Vaguely Recognisable Faces

That Alan Moore is fantastic. He looks both soulful and a bit crotchety, which is exactly how I think of him.

Thank you, em... That is an accurate description of him.


This isn't a face or portrait but I'll dump it here anyway.
After finishing the challenge early this month, and after being inspired again by Thimbleweed Park (which I haven't played but I've loved reading the blog) I've been spending the last 2-3 weeks trying to do some pointy-click stuff.
In the end I settled on trying to recreate that first scene from the movie Se7en.
And yes, I know this is horribly unoriginal, other people have done this kind of thing before (like Andrew Scaife's book) and 8-Bit Cinema have even done this exact scene better but who cares about that?



I do find pixel art so very hard, especially with modern tools. Even after turning off resampling and using Photoshop's pencil tool, anti-aliasing still creeps in there somehow to annoy and frustrate me. I wish I could be more precise with it.
And I'm not overjoyed by the character sprites but they work as placeholders for the time being. I can always clean them up later.

I used to think Photoshop was fairly easy to do pixelart stuff with, but I guess I did very small images - I used a transparent background where each of those greyish little squares corresponded to a pixel so it was easy to see. ArtRage is hopeless for pixelart. I've tried it with Krita once and I guess it's possible, but it's not very easy. Most of their brushes don't want to leave small, exact marks at all.

That would actually make a good challenge theme

I'm not taking the hint, I'm on sick leave. Getting annoyed with stupid games, my neighbours (one of which seems to have a hobby which includes gentle hammering off and on all day every day) and probably myself too.

ArtRage doesn't like pixels at all.
I quite like the features of GraphicsGale but I find the interface very frustrating, especially the way the spacebar brings up a popup menu when every other painting program uses it to pan the canvas, and it's very hard to change and give up that muscle memory.
So it has to be Photoshop despite all those sneaky semi-transparent pixels that ruin my sprites. I think the best way to do them is to get a fully opaque silhouette, lock the transparency and then paint in the details and shading to clean it up.

Valence wrote: Another thick paint extravaganza....
Tom Hanks...

man, this one is really good, loving the color and the coarse feel . Is this on Artrage?? i need to try that shit now, this is sick.

ooooh yeahhh Bachelor party baby

Thanks, Mr S.

Yep, that's the ArtRage Oil Brush. It sometimes creates some weird colour mixing but gives you some great smeary texture. The canvas for that pic isn't a default one though, I think it's one of Misterpaint's papers that I downloaded from the ArtRage deviantart page.
The software is well worth a tryout, it's relatively cheap and there are free/trial versions for both computer and mobile. I always found it much easier than Corel Painter which in my brief experience was glitchy and overloaded with too many fiddly options.

I have been trying to introduce more texture to my paintings, with varying degrees of success- sometimes it can look a little too gimmicky. I think the one I was most pleased with was the Vampire challenge, it seemed to fit the subject and mood of that pic.

Still no new faces but I think I have now done enough of this particular Point and Click lark. (Although I may use what I learned to try another one later.)
I added a couple more rooms, including a scrolling one with a bit of foreground parallax , to fill it out a bit more.
If I was a better human being I would now go back and redo some of the graphics and sprites after all that technical stuff of scripting and cleaning up dead ends, but I'm lazy so I won't.

I still think it looks more like "blurry lo-res" than Official "Pixel-Art" but what can you do, huh?

Are you gonna let us play it?