I Tried Doing Pixel Art Every Day for 16 Months
What funny little scribbles did I draw for 15 mins a day across a year and a half? Come find out.
Man, I cannot draw to save my life, but that's the fun of it. I have no talent for art, but I enjoyed faffing around with these rules:
- Prompts and palette via: Lospec Dailies (most of the time, sometimes it was books or my own thing)
- Max 15 mins spent, no matter how good/bad
This was inspired by my gains from "code every day for a year" in 2022 and the Spilled Ink YouTube channel, challenging themselves with (often) timed art pieces.
Starting on the 29th of December 2024, I only completed 250/463 days; buuut that's 250 attempts more than zero! It's also not the first time trying out pixel art. You can find my repo Pokemon-gen-2-style-tilemap where I play around with creating a stylistic 1 to 1 with the existing Pokémon Crystal tile set.
Below is the collage, they're roughly in order of oldest to newest. Some look kinda professional and probably are the ones from Pochi-pochi Pixel Art Let's enjoy drawing pixel art freely!
My favourites
The following are my favs, with the prompt and palette.
Chip Potts
Beast - Warm Space
The first piece I went "wow, that actually looks like what it should be". No tracing, just reference images. I had this one about a month in and to be honest, it kinda helped me think "I can make these looks good" after a string of awful pieces.
Honey slime
Food - TY - Murder Mystery 16 Palette
A real cutie. I think I was looking at a Dragon Quest slime for inspiration.
Fishing at sunset
Fishing - Sunset 8
The palette's real good, and it was my first lookup for how clouds were shaded.
Chansey
Luck - Diverse Natural
At least it's recognisable! Looks a little beat up, but still good.
Frog
Pet - OLDSAND-16
I saw a tweet long ago that had really cute pixel art frogs and I wanted to do the same. The colours and cute are spot on for this one.
Shooting star
Sign - PARADISE 30
I reallllly like the colours and how this one turned again. Another one from inspiration of another post I saw on Twitter.
Pikachu
Dynamax - Pear36
What a unit. Pi!
Qipao
Qipao - Custom
Top three for me, I think. I wanted to do a Pokémon styled sprite and initially got inspiration from Resident Evil's Ada Wong.
Conclusion
Would I do this again? Absolutely. They were super fun. What I'd change is my prompts and palettes. Maybe stick with one decent palette so I can get used to how colours work together and perhaps a prompt being a wider scene, such as a town then daily working on the individual parts that make the scene.