Pixel Art – SquaredPancake

I enjoy pixel art! I don't know why - Pixel Art just really does it for me. Here I upload anything I made regarding pixel art (aside from the art I made for the website and my shareables, those are in other pages)

Miscellaneous

Two versions of a Dumbbell I made as the icon for the Minecraft Parkour Gym idea I had. The first version (left) is quite bad, but I like the second one (right). The texture is inspired by the dumbbell found at the gyms in Celeste: strawberry collab.
Two pixelarts of the Protectorate Logo from the game "Starbound". I got motivated to make this after looking at my Protectorate keychain I bought on a whim one too many times. I find it hard to determine which color scheme/palette is better than the other.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Notes

I don't know why, but it feels different to do pixel art in Animal Crossing: New Horizons than in something like Aseprite. I don't have to worry about colors too much because of the limited palette, and it just in general feels more casual/lighthearted to do so, potentially because of the gameplay and game feel directly surrounding it. I generally feel like I can focus more.

There's also this same section on my old website and it features some pretty snazzy css.

Ribiko Flag - The first flag for my island called Ribiko. I intended to put something in the middle, but couldn't figure out what. The orange on the top left is a small icon representing an orange, which I planned to reuse in some other assets (notably island styled clothing, as like a pin on it). Now superseded by the second island flag

Sundown Forest - I like the sky gradient, but feel like I messed up with the highlighting part on the forgeground elements.

Neon Cassette - I quite like the subtle glow effect made to make it look like neon lights.

Orange Stamp - The current flag for my island, depicting an orange since they're native to my island.

Conflict Arising - A piece I've made when I felt conflicted about something. I quite like how I decorated the background with that limited color palette, and how that makes the middle warning sign stand out.

Missing Poster - A poster I've made as a somewhat dark joke to put near a well. I like the style and humor of it.

Trainline Map - This painting was inspired by my 5-year old nephew screwing around in the drawing app. He would draw these lines and I was again amazed at how smooth they looked through the filter applied to the final canvas. When combined with the idea of making a train map and my general love for simplistic designs like this, this is the result.

Pitstop at the Edge
Originally when porting this painting over to the website, it was unfinished, featuring a vague shape at the bottom left with the black hole at the top right (along with some floating shards I experimented with at the bottom right).

While tracing it over in Aseprite, I thought of ways that it could be improved upon, and so I first touched up upon the black hole and it's surrounding area. Then came the stars in the background and then I tried adding striped lines to the bottom left like it's a road (which was my original intention anyways, I believe).

One thing I limited myself on while touching up my painting was that I could only use the palette I made the unfinished portion with because I didn't want this piece to be unachievable in-game by picking a color outside the provided spectrum. It really made me feel like a good pixel artist because I heard that pixel artists usually limit their colors and I find that the limited colors I picked could be used in multiple places, making them versatile and well-picked alongside good-looking (like how the orange ring of the black hole was reused as the brighter stars, or the brighter magenta waft around the black hole as outline for the road).

Animal Crossing: New Horizons just excels in that regard for me: it forces me to pick roughly correct hues and values instead of making me worry about exact tones. It all does this while still giving a huge load of freedom for color and a limited palette and I love the fact that the designers of the game made a user-friendly pixel art editor that encourages this practice all just as a side activity in the game.

EDIT: After a few days I stumbled on this page again and just instantly noticed that it looks odd that the road just has the same color as anything else in the background.

FEZ - Pixel art of the starting village from the game FEZ.

FEZ (Gradient) - Pixel art of the starting village from the game FEZ, including the weird cube you see at the beginning of the game. This versions's sky has a gradient that would be impossible to achieve ingame due to the limited color palette.

Freya's Nightmare - A painting with the same name from a game called Tangle Tower.

Pixely Productivity Suite

Notes

Concept art for a collection of programs in a pixelart style that would be used for a variety of things - think Aseprite but expanded into other things like making mind maps, timelines, text documents or PowerPoint presentations. I never did a lot with it, but like the visuals of the little I did (although I kind of feel like these designs would be impractical and there's something that could be improved, but I wouldn't be able to point my finger on what).