BazilRacoondog
patreon
A bit of CGA pixel art and a little progress with Volk project.
🕑 Added 2023-11-06 23:45:21 +0000 UTCI keep playing around with pixel art lately, just can't resist it. An idea hit my head to try old CGA graphics with my characters which I was thinking about for a long time actually. For those who're less nerdy about old games I can give a quick explanation. CGA graphics is one of the earliest examples of color in home computers, CGA stands for Color Graphics Adapter and it was released in 1981 by IBM, one of the most common home PC manufacturers back then. As a pioneer at color graphics, CGA was imperfect and fairly hated by users back then for its palette limited to an obnoxious combination of just black, white, cyan and magenta which many people still remember without big fondness and not afraid to call it ugly once again. But at the same time there's a lot of people who feel nostalgic love for it and simply don't mind this color combination. Like me. Obviously, being born in 1996 I can't feel nostalgia for an outdated PC technology from early 80s but I simply love these colors and love attempting some really challenging pixel art which limits me strictly.
You can read more about the history of retro computer graphics evolution and CGA in particular in this article, it sums it all up really good and easy to understand.
http://heroquest.no-ip.com/dgi/5gen/
So, we can say that cyan and magenta were like Adam and Eve of colored computer graphics and how convenient it is that these are main colors of my Zed Vector character, like if he was made initially to be easy to travel through any platform. That's why I was thinking about how he could look in old DOS colors for a long time but decided to make it real only just recently. It looked simpler in my head but hunting for more complex aesthetics it ended up looking more like a dithering practice. Dithering is a method of using dotted and lined textures in limited color palettes to imitate extra shades and gradient/shading effects. It was common back then and it's still common in modern pixel art and games as well. The more limited your palette is the more you need to use dithering if you aim for something really complex so it's expected for people in 80s to go really desperate trying to get as much graphical variety from CGA colors as possible. My Zed Vector and Mark Spothound artworks are good examples where I tried to make Mark's yellow nose look different from his white body yet still lighter than his snout and his purple ear look like it's another color than magenta used for snout or cyan used for lips.
And yeah, it's finally the first normal full-body depiction of these two guys, now you can see Zed Vector is a short-stack with a bit of a belly (what could you expect from me) and Mark is a tall lanky guy with some big nipples, that's how I imagined them all this time, they're my representations of a sexiest cartoon character possible after all.
Also did some small sprite attempts and NO, I'm not thinking about DOS-style game, it's enough projects in my head for now, so I'm really just fooling around and doing small retro art stuff here.
What is a real project work is that I also did alternative materials for "The More You Shave..." with Vityai instead of Volk, I promised that these should be done for a more variety so here it is. Also decided to change background to something a little bit more complex than just flat yellow color filling which I thought is too minimalistic compared to other mini-games and make it look like a simple old wallpaper.
It's a continuation of this: https://www.patreon.com/posts/more-you-shave-91285101
