuff, no?

But yeah, it's a firefly; I'm not going for realism in this, more of semi-realism like in the Scootaloo pixel, so I can throw in some realistic elements and get away with shading the ponies more, but for things like the fireflies I'm doing it in more of a cartoony, symbolic way.