i saw your awesome dress from acnh! do you have a gridpattern or creator code? either would be lovely cus i know what design you got it from but i don't have the creativity myself, but it's so fkn cute i need it in my life.
Ok prepare yourself because I explain wayyyy too much. I think going into more detail here will help you and others though.
Thanks a ton for this ask! It helped me organize my process so I can share it with you and everyone else ^^
The biggest thing with this dress is I approached it to make something I'd wear irl. I love a wide range of fashion and buying my fashion choices would cost my rent and soul so I'm continuing to live vicariously through my AC character lmao
I was inspired by those cute sweaters with drip designs and my favourite colour palettes to mix are black with bright and bold designs because I'm extra as fuck. I tried to search Google and Pinterest if anyone patterns with that drip design. Someone actually made this this sweater. I'm adding the hyperlink so you can check em out.
So with that, I used that design as my "base"
I knew what I sorta wanted so then I looked up Lolita and Harajuku fashion and made a small board so I had reference for how jumperskirts look and physically work. It saved me time later on so I wasn't trying to draw from memory.
During it all, I also did tons of iterations where I'd stop, and make an extra copy to save on the side in case I add something major and mess up. A habit from doing digital art but it helps. There are no layers and no cache of 50 undo's lmao. About 3 times I actually saved and quit because I don't trust autosave in anything.
Moving on, I analyzed it to see how the pixel art for the previous sweater worked but hit a roadblock.
So I got that drip design down initially and had to adjust it for the smoothing as well as how the mesh works, then the rest that I added was basically accents on how jumperskirts work with details last. Again with making iterations and copied saves and frequently exiting the editor to see how it looks actually on my character.
New Horizon's pattern system has this anti-aliasing/smoothing algorithm where if certain colours are within a specific HSB range that I haven't fully figured out yet--they'll blend differently. So certain shading methods that worked in New Leaf can look really bad, off, or sometimes not even work. Some edges will round, some will stay sharp. It took a lot of experimenting to get the "lace" part at the bottom to work right because if I had a colour's saturation or brightness to close or too different, it would refuse to curve. A pink in my palette is almost identical to a purple but it didn't work the same.
There were some annoying small things like how grids are 32x32 in general so as an even number, I couldn't make it perfectly symmetrical and still have the white parts blend right. Literally one pixel difference. There were a lot of exasperated sighs.
Small colour and design principles to keep in mind.
I don't come from a pixel art background but this stuff is generally universal and its sorta stuff that makes sense but you sometimes don't think of.
I used a consistent theme and palette with the neon warm to cool tones and I added a little yellow to add some details but kept it minimal not overpower it.
I worked from bottom layers to top, skirt, shirt, suspenders, made sure seams were flush, final details.
Maaaaan, that was super long but thanks so much for the ask because some other people have wanted to know too. I did all this on my phone for the past hour so I hope it's not too messy.
The wings were a last-minute thing cause I have a sweater irl with them on the back and I was just all "Fuck yes, I need this". And the back was a little bare. So I figured those out and instead of shading via brightness/greys, I used the colours I did on the drips to add dimension and keep it unified.
So short story for my dress: I just made something I'd want to wear but can't afford irl.
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