#74 All the pain must go

Before any yapping, I was asked to show this glorious and insanely detailed project I had for this pixel.

I know, I know. Basically ready to ship.

But now, seriously, I can't stop smiling looking at this piece. Not because it's perfect, but because I have in mind post number 23 here. My first try to make a chibi like this.

Oh man, it's like 2 totally different people made them, and in a sense it's true.

No matter how many times I tried, I couldn't make a face outline. I think my lack of 3D imagination is making every shape look flat in my mind. So I started with the eyes (well, one eye and the eyepatch) to set the angle. It worked out surprisingly well.

After a few adjustments, I was ready to start outlining the hair.

Yeeee, it didn't go so well.

Another try. I have to remember that everything will be bigger on the right side if the character is facing left, including the hair.

Ok, looks decent, and the hands are back!

Making the eye was simple enough. Changing colors, not only shades, is making such a huge difference!

Just some small details to make the face less empty. Once again, the right cheek is bigger than the left one.

Now we can start working on hair. The method is a little different from my usual (not that usually I use any specific methods). We start from two colors, base and the shade.

After adding my love, the glorious light line, we slowly blur the borders between the colors. For this, we are using a different one that fits in between their saturation and lightness level.

It's good to not go overboard, the clusters cannot be too small.

The darker side will have fewer clusters and shades. You can't see all the details in the dark, after all.

I still need to figure out how to make something look fluffy with so little pixels.

Time for the hands! They were half improvised, half made from a reference.

It's not rocket science, just try and error. Change a few pixels -> looks good? -> save, if not, try something different.

The outline of the hands is brownish to not fight with the black outline of the head.

And that's all, it's that simple. And yet, it took me so much time to get to this point.

I can't comprehend that my lazy, inconsistent, absolutely skill-less ass was able to keep this up for so long. I started so low, but that's good. It was the whole point, after all. Even someone like me can learn to do things.

And if EVEN I can, what the hell can stop you?