Laquin

I'm Laquin, a hobbyist pixel artist and full-time goober <:

It was my friend ruedischmuedi's birthday in December! For those who don't know, Ruedi's the Number One Excadrill lover in the world by a huge margin. Needless to say, a birthday illustration needed to feature it!

I think my idea for the drawing was pretty clear from the start, yet the execution was embarrassingly bad at first 💀 The anatomy was all over the place, Excadrill's head looked like a rat 😭 Bro did not deserve that.

It took me a while but i managed to more or less figure out its body shape, how it's pretty much a sphere with limbs. Afterwards, honestly everything else went pretty smoothly!

I did a couple of experiments on the floor to figure out the best way to texture it and ended up with this that you're seeing. it's supposed to be different kinds of rocks and sand scattered around. I must say it was pretty fun to do it xD I'm not sure it looks that good, but i was told by some friends that it does, so I'll have to trust them.

I'm super happy with the outlining and coloring. The palette is quite but not overly vibrant, and I feel like the metallic parts of Excadrill are just the right color. I did something weird by making the sky around its body a bit darker, and i think it worked great to tell the metals apart from the sky.

Only part I'm not content with is the cake… Meh, it's kind of hidden, right? Doesn't stand out at all and I'm not sure what I should've done about it.

Finally, the clouds are completely made out of dithering and super proud of that idea, it looks coherent with the sand on the floor and I feel like it makes it more forgiving to not get a perfect shape for the cloud.

Anyways, overall I'm very happy with this drawing even though the beginning was chaotic. I mean, I always start my drawings quite chaotically lol.

well well well, another birthday gift that i'm posting half a year late :p this was for a friend i've had for quite a long time! she's been really supportive to me during tough times and i appreciate her a lot for that. :) yet the last time i had hung out with her was in 2021!

Of course, that being the case, we have very few photos together, and this drawing is based on one of them. Now, I must admit I have cheated a little bit here (hope the Pixel Art gods are not reading this…), as i partially traced the original image.

Well, it was a busy season, and drawing figures was too daunting, so to be honest i didn't even try lol. That means that the proportions are pretty much perfect! But i still did the texturing and coloring manually, and did some slight modifications to the original composition.

One of such cases was on her leg. The reference was too blurry and dark, and instead of a leg i was seeing a weird vague shape. I mean, it's not really my fault, those trousers had some garments on the side and made everything super confusing. 😭 After figuring out what it was, i decided to change the shape slightly and make it readable in the drawing.

I do love how the people's shadow on the seats look! I'm not used to making that kind of irregular? random-ish? noisy? dithering (i don't know what the appropriate word is), but it sure worked so well ^^

I also like the style on the faces. I first drew the eyes and all that, but realised that hiding all those details looked way cuter! So that's how i left it.

I do not like the colors used on the phone. Too saturated, and a value too similar to that of the background.

A dear friend of mine had his birthday in November (I drew this in November, don't worry, I'm just late to post it as always). He's a VERY dedicated fan of Sonic. And as a good Dutchman he likes frikandel broodje!

Frikandel has been a running joke between us. So when i was brainstorming what to draw for this birthday drawing, I thought 'Whoa! What if I draw him eating frikandel instead of a cake!? I'm so original!!'

So I started looking for Sonic references and… Bruh, it turns out Sonic's canonical fav dish is chili dog?? WHAT WERE THE CHANCES 😭 So my super original frikandel eating Sonic now looks like an average Sonic with a weird looking chili dog.

Anyways… I stuck to it regardless.

I had a lot of trouble getting Sonic's body shape right. Bro has a really weird anatomy… On the first sketch, I was making the body way too fat and the ears extremely long. The body still looks weird, especially on the hip area, but it's definitely an improvement over what I started with.

I do like what the eyes look like. I wanted to make the shiny eyes that I sometimes see in anime when a character sees something they like. I think i managed to convey that just fine.

Finally, I like the environment. The globes look colorful yet not too distracting! And the ground is an obvious reference to Green Hills as any Sonic fan would probably recognise.

(A submission for #monthlypixels on Bsky)

I promised Shrimp I would participate, and I'm sooooooo so glad that I did. I am super happy with the outcome!!!

First of all, for the nerdies: yes, I know….. Pumpkins are not a vegetable and blah blah blahhh 🤓☝️. I learned that even eggplants are a fruit (WHAT!????). BUT! It has the culinary properties of a vegetable, right? (just say yes so that i am not disqualified, please).

I just wanted a more original way to include the three vegetables in the composition. And I'm kind of proud of this silly idea that I had! Sometimes I question my creativity, compare to other artists and feel like I'm not capable of coming up with fun ideas. But idk, I kinda like the eggplant thing!

As for the more technical side of things, y'all know I always have difficulty using reduced palettes. And making my own palettes too. But I love the one I managed to pull on this work! I guess all it takes is being a little bit bold to reduce the color count in a painting. I feel I now have a better understanding of how saturation should be used when making a palette. For example, lowering the pumpkin's orangeish color's saturation made it blend so much better with the environment. I ended up using 5 colors insead of the allowed 8!

Anyways, the drawing process was pretty smooth, it didn't take too much time to draw it (apart from the 29 days of procrastination, lmao). And I had fun!

(OC by @/okeydokeyboyo.bsky.social on Bsky)

it was Boyo's birthday on Halloween! Boyo seems to love pencil drawings ―he's been pencil drawing cakes on pretty much all birthdays celebrated in our mutual Discord server. So I decided to uno reverse card and make one for him as well.

… yeah, I know. I'm posting this more than TWO months late. I'm so sorry 😭 Life has been stressful 💀 and writing these texts sometimes feels daunting. But i handed in the gift in time, so it's all good! (i hope) ¬¬

I'm reaally happy with the pumpkins, which simulate whipped cream. They're not that impressive, but I remember drawing them quite seemlessly. It felt 'intuitive,' and I remember the same couldn't be said about older drawings of mine. It's cool to feel progress apart from just seeing it visually.

Likewise, I feel quite proud of how I'm having more 'creative' ideas on the drawings. Just silly details like having a halloweeny arm replace a boring candle. I've been noticing it in all my recent art, and I'm confirming that creativity is a learned and trained skill.

Everything was going quite well, until a thought popped up in my mind. 'Hmm, yeah! I should blend the tones!' Horrible idea 🥀 The paper texture actually looked quite cool, and that charm was lost after rubbing the tissue over the drawing.

I knew this could happen, but I wanted to try regardless. I had some hope that it would improve the result, but it didn't. So I'm kinda sad I don't have an undo button, to keep the non-blended version as canon. But i guess this bittersweet feeling is part of what traditional art is about.