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Pixel art OCs

Been recently spending free time drawing silly little pixel arts of original characters. Here they are, in rough chronological order.

Face of a white-skinned woman with gray hair

Was browsing through the community page of a game on Steam, happened to see someone’s profile pic of an elf-like character from some MMORPG with purplish gray hair, and it gave me a tiny bit of inspiration to draw something similar. I did make little pixel art portraits before, but these were usually in a front-facing perspective.

Face of a young black guy with cornrow hair making a V shape with his left hand, as if lying on the ground and posing for a photo

This one looks kinda weird, I will admit that, I was experimenting with tilting the perspective by 45 degrees.

Pixel art image of a white woman with blonde hair, a tank-top, blue jeans and red sneakers slightly leaning onto a brick barrier

This is the first full-body image. I was (and am) still struggling with maintaining proper proportions and posing, which is part of why most of these images once again use front-facing perspective. Unlike most of these images, which use the PICO-8 palette, this one was an experiment with the Anb16 palette.

Pixel art image of a woman with yellowish white skin and black somewhat curly hair standing near the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. She’s wearing a red bomber jacket with a white stripe on each sleeve and going through the bottom and front in an inverted “T” shape, black pants, black shoes and white socks visible between pants and shoes.

This one ended up looking a bit goofy in my opinion. I spent most of my attention on the jacket, which was slightly inspired by one I saw on my way from work.

A somewhat silly-looking blue-skinned alien girl with antennas poking out of her head, but also elvish-like ears, big unusually-shaped all-white eyes, kinda chaotic red hair and a red uniform that’s got a bit of a shoulder pad thing going.

This was a rather quick attempt to draw something in the style of UFO 50, a collection of 50 original games by Mossmouth, all made in a style reminiscent of 8-bit console games, sharing a single 32-color palette.

A lot of the games in the collection have an overarching theme of “characters realize that fighting a conflict is a silly idea”, and I was imagining that this character could have fit a game about an alien invasion, being an alien girl who instead gets really into human culture and tries to help the humans instead (perhaps by running a between-level shop).

Pixel art image of a white-skinned woman with very red hair standing next to a wall, somewhat leaning onto it with her left hand and covering her mouth with her right hand (but it’s still possible to see a bit of a smile), wearing a white shirt, skirt, over-the-knee socks and not-yet-shaded-or-defined sneakers

At this point, I started both drawing these characters at a higher resolution and actually giving these OCs names, and this one was named Claire. The plain white background and clothes were a placeholder that I was using while figuring out how to properly draw things. The general workflow stayed the same – first freehand the face and basic pose as if i was drawing a stick figure, then gradually draw in the actual details – but the higher resolution was less forgiving of errors. On the other hand, I was finally able to draw someone’s hand without having to reduce the number of fingers, as is common in animation, as well as do realistic eyes properly.

Similar image to the previous one, except Claire now has fully-drawn sneakers and a more prominent shadow on the wall

Similar image to the second one, except Claire now has more proper hair, slightly thinner and better-shaded legs, and her shirt has medium-length sleeves instead of really long ones

Eventually I decided to give Claire a “retro video game”-styled outfit. The shirt got a design similar to that of a video game cartridge, while the skirt was instead styled after the connectors on a cartridge, with interleaving gray and yellow/golden stripes.

Pixel art image of a white-skinned woman with red hair standing next to a wall, slightly leaning onto it with her left hand, while covering up a smile with her right hand. She’s wearing a shirt with a design resembling a video game cartridge, whose box art shows a black man with a red headband and a white-skinned woman with blonde hair holding firearms, while weird claws and an alien head is behind them. Underneath that shirt is a skirt, with a visible stripe of green at the top and a stripy (and somewhat shiny) grey and yellow/golden pattern throughout the rest of the length, invoking the look of pins at the bottom of a video game cartridge. She’s wearing black knee-height socks and black sneakers with white tips, shoe strings and what looks like a small emblem at the side.

This one ended up resembling a weird mix between an NES and a Game Boy cartridge, with the central design being a slight modification of the Contra box art.

Same character as before, except with a different-looking shirt. It is now dark blue with gray grid lines running throughout, and the image in the center of it now portrays three people in front of a cityscape: a black man with black hair and a yellow vest, a white-skinned man with blonde hair, a blue headband, a white tank top and jeans, and a white-skinned woman with black hair in a red dress. All of them are raising their fists, as much as it is possible to show in such a tiny space.

Then I decided to draw a different design for the shirt, styled after Streets of Rage instead. Sadly, cartridges for the 16-bit Sega console tended to have rather boring designs in and of themselves, so instead I took the grid pattern from the game boxes instead.

This character, unlike all the others, existed for several months. I used Konrad as a character in an online game, and figured it would be neat to give him a pixel-art portrait in the same style as well. Not to mention that, so far, almost all the characters have been female.

A pixel art image of a white-skinned middle-aged man with blonde hair, wearing a dark blue formal uniform with red rank markings on top, a logo with the letter N on the right (left for the viewer) side, gray buttons and two silver-ish lines at the end of the sleeves. Underneath the suit is a simple belt buckle and some kind of electronic device. Below are dark blue pants and black shoes.

An alternate outfit for the previously seen character, with a more formal button-up suit, gold trim lines on the sleeves, a black undershirt with a star emblem instead of a tie, black pants with gold trim on the sides and a visible leather belt.

Eventually I decided to rescale the 128x128 full-body characters to the same size as Claire and Konrad. In practice, this led to severe redrawing of their features.

The girl in a tank top got the name Ashley, whereas the one with the jacket was named Hannah.

A white-skinned woman with blonde hair slightly sitting on a short brick wall. she’s wearing a white tank top, blue jeans with a belt and red sneakers

An orange-ish white-skinned woman with red glasses and black somewhat wavy hair standing in front of a cliff facing the sea. she’s wearing a red jacket with a white line in an inverted T shape and similar white lines on her wrists, a white t-shirt below it, black pants, slightly visible white socks and black shoes

One day, I also felt like drawing Claire in a more casual outfit doing a heart shape with her hands. Probably due to a simpler pose and outfit, it only took a single day.

Pixel art image of a white-skinned woman with red hair and green eyes. she’s smiling and doing a heart shape with her hands. She’s wearing a white t-shirt, blue somewhat baggy jeans and white socks.

For the next character, I went with a more unusual aesthetic instead of going for “conventionally attractive” designs. I also wanted to try drawing a plus-sized character for once, and experiment with more complicated backgrounds and poses that aren’t just front-facing once again. The end result is Danielle. I like to imagine that she doesn’t care at all about the opinions of any fashion magazines and dresses according to her own preferences, which her friends happen to love.

On a more technical aspect, this is also the first design where I decided to use the extended 32-color palette from Picotron, which provides more skin tones, shades of blue, gray and even good purples, which the original PICO-8 palette lacked.

Pixel art image of a white-skinned woman standing inside of a subway train. she has gray side-shaved hair and yellow eyes. she’s wearing a necklace with a heart shape on it, a purple shirt, a belt underneath that’s mostly hidden by her hands, a gray skirt that wraps around a bit and has a petal-like shape closed by buttons, stockings and casual purple shoes.

Once again, real-life inspiration gave me the idea for the skirt. I still have no idea what that kind of design is actually called, I tried looking up “petal skirt” and got confusing results.