In February 2023, I entered the pixel art world to create several sprites for a player character for a two-day game jam. Whilst I had some art experience, I never touched digital art or pixel art. But once I booted up Aseprite, a pixel-art program,  everything felt right.  I could draw not only many character sprites but also visual effects and UI elements for our game.  In those frantic two days, I learned two things: the importance of every pixel in a canvas and how fast I can work. 

In later months, I continued to make pixel art for video games, learning how to create environments, landscapes, and animations. I learned several techniques, such as dithering, anti-aliasing, and smearing. As I was also a character designer for Magnet Run, I learned how to incorporate my audience into my designs. For example, since we had a younger audience, it was important to create characters whose colors pop to attract a younger audience. But the characters also need to have an appealing yet simple design so kids can remember the game they just played.

As of October 2023, I have contributed to the PixelDex project, an online collaboration between pixel artists to create monsters for a bestiary. This was the first time I ever contributed to an online community project where I knew no one. To submit your art for the PixelDex, you needed to follow certain guidelines and thus couldn’t just submit anything. For example, you had to adhere to a certain color palette, your canvas couldn’t be bigger than 96×96 pixels, or your monster had to have certain elements to be eligible for submission. Despite these being guidelines, it enhanced my creativity as I was able to design around these requirements and feel tethered to a certain idea, as opposed to having no guiding light and thus feeling a bit lost when it comes to monster creation.