Let me begin this article by expressing my deepest gratitude to all the people who have supported me in some way and have shown their appreciation for my work during this year. Pixels Huh would not be possible without the incredible energy that you give me every day!
In this excessively long post, I’d like to explain what it meant for me this first year working on the Pixels Huh project, how it all began and how it has evolved to the present day.
THE (VERY) HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
It all started in August, 2014. I had been working as a freelance children’s books illustrator for four years.
Those were pretty tough years, with very few successes and many disappointments. I was new in the freelance arena and I was learning the hard way thanks to many frustrating projects and disrespectful clients. Those were four years of instability that sometimes brought me to my limits. But I couldn’t imagine doing anything else! Creating art is the only thing I’m good at and what I’m most passionate about in this world.
Sometimes it’s painful and terrifying, but… I just love creating things! :D
As I learned more and more how to deal with undesirable clients and how to choose only the good ones, things were improving a little for me. But the only thing that made me really happy during those years was creating my own personal work on my spare time.
I experimented with graphite drawings:
And I made a bunch of acrylic paintings too:
Learning new painting and drawing techniques was really awesome, but something was missing: Video games have always been one of my greatest passions and yet they were hardly part of my artistic imaginery.
Why?
When I was a kid I filled my school textbooks with little Roger Wilcos and King Grahams, I drew from memory whole levels of Prince of Persia and Lemmings… I even painted a giant Scumm Bar on my desk once! (the school principal told me that I wasn’t allowed to do that, but that he would never make me clean something so cool!).
It’s pretty obvious that video games are such an important part in my life that they had to be present in my art. But I had to find a way to depict this gaming influence mixed with the usual topics that already appeared in my artworks.
The answer I was looking for was, of course, Pixel Art. An artistic medium that inevitably brought my mind back to my best moments with Guybrush, Larry, Bobbin…
When I was a kid my mom bought a 486 PC bundled with Deluxe Paint and I made a ton of art with my faulty mouse. Mainly I just copied screenshots from video game magazines, so I acquired quite an experience with classic Pixel Art and its techniques back then. I remember printing all my drawings with my black and white printer and showing them to my school mates (maybe my parents still keep some of those drawings… I’ll have to ask them).
But let’s go back to August, 2014: This bright idea of translating my works to Pixel Art came to my mind one night at 3AM. I jumped from my bed and turned on my computer.
I made a very quick test:
A man in the darkness illuminated through an open door.
It was all I needed to make sure that Pixel Art suited my artistic needs. Lighting and shadows have always been an obsession for me and I had to convince myself that I could get a similar quality to that of my paintings.
A few days later my wife and I went on vacation to beautiful Romania. It was two weeks to put my thoughts in order and start planning what kind of work I wanted to create with this new style.
We got back home in early September and I had my head full of ideas, so I got to work in my first Pixel Art pieces:
Scene #01: ‘Midnight Carnival’
After making several rough sketches of buildings and characters to define the style of these new illustrations, I started my first two Scenes: ‘Midnight Carnival’ and ‘Moon Base’. I finished both in just three days. I was enjoying this medium so much that I couldn’t stop working! I remember that I had little sleep those nights.
I was so happy with the outcome of these two illustrations that I decided I had to show them to the world (something I never thought I would do). So I opened a Twitter account and a blog on Tumblr, and posted these two illustrations under the name Pixels Huh.
I don’t even remember where I got the name … I think I read it somewhere and I liked the sound of it.
It wasn’t important anyway, because at that time I was convinced that no one would care at all about my work.
