Porcirelius / Pixel Artist
ON BEING CREATIVE
---------
This is not a competition. You are not being requested to be better than others at something. You have your own path, with your own ups and downs, your own pace, rewards and goals. We humans can only focus in one thing at a time, and if you ever find yourself focusing on someone else's work, opinion, goal, then you've successfully lost focus in yourself. Focus in yourself, and take people as inspiration, not as idols. They're not deities, and what we sometimes call talent is, in reality, a background full of hard work and struggles.
BACKGROUND
-------- If you can spot Brazil and Argentina in a world map by just plain memory then you'll notice, squeezed in-between the middle, the unknown country from which I belong to: Uruguay. And since Brazil is right next to us our culture has both hispanic and portuguese elements, sometimes called "portuñol" by locals (portuguese + español) That's enough Uruguay for you already. There wasn't much stuff to do when I was a kid other than watching television or going outside; and I didn't like to do homework neither. So because I had a piece of paper on me and nothing else to do besides that horrible homework, it was all settled down for me to start drawing. I think that's pretty much true for most school kids, to start drawing nonsense as a procrastination response for homework, however I took that practice to the next level, by purely disregarding homework at all! (please don't do that). I wasn't quite the student, as you can tell, but I ended up approving anyways, take that Juan! (that's my old chemistry professor) I can't really tell if drawing came to me naturally or did I get better overtime by pure practice alone from an early age. What I can tell for sure is that I've never attended any art-related school ever. Despite that, I do know and practice a lot of activities: drawing, design, piano, music in general, programming (which requires some math knowledge) and a bit of writting to. I'm also speaking to you in a foreign language after sucking as a student! The natural way the brain learns stuff is by imitation: a baby will learn to speak and walk purely by watching their parents do so, and they don't attend school to learn those, do they? And so I did learned every skill by watching others and trying to understand their work. Don't disregard school, but don't get discouraged if you can't go or don't feel like going neither. You'll get there one way or another. About why did I choose pixelart specifically, I didn't until very late. I was mostly doing traditional, pencil and sometimes watercolor, tried to learn vectors once I got a computer and then switched to handcraft practices such as origami and clay sculpting. Doing pixelart was a last-minute choice done by my inner kid. I used to own a NES and I still have my good'ol gameboy color. By doing pixelart I was, in essence, going back in time, but now I was looking at my work as if it were a videogame you could play in those systems. I didn't know what pixelart was back then, and I certainly didn't care neither as most games were in pixelart anyways. My inner kid is certainly happy now, doing stuff that resembles those old machine games, and that makes pixelart cool!
STYLE --------- Altough I handle a lot of styles, I almost always do pieces that, as I said before, have the most restrictions. Less is more, so you'll see me doing a lot of low resolution - few color stuff. This format of 4-colored pixelart is called 2-bit pixelart, and it's seen mostly in the GameBoy system, although it is present in most retro consoles in more or less degree. Doing stuff with little is what gets me, and so I would say Gameboy-style pixelart is my main cup of tea. If you ever feel like such a style with so little resolution and abscense of color is ugly, bear in mind Pokémon was born this way and yet it is the biggest franchise of all times.
INSPIRATION -------
I believe that when someone is really into something, whether an artist or not, it takes inspiration from everywhere all the time. As the truly artist is constantly scanning the visuals around and getting ideas even from a meaningless cloud, so does a writter when it reads a random traffic sign while going home, or the musician when it hears the neighbor ringbell, or the chef that gets inspiration from looking at someone's garden while walking. Inspiration is everywhere, you just need to be receptive enough to take it. I can't name a particular artist or a specific piece of media, as I take small bits of everything from everywhere, but I can say absolutely sure that everything started when I was playing the original pokemon games Red and then Gold, both for the GameBoy system. I didn't know what pixelart was, or what did I wanted to be once I grow up, but I knew I have to create my own stuff. You could say, therefore, that my main inspiration comes from retro videogames in general, although that's not fully truth, it is at least the origin point. I like people that can pull great stuff from basic concepts and minimal resources. Less is more is what they say, and we have great stuff born with that philosophy: the GameBoy system itself is one of those! We have the tamagotchi, and the zx spectrum is yet another example that I love. And that is not even art but engineering. We could say then than pixelart inherits this philosophy as it can be considered a simplified, more basic way of producing visuals, with less colors, limited resolution and fewer video frames than regular art and video. But don't get decieved, less doesn't means easier! You can do great beautifull paintings if I give you all the brushes and colors in the world, but if you suddenly have to create something great with just one specific brush and maybe 2 colors, you'll have to push your creativity further.
THEMES --------
I do have a particular inclination towards silly humour and horror stuff. I sometimes mix em, as weird as it sounds. Of course that, for the sake of the viewer's mental health preservation I do not actually post any of this, but if you pay close atention to my current pieces you might find traces here and there but just slightly. If I ever do a story-driven videogame you can bet it is going to be one of the most silliest yet bizarre things of all times. Media that I like from these genres are Conker's bad fur day, Little nightmares, Billy & Mandy, Flapjack (tv show) and Courage the coward dog.