A bunch of different new pixel art

My mind was all over the place recently as I indulged on my cravings for pixel art and personal OCs stuff a lot, spreading attention between different little projects. Really hard to control these urges even despite I actually planned to use November to deal with some Halloween stuff I didn't manage to do in October but today I finally approved new commission sketch with my friend so at least now I can finally start something serious.

Pixel art I was working on involves a plenty of different stuff.

First of all, I keep making progress on my Vincent Frame piece as you can see done in a style of 90s games for 32 bit PCs and systems like Windows 95. I can hardly call it pixel art when it has a 800x600 resolution and 255 colors but at least it's still retro graphics that require some knowledge to be simulated properly. The basic version is pretty much done so what you see is the final thing but I still need to add some animation and do promised alternative versions. I'll describe the making process more in detail when I finish it fully.

There's also one little fantasy that went out of control and turned into another big project of the month. My friend BunnyBothered (the one who made a Bazil sketch which was later used as a base for my Bazil the Ultimate B-day Unit piece) left a very excited comment to my silly little concept of Zed and Mark as normal and inflated CGA sprites when I posted it on FA and said he wished there were an animation showing how they ended up with this type of shape. I didn't expect anyone to love this random simple thing so much and didn't plan to ever return to it again but here we're and after just being done with my Pop Your Friend Contest animation I already got started with the new one because I felt encouraged by uplifting comments once again.

There's a lot of stuff that is planned to go on here. First I came up with the location idea being nude beach as the easiest and at the same time appealing place to draw (ngl, doing kinky stuff in public places like this feels hot) and then I got carried away with my fantasies and decided to get the whole crew involved, not just Zed and Mark. Basically, it's gonna be a story where first Mark inflates Zed, then Jack and Kit show up and help Mark pump himself same big too and then probably some sex between normal and inflated guys will happen, I'm still deciding on what exactly it's gonna be like.

A big part of this project is already finished, nearly 70% of it, many different poses, animation frames, dialogue texts and so on, this is too much to show so I just shared some key moments. All the project assets will be shared here anyway once it's done.
Also planning to make an enhanced graphics version of the final animation with colors upgraded from CGA to EGA like shown above once its done. I think I'll keep this colorized version Patreon exclusive and just post the above still image publicly as a teaser.

Next is I finally managed to try conquer ZX Spectrum. And since it's my first time trying its graphics and these ones are already finished pictures unlike previous two projects I think it's time to tell a bit about how Spectrum graphics work.

ZX Spectrum is a British 8-bit computer released in 1982 and was intended to be an affordable low-cost computer for masses, so many of its aspects were greatly simplified compared to the almighty Commodore 64 for example that came out the same year. It indeed succeeded at conquering the European market, it didn't got much popular in America though but many of its games were later ported to platforms like America's favorite Commodore 64. Spectrum, or better say its illegally imported clones, were extremely popular in USSR too as it couldn't afford anything better and its own computers like BK-00100 looked very much like something between Spectrum and old CGA graphics.

Spectrum wasn't really bad compared to other computers of the same year but yet it still had some HORRENDOUS graphical limitations that are pretty difficult to deal with if you want to make something decent, this is why it took me so long to finally attempt it.

First of all, this is Spectrum's full palette. Six eye burning primal colors at their full brightness and their darker counterparts plus black, white and one shade of gray. A weird choice compared to other computers which tried to pick more nuance colors for their palettes that are more comfortable for the eye. But this is still just a matter of taste, the real problem is that Spectrum's screen was divided into an 8x8 pixel square grid and each square could contain only two colors together. This is very similar to Commodore 64 hi-res mode and this is why it had so many Spectrum game ports.

You can see that my works follow this limitation thoroughly (it can't be otherwise as I always check them through Multipaint where it's all automatized) if I show them with the grid being visible. There's no single square presented with three or more colors being crossed together. It's still possible to create nice realistic looking graphics with it but it requires some high level wizardry and precise calculations to make it look convincing like there's no limitations at all, that's why most Spectrum games were like "Fuck it" and going easier way by making everything just monochromatic, unleashing the full potential of ZX Spectrum graphics is not easy. And this is what I had to do myself too.

I also have two examples where I took my old CGA concept (I mean its more colorful version) and tried to automatically convert it into Spectrum graphics with DaDither and Multipaint. The results are quite flawed, leaving much to be desired and prove how hard it is to have colorful visuals that don't look like they're divided by the grid on this machine.To make things worse, colors from a brighter half of the palette can't be put in one square with the darker ones. If it were possible, Spectrum could have nice smooth gradients but instead it's just blocky stuff like this.

All Spectrum graphics had to deal with it and tried to get around this limitation as good as possible. The image above looks nice, realistic and colorful and it's not too obvious that the border between light and dark yellow is very blocky until you look much closer.
The same trick worked well on my second Spectrum art with tree leaves.

And the last thing I did for now is another Commodore 64 project.

It all started with a lame concept I started 7 months ago (first picture above) and dropped it pretty fast but now I came across it in my folders and thought maybe it deserves another chance. I polished it using my improved skills and it started to look pretty nice so now I think it deserves to be finished. I'm planning to turn it into a little animation too, not going to go above and beyond as usual with showing the whole process of Zed's gut growing from normal to big but I want to draw Mark being in two positions while saying kinky things in a form of text displayed above, one with him standing on the left and feeding him pizzas and second with him on the right as you can already see on images on top of the post, giving his belly rubs and slaps that will make him belch (much likely fart too), that's all. Not sure if I finish it before December but I'll try, it's not a really big project after all.

That's all the recent stuff I wanted to share. In a conclusion I need to apologize if you think I'm binging on this kind of art a bit too much. I know that both primitive pixel art and my way too wacky and exotic looking OCs is pretty much an acquired taste and many people probably subscribed to me not for this stuff in the first place, let alone definitely not for listening to me yapping about all the nerdy retro PC stuff. It's just very hard to resist this craving. I'm gonna make at least one complexly rendered goodie with lots of dirty alts this month, I mean my current commission, which I hope sounds uplifting.