It's time to write about a recent pixel art piece I made! I decided I'd draw my old room back when I was 19-20, at least as well as I could remember it. This was the second place I lived at after the dorms - I spent my second year in college here. It was a small room in the corner of a large, funky '70s-ish house. One couple and three other roommates lived there; I was very different from them but we all got along mostly.
Note: these screenshots and animations that follow are just a recreation of the process I built with the layers from the piece, and sometimes they're a little out of order. One of these days I'll actually record the process from start to finish so I can show how I drew (and redrew, and redrew) my work.
I started by creating the basic elements of the room itself: floor, walls, door and closet.
Then I painted in the floor, walls and paneling:
I started with the largest object that would define the scale and placement of other objects: my futon bed. I started by drawing a frame for the approximate size it would take up, then drew in the elements layer by layer: the futon frame planks, the frame supports, shadowed floor, the futon itself, a bedsheet, and a zebra-striped blanket (which I'd had since I was a kid). I drew the pillow in a little later. Drawing out details like shadows that I couldn't see behind layers above helped me dimension and place items in the right place.
I then drew the shoji lamp I first got together with that futon for this room - everything in this room would follow me for years from place to place :). One thing I did here that pixel artists sometimes frown on is add a soft blurred glow to the lamp, but it really helped make it look right, and the lighting was very important for getting the feel of the room. Added the pillow, began to do rough lighting of the room and added some thickness to the floor to give the whole piece dimension.
As I started to draw a desk, I realized both that the room was too small and that drawing a large enough desk means that real-life me never would have been able to get it through the door. I actually dragged the desk I was drawing over to the door to check and realized:
- it was too wide
- it was taller than where the door handle should go!
It was also just too close to the bed and lamp; the room would be way less open than I remember it being. So I expanded the walls and floor/platform, and drew out the door and closet to appropriate sizes. In this next animation you can see the desk being drawn, room expanded, and I also added in this kakemono scroll that was a great aunt's. I was really happy with how the scroll came out; for such tiny details it does look somewhat like the waterfall landscape of the real scroll I used to have.
Next I started drawing all the stuff on and around my desk! I made a mouse and mousepad, keyboard, monitor, speakers and cables connecting it all. The monitor was the hardest of all, its geometry but particularly getting the colors and shades I wanted, and I redrew it so many times. Then I drew a desk chair, my old backpack and some engineering books that I didn't spend enough time reading. You can see some time in the middle of recording these steps I fixed up the lighting a little bit and refined the scroll details (up to this point I had recorded all these steps *during* the process of making it, but for all frames afterwards everything was recreated after it was complete, creating this discontinuity).
Here is a detail closeup of the desk, lamp and bed.
I then started to touch up and refine the lighting beneath and around the lamp, plus light and shadows around the futon and frame. A lot of this I actually drew in manually although I did use some blurring again on the rays cast out from the lamp. In the last few steps here I also started on other details, adding in the doorknob and adding a few stacked clothing items to the closet and a closet rod.
Last steps! I added some clothes to the closet, jackets and shirts and jerseys and so on. This was challenging to draw and get it to look right in isometric, and at such small scale, but I'm still pretty happy with the result.
I also added a piece of transparent green fabric I used to have draped over the closet - sometimes I had a different piece over the closet and that fabric over the lamp, which gave the room this really cool green light. The actual fabric had these abstract organic black patterns on it but I tried to draw that and it was coming out way too messy to make out. Finally I drew my old skateboard and adjusted the light and color over the whole piece until it looked right.
The final piece!
If you'd like to read a little nostalgic thread about this room and my happy memories there, you can do that here :). I am not sure but I might also update this piece to incorporate the thread here.
Finally, here is a start-to-finish animation of the whole process:
If you like this piece, consider giving it a share on twitter or your social media of choice! I'll also do an annual wrap-up piece soon, but it might not be before the new year.
