How many pixels are there?!
This is my protagonist (in other words, me) from Pokémon Moon. I love moon-me so much. It made me so happy to play as a girl ever since I first allowed myself to do so in Pokémon XY in 2013 and to make a character that was supposed to be a female version of me and to wear cute clothes that I couldn’t wear in real life. It felt so much more like me, so comfortable, so happiness-inducing.
I took some artistic liberties and changed a few things to be more like the fully original human persona I’ve been planning for years, but just a few because this is still meant to be moon-me from 6.5 years ago and not original-me from the present. Like the big round glasses, yellow eyes, mirroring the hairstyle to match my real hair, a slightly narrower mouth (and one that is a little v-shaped and consists of two separate lines because I wanted to give that a try), the triangular yellow hair clip, and the flower pin having 5 instead of 6 petals.
I’ve been wanting to try a higher resolution for a long time. I love low-resolution styles like my current one but sometimes I really miss the ability to add more detail. Especially for glasses and eyelashes. Which is why my ACNH-me drawings are missing glasses. But when I decided to draw moon-me, I really wanted both perfect glasses and to experiment with more detailed eyelashes. So I took this as an opportunity to finally get out of my comfort zone and use a much higher resolution. I adore higher resolution pixel art styles like this by other artists, it would be nice if I could do that, too.
In addition to the resolution, I also wanted to do some colour palette experiments. I love art that is very pastel and soft and I’d love if my art would look that way as well. So I once again adjusted my colour picking habits. I had to make some compromises like making the glasses and eyebrows darker to make them visible against the dark brown hair (initially they had the same softer pastel black as the eyelashes, but this change also has the upside of making the glasses clearly distinct from the eyelashes) and making the hair both lighter to make the black glasses and eyebrows contrast enough, as well as not making it as pastel as I would have liked it to be because any colour I tried was either too light (I have dark brown hair) or too grey. The yellows were also a challenge, as usual, because yellow is a very picky and unusual and difficult colour. The end result is not quite as pastel and soft as I had hoped it would be but it still looks great and different.
I really love the result! Of course I’m not entirely satisfied with everything, like the head shape, but I got something done and I tried lots of new things. More improvement will come over time. I had so much fun and was so excited during the process that I finished it in one day (although very late at night, and of course I found some things later that bothered me and that I had to change). I’m pretty sure I’ve never finished a piece of art in just one day. I will probably extend this to a full-body drawing eventually, but for now just the head is enough. I want to do smaller things but more things and have more fun doing them instead of overwhelming myself with too much.
Fun fact: I took these photos with my camera’s self-timer to minimise blurriness from camera movements (which was totally worth the weight, these images are perfectly crisp), and every single time the timer reached zero and the photo was taken, the character started doing the idle animation. I guess the idle timer is also 10 seconds. But that pose in the third image kind of looks like she’s looking down on herself in delightful surprise and marvelling her great outfit and cuteness. Kind of like me after starting the game and seeing moon-me for the first time in years. So I kept these photos with unintentional poses. They look more interesting than stiff default standing poses (the upper one I put on here at least, the lower one looks like an accidental mid-movement photo with motion blur).