Grauw’s blog

As a study, I created an MSX pixel art version of the Rose character from Tales of Zestiria:

Source image:

Step by step:

1. Penned version with tablet (Wacom Bamboo) then tweaked a lot with mouse. Not sure how much value the tablet added, it was quite sloppy.
2. Some basic colouring with the original colours.
3. Some further colouring and added some highlights.
4. Quantised the colours to the MSX palette.
5. Colouring and shading of the hair, more details, anti-aliasing, polish, and narrowed the character to improve the proportions, especially the eye distance is noticeable (lasso tool is great).

One snag I ran into is that since on MSX pixels are not square but slightly rectangular, the MSX image looked quite stretched. Narrowing the face helped a lot but it still looks a bit stretched. Something to keep in mind in the future.

How it looks in openMSX:

14 colours used, 15 if you count the background. I spent about 4 to 6 hours on it (two evenings).

For the image editor I used Aseprite which is not free but only a few bucks, and is a really good editor for pixel art. Good palette support, supports a transparent colour, layers, animations, etc.

What are your thoughts? I think it turned out pretty well. I’m wondering if I overdid the anti-aliasing in the hair; it smooths the edges but also adds shadow details that weren’t there originally. Is it maybe better to remove some anti-aliasing pixels at the cost of some sharper edges, you think? Please let me hear your critiques.

Next time I’m going to try to create an original drawing.