#20 colors

[someofmyrecordcollection]

20 Colors ‎– 20 Colors

Metronome ‎– 827 209-1

Vinyl, LP, Album

Germany, Aug 1985

Pop

[sanvitheartificer]

Some cellphone photos of my art for @yjficexchange (for a fic by the wonderful @cakeandpi!) Here is a link to the story: http://archiveofourown.org/series/749676

[a picture of Kaldur’Ahm facing us, drowning. He does not have gills or webbed fingers, and bright turquoise blue bubbles are coming out of his mouth, floating upwards. A few tears are also floating upwards. The tattoo on his right arm wraps around his hand and becomes an anchor, the same shade of blue as the bubbles with subtle black patterns. He is surrounded by a yellow-peach glow, with a brighter yellow surrounding the anchor. The background is dark blue-purple. There is cursive text written to the side.

The text reads: “duty  what a good <strike>soldier</strike> <strike>hero</strike> sacrifice” ]

[spacecasepc]

i was going to snap all the final colors to ones in the 4096-color palette available to the PC-98 series, but somehow I accidentally blew the 16 color limit and I think it's using 20; therefore PC-98 compliance is out the window. But since the TV series came out when it did, it's possible an Outlaw Star game could have appeared on the platform.

My original vision was to pretend such a game existed; by doing the show's final epilogue art, doing the Outlaw Star logo and pasting it over that, and creating a rudimentary "main menu" of typical game selections.

But what it turned into was a 20-color study of manual pattern dithering and antialiasing with a limited palette.

I took a screencap of the epilogue, cropped it, resized it to 640x400 (bilinear) and set that as the base/guide layer to trace over.

I also did some machine color reductions after both bilinear and nearest-neighbor size reductions on the original screenshot and used them for reference layers. The background (stars) is also blend of a few different automated palette reductions which I used different settings for. Some used pattern dithering and some used diffusion dithering, each did some area better than the others even after snapping all their palettes to the homogeneous one. So for that I just painted masks, and manually repainted into that several pixels from the edge of most foreground outlines. Everything in the foreground, though, including antialiasing and patterns, has been put there by me, with the pencil. The original (full color, machine-reduced antialiased reference layer) is completely covered with new pixels.

Most of the history looks like the image above. I worked on this for several months. I guess that means I am not a pixel artist; I am a pixel tracer. So I am, then. But let me tell you, there are some reallllly difficult choices to make when trying to simulate effective antialiasing and pattern dithering especially when they are right next to each other/one and the same. I'm also color blending with the intention of tricking your brain into seeing colors that aren't in the palette (like yellow and orange) and for those colors to appear as gorgeous smooth gradients on a CRT display (simulated with software because I don't have a real one anymore)

I have worked really hard on this and it's about 90% done but I still have a feeling the "real" pixel artists on tumblr would hate it for my use of machine reduction and tracing :P

[sporraky]

20

[someofmyrecordcollection]

Twenty Colors ‎– Anytime

Metronome ‎– 883 269-1

Vinyl, 12", Maxi-Single, 45 RPM

Germany 1985

Synth-pop

[someofmyrecordcollection]

Twenty Colours ‎– Up In Flames

Metronome ‎– 881 352-1

Vinyl, 12", Maxi-Single, 45 RPM

Germany 1984

Synth-pop, Electro

[eternity9]