hello! Iโm zin, an australian pixel artist and fiction writer! I do my pixel art in MSPaint with a mouse, and have been working with the medium since 2013. my AO3 is here!
my main interests are TTRPGs and LARPs (vtm especially), love live!, vocal synths, and my own OCs, though I enjoy many other things as well!
๐ง main blog is @zinziinziiinย
๐ฉธ vampire/vtm blog is @pretend-pretend-vampireย
๐ง main love live blog is @koi-no-signal-zin-zin-zinย
๐ฉธ general horror blog is @mannequinwristย
if you want to play with gifs like dolls with me, here are the individual elements with greenscreen. I animate with MSPaint and photopea, and this is actually my first time working with layered elements since I think the DeviantArt canvas back in the day?
big:
true size (crunched by tumblr, sorry):
if anyone wants to copy My Specific Method as well, the process is detailed below:
first, ensure that you open the big version of the screen image in MSPaint, then select all and resize it to 125x75 pixels and trim the edges of the canvas. the true size images above have been subjected to artefacts upon upload, so using them will give an imperfect result. if you don't care about mixels, you can work with the big version of the file, but if you want to stay true to the format shrinking is best.
if your monitor is 1920x1080px like mine is, you can take a screenshot of anything you'd like, shrink it down to 4% of the original size (77x44px), and move it over the greenscreen part of the screen image. any image of the same ratio can be wrangled into the right size, though I'm not going to do that maths for you.
make the images bigger; 625x375px if you want the same size as mine. keep them crisp by copypasting the true size and dragging it bigger after enlarging the canvas. ensure that alternate screens (I have 3 versions of the screen; cevio, cevio with a note added, and a random spreadsheet) are saved separately.
open photopea, and open from computer your first screen image. add the big versions of the character sprite with file > open & place, then make sure the character sprite layer is selected and go to filter > other > colour to alpha. colourpick the greenscreen colour and turn the transparency threshold to 100% and the opacity threshold to 0%.
duplicate and arrange the screens as you'd like, with the start of the gif at the bottom of the layers list and each character sprite directly above the corresponding screen layer. go to each character sprite and merge it down to the screen layer below it, then name each combined layer "_a_[whatever]" so that the frames animate when you export it as a gif.
to do that, go to file > export as > GIF and interact with the menu from there. you can slow the gif down or speed it up, and if you find you want to lengthen certain parts, you can go back and duplicate frames you want to last longer.
I've not been animating very long, so there is probably an easier way even within photopea, but this has worked for my simple projects thus far and photopea is free, so I'm doing it this way for now.
