hi, i'm jenn schiffer and this is my lifestyle blog

nearest neighbor studies 1, 2, 3

over the past several months i've been very slowly working on some pixel art gouache studies based off of figure drawings i'd done of both live models at jc print room and online. if you read my weekly retros you'd have seen some peeks into my work. if not, this post is also for you. and i wanted to share photos of the process taken with my samsung nv10 that i bought myself 20 years ago. i'm not trying to blog about cameras right now though.

tl;dr: i painted three paintings, and here are all three paintings together:

photo of me making a monster face in front of my three pixel art figure paintings on the easel behind me

i call this series "nearest neighbor" because i digitally render the references by scanning my sketches and scaling them down using the nearest neighbor scaling algorithm which gives it a sharp pixel art output. i've been using photopea for this a couple of years now.

okay, so i'll start each study showing my original sketch and then process shots. remember, these were taken with a 20-year-old point and shoot digital camera, so do try to appreciate the dreaminess of the shots instead of lamenting the...lack of focus lol.

figure drawing sketch in black ink of a nude woman with one hand on her hip and the other bent with her hand touching her shoulder slightly

for the first study, i took the scan of the sketch, scaled it down and then fussed with color levels so that the pixels were mostly black but there were accents of purples, greens and a couple of reds. it reminded me of when you'd put your eyes right up to a crt television screen and can see the colorful dots that are still needed to make a mostly black and white image.

photo of me starting the first pixel figure study on my dining room table, i'm reflected in the mirror on the wall and giving the finger (endearingly)

i worked on this in december on our dining room table. i used some colors from this winsor and newton student gouache set that i got dirt cheap during a sale.

photo of the first pixel art study about halfway done, with the black outline pixels and the different collor accent pixels. you can also see my sketchbook where i'm using the excess paint to paint anotehr figure, my phone showing the digital reference, and a camera recording the process

i recorded the entire process. maybe i will post a timelapse one day. i record a lot of my art practice and talk to myself so that i can go back and take notes of things i call out to myself. if i die and someone posthumously posts these videos, i will haunt them.

photo of the painting with a blue background pretty much finished

i was painting on a livestream the other day and showed this final painting off and said i will probably go back and make the background more opaque. i like the color accents, but i wonder if it would look even cooler if the background was fully black. i will probably do this figure again in black and white with a cyan background based on my experience of the following studies.

photo of a printer-paper-sized beaded tapestry where the strands are mounted from the top to a thick piece of brown board and the image is the same figure and colors as the painting

oh, i also made a little beaded tapestry to see if i would enjoy doing beadwork. the answer to that is...no. lol. at least not right now in my life. the beads against the board sound very cool when pumagreg jumps onto the cat tree that it currently adorns. beads sure are heavy and expensive.

figure drawing sketch of a few nude figures in black ink. in the middle is the sketch i used of a mid-sized woman with onehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpYqt7oCXFs arm behind her back and the other arm softly rested on her hip

the inspiration that sparked this series actually came from this figure sketch. this was from an online model, and it is such an elegant, simple and interesting pose. this was my favorite painting of the series so far as well.

photo of the painting paper with a grid drawn on it and you see the digital reference of a grayscale pixel art figure of a woman with a yellow background. you also see the camera recording the process.

this time i wanted to skip the color accents and just go full grayscale on the body and a bright background. i am also now realizing as i edit this photo that i recorded this painting's process too. i forget if i captured the whole thing though.

my painting in progress, with black pixels of the figure done. on the wall mirror you see a reflection of me giving the finger. we are at the dining room table again.

i'm also working at the same table with a similar setup except i only had to work with black, white and yellow gouaches. i used holbein gouaches, one of tubes i bought in berlin a very long time ago and the others were part of this 12-piece set i impulse bought - a purchase that i think i would regret if i believed in the act of having regrets. 😈

photo of my painting finished, with the yellow background still drying

i love how this one came out. the yellow was such a good choice, and i love how it contrasts with the grayscale figure. maybe i should another bead project but with this one using the lessons i learned from the first beaded peace i did [btw if you'd like to contribute to my heavy and expensive bead budget as a thank you for blogging, you can tip me and/or shop my store, bugs rock xoxo]

figure drawing sketch in pencil of a nude woman wearing a wide brimmed hat, with her arms up and two the sides holding up a long scarf. she's wearing fishnet stockings

for the third study i wanted to do a larger painting and try a model that has some kind of props or accessories. this model was from an online gallery.

photo the grayscale figure of the above nude woman in a hat and scarf painted on paper on my easel. next to it is the print out of the digital reference, showing the background will be a medium "cosmos" pink.

