Rachel from Blade Runner. No copyright infringement intended, for educational usage only.

I’ve been wanting to get into pixelart for a little while, though not in the normal sense most people think of when someone sees the word ‘pixel art’. Instead of making a platformer style sprite that you’d see on a Snes or Genesis etc, I liked the dithering style of the various visual novels on the NEC PC-98.



Thanks to its limited colour palette, dithering is an oft-used tool to blend between the few colours they have on the system. For my purposes however, I limited my palette to a simple grayscale (admittedly it is blue really, but close enough) to practice my skills in shading.



I started by sketching a concept art from a great shot of Rachel (being interviewed by Deckard I believe?) which has very stark lighting, and great framing. From there I shaded in the areas of light in a fairly basic fashion, then went to work detailing from there.



Time: Roughly 2-3 days? Should have timed myself!

Here’s a breakdown gif:



Special thanks to Derek Yu for his fantastic Pixel Art Tutorial.