jenn schiffer's live laugh 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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 😈

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]

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.

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!

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.

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:

1. i am not a big fan of acrylic gouache. it's hard to clean up after, and can't be reactivated.
2. monochrome figures with a high contrast background are cool to paint and look at
3. beads are heavy and expensive
4. my camera works great still even though it is 20 years old, all it needed was a new battery.
5. 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