Hyperlink Your Heart - Art

Coming Down

2025-07-08T11:59:00+02:00

Something I’ve had in my mind for a while is to do something based on the Chemical Brothers’ song “Where Do I Begin”, which I think captures well the feeling of coming down after a trip; the mix of awe and confusion and the tenuous connection to your sense of self.

So I set out to do that, intending it to feature a woman with a coffee cup, like in the song… and somehow got diverted into this close-up portrait. I think I had planned something like Cosmic Eye, where she would have a universe visible in her pupil, but she wasn’t really at the necessary scale for that to work.

I further intended to animate the colours, and shift between different palettes in a sort of pulsing manner, but that wasn’t working out the way I planned, so I abandoned it.

I guess the most notable feature of this piece is the dithering style, which is sort of rough and incorporates various shapes. I’ve never tried this style before.

I might need to try this again and stick closer to my original vision…

Timelapse

I used the recorder feature of Pixelorama to capture this timelapse, in the mode that only captures the canvas. I like that the result does not hop around erratically like my previous timelapse, but it does get a bit hard to follow what is actually being worked on at some points when it gets into the finer details, especially the anti-aliasing.

Big Lick

2025-06-12T15:36:00+02:00

Oh boy, it’s been a while since I posted any art! I think I was put off the whole endeavour back when NFTs were the big thing and a lot of artists I respected were showing their ass over them. I had also started a piece that was maybe a bit too complex for me, and I started to dread working on it, and to feel guilty about not working on it, and then I started thinking that art for its own sake was just a distraction from what I had actually set out to do, which was to make a videogame. I started putting a lot more time into developing my dialogue graph editor for Godot instead (since given the name “Digression”), and a tiny bit into the mechanics of the game, and just didn’t think about art for a while.

Since then of course, NFTs seem to have basically disappeared from the zeitgeist, their promises of vast riches and libertarian copyright enforcement for artists unfulfilled, and all the artists have been replaced by machines that can pull, on command, statistically likely representations of anything you can imagine out of the aggregate of all visual media on the Internet. As if it wasn’t bad enough that a huge chunk of it was already owned by giant corporations, capital is now grinding up our culture into a meaningless, commodified slurry and feeding it back to us. The pretense of having the interests of artists at heart has been replaced by a naked, shameless grasping. And with governments falling over each other to attract AI investment, it seems unlikely that there is going to be any recourse for individual creators any time soon.

So I’d like to say, then, that the reason I did this piece was that I’m an obstinate luddite who refuses to accept that the age of human creativity is over, and that I had to do my part to help preserve it. But actually I just needed to do something for my sister’s birthday, and it occurred to me that I’d never done any pixel art for her even though she is someone who would probably appreciate it. And isn’t that a fine, human motivation for getting back into art?

She did appreciate it, btw. I’m not sure she would have if I had engineered her a prompt instead.

Tools and Process

I used to use Pyxel Edit for all my art, but it is proprietary and Windows only and I couldn’t get it running in Wine since I switched to Fedora. So I have switched to Pixelorama instead, an open source pixel art paint program developed in Godot. There are a few things that Pyxel Edit did better, but Pixelorama is a very decent substitute. I like that you can put different tools on your left and right mouse buttons, though it tripped me up a lot initially. One thing I really miss is the ability to update a colour globally from the palette. It was great to be able to completely change direction with the colours without having to repaint anything. That was something I used to do quite often and at any stage of the process, sometimes even when a piece was otherwise finished. Maybe I will look into contributing to the project, since I am somewhat familiar with Godot…

When I tried adding the reference image it just automatically put it under the canvas, which I wasn’t expecting, but since it did I decided to just trace a rough outline of the figures for expediency.

Unusually for me I did a lot of anti-aliasing in this one, and I really liked how that turned out, especially on the face. More of that in the future.

Also unusually I did not pay much attention at all to how many colours I was using. There is relatively little dithering as a result, and what is there is mostly for texture rather than giving the appearance of additional colours. I usually like the challenge of keeping colour counts low, but it was nice to be more relaxed about it for a change - I ended up using 64, and it’s not as if the resulting palette is general purpose!

Timelapse

The timelapse for this one is a bit of a mess. My previous method of capturing them doesn’t work in Wayland, and I overlooked a feature in Pixelorama that would have allowed me to evaluate the canvas without having to zoom in and out constantly. I’ve since discovered that it has a recorder feature that can save a copy of the canvas after every change, so I will likely try that for my next piece and the timelapse should have a very different look…

Out of Road

2021-08-11T17:10:00+02:00

I don’t remember where I got the inspiration for this one. I guess I’ve been thinking a lot about climate change recently, what with the great crypto/NFT debates earlier in the year and recent extreme weather events and wildfires. It seems particularly timely given the recent IPCC report.

In terms of technique, I used a 3D render as a base, which is something I’ve done before, but this time I used somebody else’s CC licensed model because cars are kinda complex.

“Ford Mustang Mach 1” by BaldGuyMartin is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution.

Timelapse

Recent Art & Portfolio

2021-06-08T00:20:00+02:00

Once again I have become neglectful of updating this blog with my artwork, so let’s do a roundup of the last uh… 7 months?!?! and maybe I’ll try to get it back on track from here on. Though I do have a nice portfolio site now that I have been keeping up to date, so if you really like my art you could be following that as well. More on that below.