i livestreamed most of the process of this painting but i didn't record the majority of it. this means that if you happened to watch any of my streamplace streams, you are special and got to watch something no one else ever would. i'm still trying to figure out the best desk setup to paint live. at least it finally occurred to me that my easel is extremely adjustable in height as it's on a standing desk lol. this was way better for my back than the table!

photo of the painting with all of the grayscale nude done and you can see the pencil grid

another thing i wanted to try was keeping the pencil grid, in the other two paintings i erased any visible pencil grid lines. i think this is cool for inside the figure, but not so much in the background.

photo of the final painting, with the medium "cosmo" pink background painted

i loved this "cosmos pink", it reminds me of a hotel i had stayed in berlin in 2019 that had a freight-like elevator this exact color. i did not like painting the accessories, the scarf in particular. it was a lot of work to keep its dimension without a lot of pay-off. it will be awhile before i try to paint this big again unless the figure is smaller.

🦋🍌🎀

when i got into painting pixel art, that was only after an entire era of me using colored pencils and gel pens to make "analog pixel art". i find painting to be way more ergonomic and affordable, with the only tradeoff being that paint is harder to control or do very precise work than with pencil or pen. even though i've been doing it awhile, i still love capturing and iterating on my process to make the practice and my work more fun. anyway here is what i learned from this series:

i am not a big fan of acrylic gouache. it's hard to clean up after, and can't be reactivated.
monochrome figures with a high contrast background are cool to paint and look at
beads are heavy and expensive
my camera works great still even though it is 20 years old, all it needed was a new battery.
i shouldn't wait 7 months to share a painting

at the end of the day, if any of you can take one thing out of this entire series - which is only just beginning - it's that my hoarding of peripheral cables for over 20 years has been validated, which means so has yours.

xoxo jenn

this was published July 28, 2026 under living art pixel-art nearest-neighbor painting acrylic gouache watercolor nv10 photography

weekly retro #77: blue skies and painted pixels

after a week of smoke in the air and severe thunderstorms and heat, we got to see a week of blue skies and an atmosphere that doesn't burn one's nose more than it usually does around this car-dominated hellscape. this week we were all outside and it ruled.

weekly retro #76: hazy shade of whenever

this week was one of those weeks where i felt like i was just going through the motions, living in the moment but feeling a bit out of body. i think it was a mix of the heat, the wildfire smoke, my period, and the windup and down of the world cup.

what i made during my fourth ceramics class

technically i had scheduled myself to spend this hour in the ceramics studio, but i didn't want to go all the way there and find that my bisqueware isn't ready, so i've decided to push that time to tomorrow and instead publish the latest in the *what i made in my ceramics class* series.

weekly retro #75: bingo

this week began in recovery from the heat wave and being outside so much in the direct sunlight the few days before. i said i didn't want to see the sun for at least 48 hours and it obliged, although we could have done without the massive amounts of rain.

weekly retro #74: heat dome

it is presently a cool 84 degrees (F) out according to my laptop as i type this in a well air-conditioned room. don't be mistaken, though, your beloved princess of hating the heat (me) spent a lot of time outdoors despite, and in spite of, a three-day "heat dome" bringing over 100 temperatures to the metropolitan area throughout the 4th of july weekend.

weekly retro #73: frequent stops

this past week was a test for how bad i really want to be off my phone, and the answer is *very bad*. it's a tough habit to kick though, requiring intentional moves like deleting apps and logging off of web pages, keeping the phone further from me than other things i could fidget with my hands and eyes, and simply going outside. in an algorithmic world, making intentional moves is really hard.

weekly retro #72: cone's off, cramps on

when i was in college learning software engineering, my professor told us that there's no way to say with 100% certainty that your software is bug-free. even if everything is working perfectly now, there's always a chance that some kind of race condition or memory leak will rear its ugly head down the line. that doesn't mean you should never celebrate a release, just that there's a level of humility needed to align with reality. i bring that up to show that i know that there are caveats when i say that pumagreg is cancer-free. as far as the sarcoma in his leg is concerned, he's all clear, and that's a huge win!

weekly retro #71: the cat's alive, knicks in five

i wrote last week's retro from the floor of my bathroom next to pumagreg as he lay lethargic after pissing blood, and with advice from the animal hospital to see if it clears in the morning otherwise bringing to an emergency room. today, i type this from my couch as pumagreg lays nearby after zooming around looking for food. it's incredible how a good nights rest can heal even the sickest little guys.

weekly retro #70: asked the vet for a lobotomy but they said no

happy june, happy pride. it's also the beginning of what i'd been preparing for weeks, which is a new chapter in my cat's life as a (hopefully) cancer-free tripod. in this weekly retro i talk about some dark stuff but calling attention to the dark makes the light even brighter or whatever. oh, and go knicks!

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