APD (3); Play

THEME

Play

CONTEXT

https://8pxl.tumblr.com/

I appreciate the elegance and simplicity of the illustrations done by this artists, whenever I come across their work it makes me want to get back into pixel art and the use of colour specifically is really inspired. 

https://twitter.com/zenforms?lang=en

I used to play with this app quite a bit a few years ago, in truth it’s a bit of a pokemon dupe but the art style and interface is quite nice. 

METHOD

I wanted to continue with learning Harmony/Toonboom this week, but ended up back in Photoshop just by virtue of not having access to the brush type I wanted to use in Harmony. Following the theme of ‘Play’ I had a vague idea of making something reminiscent of older 8bit games visually, and as I was planning on making a looping animation I didn’t feel like using PS was going to be too much of a hassle unlike when I was trying to do hand drawn 2D frame-by-frame animations in the prior studio. 

I mocked up some fairly simple pixel graphics and tried to keep myself from getting too overly invested in crafting a perfect drawing given I just wanted to play around rather than make a fully polished work.

RESULTS

My original idea going into this week was to make a blinking eyeball looking over a play button where if you moused over the play button the colour palette would change. I quickly realised I had no idea how to do that, and I shelved that idea for another time. Having done that I changed course slightly to just have the blink be the colour shift, going to and from greyscale/colour. After doing that I realised it was very, very boring. So I discarded that version (though it can be found in the additional files of this upload) and instead moved towards a ‘game that wants to be played’ concept for the animation and make a little pixel cursor that would appear, hover near the play button, and then disappear. 

Though I did end up with an animation that more or less conveyed the concept, I do think I could have better executed the idea. If I had the chance to redo the object I would go straight to my final concept and both refine the illustrative components as well as consider timing in the animation in further depth. 

Downloads:

Download File: play-2.gif