Socialist Revolutionaries Past & Future

Last October I was trying to get back into the development of my game Just a Robot, and started as I always do by completely re-imagining its entire look. In this case I was inspired by the look of Soviet propaganda and Anarchist woodcuts.

I followed that up in December with this tribute to the luxurious moustache of Irish revolutionary socialist James Connolly.

Spaaaace

For the New Year I committed myself to working on more space and sci-fi themed stuff. I started with this depiction of a space station roughly based on the ISS.

Also in January, a spaceship approaching Mercury, with some tricky perspective.

In February I did another piece loosely inspired by Soviet propaganda, and a theme that seemed to be somewhat controversial - the idea of billionaires fleeing into space and leaving the rest of us to our fates. Some people took that as a literal prediction of future events, but I think of it in more allegorical terms - capital is ruining the natural and social environment without any sense of responsibility to the rest of us, while its masters can escape the consequences of their actions without literally leaving the planet - depicting them doing so is just a good way of describing the situation, in my opinion.

In March I brought it back to Earth and explored the same theme from another perspective, more or less.

I started a piece in April for Cosmonautics day, but I didn’t get it finished until June - the capsule and final stage of Vostok 1 in orbit. I did a game jam and an oil painting in the meantime though!

And that pretty much brings us up to date!

Portfolio

My portfolio site, which went live in July 2020, is another statically-generated site based on Pelican, but focused on image galleries instead of blog entries (using the standard gallery plugin). I wanted a central place to put my art that wasn’t a social media platform, and that would display it optimally. I’ve linked to it a few times from here despite never actually mentioning it.

It is inspired by the ideas of Matej Jan on displaying art on the internet, and attempts to display my pieces at the best integer scaling to fit in the browser window, on a background with appropriate contrast, and with no distractions.

Of course, I also wanted to keep it as small and responsive as possible, so it does this with about 3kB of javascript, 11kB of CSS, and a selection of minimal SVG backgrounds. Because all the art is pixel art, transferring it at 1x resolution and resizing it in the browser (as discussed in recent posts) keeps things extremely compact, with the entire portfolio currently only amounting to 390kB. The portfolio does a lot better job of displaying the art than this blog does though, here the images are just resized to max width without attempting an integer scaling.

I think it looks real nice and that my art looks real nice on it, so go check it out!

Avocados

2020-11-02T21:23:00+01:00

I’m not very good at doing these art posts in a timely manner; I did this still-life of a couple of avocados for pixel dailies back in September!

Timelapse

Mine

2020-09-26T23:29:00+02:00

A portrait I did of my friend Mine a few weeks ago.

Timelapse

Anticipation

2020-09-09T12:19:00+02:00

I was inspired to create this when I won a postcard and sticker pack giveaway on twitter by my friend Stefanie, and I was eagerly waiting for it to arrive! I actually did this a while ago but I forgot to post it here.

Go check out Stefanie’s work, it’s amazing. Thanks for the goodies Stef!

Timelapse

Observatory

2020-07-02T18:48:00+02:00

An animation I made for Asteroid day to continue my space-themed art streak! Thanks to my friend Stefanie for the suggestion! Please click that link and check out her absolutely stunning art, you won’t regret it.

Prints

Prints are available through RedBubble, INPRNT and coming soon to Displate.

Timelapse

Celestial

2020-06-24T22:55:00+02:00

Only a few days after the last inspiring pixel dailies prompt, another one appeared that I couldn’t resist - “Celestial”. I had three ideas for it immediately but I only had time to do the one above on the day. I’m glad I spaced them out anyway because I think I achieved a lot with the extra time.

The second idea I worked on was originally only a planet-rise over some mountains, but it evolved quite a bit as I worked on it until it was about spaceships racing over a peaceful alien village.

I’m quite pleased with the palette and animation on this one.

The final concept I only completed yesterday, a view of the night sky through some trees.

Prints

Prints are available through RedBubble (linked individually above), and Displate.

Timelapses

Available from 2020-06-25:

Cosmic Eye

2020-06-06T21:44:00+02:00

I got back into the pixel dailies a couple of days this week. I’ve never used them as an actual daily practice, but when I see a theme I like I jump in. This day, the theme was “Eye”, and I really like eyes.

Unfortunately I was pushed for time that day so the result is a bit rough - however, I think it gets the idea across, which is “eyes which are full of stars and made of stars and also stars were there”.

I started this one out with my drawing tablet, which I don’t usually use for pixel art and amn’t very good with. I’m trying to get away from using so many rigid straight lines, and treat pixel art more like regular painting. I had to switch to the mouse towards the end for the finer details, but it’s a start.

Timelapse

Catnip

2020-01-23T15:52:00+01:00

I put together an animation over the last few weeks of a cat trying to catch gliders on a 70’s styled computer. Check it out on YouTube:

I actually only set out to draw the computer, and I’m not sure at what point the cat entered the picture, but I’m glad it did! My goal wasn’t to depict any specific vintage computer, but to create a somewhat implausible one from imagination. I did look at a bunch of references for ideas on what to include, mostly from oldcomputers.net

Music

I had originally planned to create a patch in VCVRack to accompany the animation, but I struggled to create something that felt right for the animation. Several attempts to create something in LMMS also failed. I ended up putting something together in beepbox.