I made a thing and I'm proud of it.
As a side task, I tried to find various ways to update my Twitch streaming avatar; it was basically a stop-motion animation of a Heroforge model that I brute-forced into a PNGTuber sort of format. However, that was a very slow process and it was nearly impossible to keep it consistent from work-instance to work-instance, as I couldn't easily set frames or scales accurately.
I'd wanted to replace it forever, but never felt like it was worth spending money on what's essentially a side-hobby to have something professionally made, nor did I think I had the artistic capabilities of rendering it myself. I tried learning how to use digital drawing tablets, picture editing software such as GIMP, the whole nine yards, and nothing really worked.
Then, a while after I had played a little game called Dinoblits, it came to me. The little portraits of the dinosaurs in the game were exactly the type of expressive-yet-simple artstyles that I had wanted to emulate - see for yourselves:
That little guy is freakin' adorable!
So, I tried another round of designs, quite honestly aping the models used here. I even got in touch with the developers and asked them their design process for the sprite work; the most valuable lesson I learned from them was that their designs started small and were then scaled up. So, with that clue in tow and rudimentary work in Paint.NET and GIMP, I give you my next generation of avatar:
Yup. Anticlimactic. But it's something I made with the drawing tools available to me and without tracing. I made each frame and piped them all into GIMP to make the GIF, and have the opportunity to keep making more variants as I go!
It's not much in the grand scheme of things. But for someone who doesn't really have formal training in art techniques and digital art, I feel satisfied with what is essentially mashing three different art styles into one abomination to which I can call my own.
If you'd like to see it in action, you can find me using it here at https://www.twitch.tv/rtgamut