Starting Small (post 1)

Hello, I'm Matt Daly. I've enjoyed attempting to create decent looking pixel art in the past just for fun, but I have never been very good at it. This project has given me an excuse to pursue this interest further and hopefully improve my general art skills along the way. I have laid out a specific plan for what I will be tackling over the coming weeks. Carrying out this plan will hopefully result in significant improvement to my pixel art skills and allow me to produce subjectively better looking pixel art more efficiently and with my own personal style. While it may be hard to measure these goals in terms of subjective appearance, I can measure my efficiency when using the program and ability to produce quality work quickly.

The focus of my project will be improving my pixel art, and the only way to do this is through constant practice. For this reason I will be practicing every day for at least an hour hopefully producing multiple images and variations on images during that time. I will also spend additional time fleshing out previous drawings that I liked, and trying to create a few highly polished pieces per week to showcase in the progress update. I will also be focusing on a variety of different objects when drawing, spending about one week on each:

Week 1: Characters (people, robots, creatures, things like that)

Week 2: Props and Miscellaneous objects (swords, treasure, boxes, etc.)

Week 3: Backgrounds (landscapes, skylines, interiors)

Week 4: Animated Characters (more characters, but with a few frames of animation for each)

Week 5: Animated Scenes (characters, props, backgrounds all with subtle animations)

Week 6: Return to Favorite Themes (return to objects I had previously enjoyed drawing and work on them some more)

Along the way I will be finding resources online from people with experience creating pixel art to learn new techniques and styles. At some point during this timeline an interview will also go up, which I am looking into conducting currently. I will be returning here with weekly blog posts outlining my progress during the week and hopefully showing improvement over time, see you then!