bit of love/pixel perfect

Paint Tool Sai / GraphicsGale / Photoshop 7

pixel by pixel love

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OH GOD, DEAR TUMBLR FRIENDS, PLEASE SEE A LARGER VERSION (like this or this) OR ALL MY HOURS OF WORK WERE WASTED.



It’s been a long long while, but I’ve decided I should probably be putting things up on Deviantart again! Oh wow, it’s literally been years and years and years. Whoosh. Thankfully(?) I haven’t really drawn all that much in the intervening time, and most of it went the way of the dodo when one of my hard drives failed o.o. I’ll consider backing some of what I’ve drawn up on Dev, but otherwise you can find most of the newer stuff over at my woefully unadorned Tumblr.

This piece was fun, and probably the most time I’ve spent on one single drawing in a long long time. To be more accurate, I didn’t spend that long on the DRAWING bit, pencils and inks in Sai, the pixelly explosion part in GraphicsGale using the NES palette, but the colouring…

The colouring literally kept me up at night. My original thought was to colour it “manually” in Gale using a limited palette, but I had no idea how to make this a functionally working thing. I wanted to give it a real vibrant prismatic rainbow-y look like KEI, Tsukushi, or ami, but of course it’s a lot harder than it looks. After hours and hours of experimenting I ended up using a fixed width hard edged brush with 55 opacity and 40 flow, then the mosaic filter (Pixellate -> Mosaic) at 20 pixel width for most of it. The dress still came out sort of muddy, but I really really like the eyes (which were sort of accidental anyway).

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it, I really enjoyed making it.