Well, the first cycle is done and I've created quite a bit of pixel art during that time. I have laid out a simple guideline of what I will be working on week by week, and this week I focused on characters, and I've created quite a few of these tiny people. I learned a lot about shape technique this week, taking inspiration from the work of "Hopoo" (who I am reaching out to for an interview) and Pedro Medeiros, whose numerous, short, informative tutorials have helped me greatly learn about creating these characters. I have also experimented with various styles (some of which can be seen on the blog header, in fact) and replicating other pieces of art with modified shape, colors, or shading to help hone my skills and compare my work with that of other, more established artists. However, I haven't gotten done as many of these drawings as I would like, and hope to increase my output in the coming weeks by spending more time daily working on the project. All in all, I have seen some progression from my very first piece (the wizard in the top left) to the last (the giant golem in the bottom right), but not as much improvement as I would have hoped. The only thing to do is practice more next time, I suppose. I have also began to develop a style over the course of the week, as I found that some of my favorite pieces that I worked on were the super tiny ones, often just a few pixels tall. The small size restricts me to some quite minimalist design decisions, which I like, but also means that it can take a surprising amount of tweaking to get one looking just right, because even a small change between positioning of colors can have a huge effect on the overall design of the character. This means that there are many, many revisions of these little guys with slightly longer arms, shorter legs, some extra bend in the arm, etc.
Below is the .png file I drew all my all of my art on. I like the idea of creating one per week and just expanding it whenever I run out of room, so that I can see a clear progression of my style and quality. It should be noted that there are some side-by-side comparisons in there, with another artist's work beside my own interpretation.