But suprisingly it wasn’t the case! In just a few minutes I had a bunch of Twitter followers who wrote me some beautiful, positive comments about my illustrations. I wasn’t even following anybody yet! I decided to write down some of their Twitter names. I knew that in the future they would be important to me. So thank you @SaikoRaito (yes, you were my first Twitter follower!! :D), @PixelArtM, @CluelessEvil, @MatthewJFrith, @ddawg_77, @NakedGameNews, @PixelArtSprites, @Carelesslabs, @igoramendola and @zpucky <3
Scene #03: ‘How I Met Your Grandfather’
With my third illustration, How I Met Your Grandfather, I wanted to show in the same scene the very worst and the very best of human being (War and the spirit of helping people in distress respectively, a very hot topic nowadays in Europe).
The answer to this third scene was great! Even a military aviation expert congratulated me for the attention to detail :)
The following months were crazy.
I opened my Facebook, Pinterest, Dribbble, Youtube and DeviantArt accounts, and I launched my Redbubble shop where I put to sale prints and other products based on my illustrations.
During that stage I changed the logo and the main image for something that better reflects my work:
Pixels Huh logo evolution
Thanks to the support of many fans my Pixel Art illustrations had a lot more exposure, and many specialized magazines and blogs started writing articles about my work, and some of them even contacted me for interviews! I couldn’t believe it! I felt like a celebrity! (Not really, but it was great :D).
(My sincere thanks to: David Shimomura of Kill Screen, Simon Berg of Die Welt Newspaper, Laura Rosenfeld of Tech Times, and everyone at How Design Magazine, The Creators Project, Abduzeedo, PlayGround Magazine, ARTE Tracks, Amy & Pink, Microsiervos, Fubiz, Kuvva, Inspiration Grid, Qruda Collective, FuriaMag, Criterion, Elaborate Taste, Taringa, AusRetroGamer, and many, many more. Thank you so much! <3)
Thanks to them my work was known by many new people and I started getting my first job offers as pixel artist, so I decided it was time to turn Pixels Huh into my full time job.
(I’d like to thank Katrina of Penguin Random House, Nuria of El Corte Ingles, Mery and Mat of Tigrelab, Victor of Mystic & Quantum Rec and everyone at La Caixa, Plain Vanilla Games, Wopidom and Beyond Tellerrand. It’s been great working with you these months and I hope we meet again in the future!)
As you know all this activity has not slowed my desire to keep working on my own Pixel Art scenes. During this first year I made no less than 22 pieces and I plan to beat that number this second year.
Here are some of my favorites:
Scene #11: ‘The Night Club’
Scene #15: ‘The Fisherman’s Daughter’
I’ve been exploring my animation skills too:
I ended this first year taking another step forward.
The help and support I’m getting from you all is really great and inspires me to keep learning and improving. But I know there’s some people who want to show their appreciation for my work in a more direct and personal way. That’s why I opened a Patreon account for those who want to help me keep this project alive for a long, long time: www.patreon.com/pixelshuh
I know that money is a very delicate subject, so I didn’t know exactly what to expect. But the response has been really awesome so far! It really, really helps!!
So thank you for your support, Matej, Ron, Isi, Kamirose, Paul, Michael, David, Nathan, Zhou, Gareth, Rafa, Blau, Pamela, Thibault, Luis, Jorn, Jaydeep, Ryan, Juniper, Dave, Tim and Alexandra, Garrett, Marion, Susan, Kyle, Maximo, Lloyd, Tinsnip, Exzentia, and of course, one of my biggest fans: my dad!
Wow! I thanked a lot of people in this article! :D
But I really mean it. If I wake up with energy and illusion every day is thanks to the people who spend a few minutes to write me some words of appreciation, who feature my work in their blogs, who supports this project buying from my shop or pledging some money on Patreon, who just click those Like, Fav and RT buttons…
This article is for you <3
Last but not least, I’d like to thank my awesome wife, Susanna, for her unconditional support (specially in the hard times), and also my family and my cats for all their love! :)
This first year of Pixels Huh has been definitely the most fun and exciting of my life, and I can’t wait to see what great things will come in the future! Don’t worry, I’ll write about it in my “Two years of Pixels Huh” article :D
Thank you so much for reading!
kianamaiart
stormborns
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