I don’t know if it’s just me, but the thought of having to pick a “profile picture” is the worst thing in the WORLD to me.
They’re so small and people will come to recognize you by it, so it’s important, but I also hate being one of those people who just throws their favorite character as their icon, because to me it’s supposed to be so representative of YOURSELF. And of course if your favorite character does for you, that’s fine, but I don’t really know, it never felt right for me.
Over the past .. many years, I’ve mostly used drawings of my FFXIV character as profile pictures, which works well enough and in some cases will be what I will keep doing. BUT… Recently I’ve been musing a lot on it and I wanna do something else.
Thankfully, I have an idea.
pixel art 🧡 (brief history)
this got me thinking …
my favorite profile pic of mine still is actually one from over a decade ago now – the one I use for my gaming youtube channel
My pfp on youtube is one that I drew myself way back, when my favorite game was Minecraft (and who’s wasn’t back then) so I thought that dabbling into pixel art would be the coolest thing.
I actually have a little graphic showing my progression on it, though the very last one I never actually stuck with in the end because it wasn’t quite as effective as a profile pic as I wanted it to be. Instead, I ended up updating the one in the middle and that stuck around til today (and will keep being there as my pfp still, honestly!)
So you know what I think I should do to solve this dilemma of mine? Make a pixel art profile picture, in the year 2025.
doing pixel art in 2025
And so I did exactly that after not drawing any1 for over a decade! (Actually writing this note gave me the little push I needed, as I went to dig up my old pixel art for the graphic above and had a nice little reminiscing about it.)
Obviously these days I like to have my aviators on when I show myself on video, so it was a no-brainer that I’d do something along the sort – but to be honest, it is also just a good defining feature for a medium such as pixel art. I took a few reference pictures of myself a week ago, but of course I had to let it sit before actually committing, lol.
I was going to do it just as I once did – have a reference photo, go on photoshop and use my mouse to actually do the drawing.
I downscaled my ref and started on it, roughly as I always did way back, basing the pixel art on a photo.
To be honest, at first I wanted to give up RIGHT away. As excited as I was about my unique defining feature, it turned out it was harder to capture than I expected.
And pixel art, in general, was harder than I remembered. (and I didn’t think it was easy, mind you!)
I picked a bigger canvas than my previous profile pictures used, 64x64px, so I wondered if I should lower it? Would that even help? Or make it even harder?
At one point, I even went to see what my options were if I wanted to commission someone else instead. But unfortunately, as is often as a creative, you just gotta do it yourself to really make it the way you wanted to see it, and none of the options I could find spoke to me.
Alas, I had to keep going.
Suddenly, once I turned off my reference picture, I realized that it wasn’t actually so bad. The sketch was rough, yes, but I could see it shaping up. I decided to stop relying so much on taking the basis from the reference and just kinda see what I can do….
Next thing I knew, I felt like I was just drawing with a mouse on a lower resolution canvas, rather than fumbling around with it best as I used to way back… and it felt strange – but also kind of nice!
I generally have a bit of a complex relationship with art and being An Artist, but this feeling of taking something I used to do before I properly learned to draw and doing it now having learned to draw…. it was a very bizarre experience to actually notice that my Art Fundamentals are there and that I am using them creating this little profile picture for myself.
It was a nice way to remind myself that I have grown in something over all these years.
And I got a cool profile picture out of it! :D
Here’s a little collage of the one WIP screenshot I took, as well as a billion alternative versions of the icon as I kept tweaking it over and over and over to make it look best as a little profile picture on social medias.
(I still dunno if I succeeded, but, I’m sure I’ll warm up to it.)
(also shoutout to https://avatarcropper.com/ for being a useful utlity, but also making me way too picky as I can see the little icons on the go. oh well.)
Footnotes
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So, when I mean any, I mean pixel art specifically. Since the last time I did pixel art, I’ve actually learned to draw, you know, properly. (as nice as it used to be doing the pixel art all that time ago, I never really took it that seriously as “drawing”.) It’s a creative outlet that I keep mostly to myself (but if you know you know!) as I am most DEFINITELY not an illustration-specialized designer, nor do I EVER wish to be, so it will stay that way. ↩