Retro Gaming {Process Post}

The end of the month approaches and so it is time to talk about Retro Gaming! :)

Retro Gaming - a theme based on my childhood spend on playing a lot of handheld games. I grew up in the Gameboy era so I never experienced using came systems such as Nintendo 64 or Atari so this theme is based on game systems I am familiar with. (I did add some N64 cartridges in there because I thought the design looks really cool but I never played on it)

I was a Nintendo person for sure! My first system was Gameboy Color and Pokemon pinball! I also owned a Gameboy EX, GameCube (idk why people hate it, its really fun), and a PS2. We got the PS2 so late in life, that it was already transitioning out but so many good games in there!!

It's so interesting to see that the generation nowadays play games on Steam and on the PC when back then, we are limited to playing games on limited devices (GameCube can only play GameCube games and so forth)

So this theme is a huge nostalgia memory lane for me!

To prepare for this theme, I actually did a whole month of ahem "research". I downloaded an emulator app on the App Store and played hours of old Gameboy games to get myself in the right mood.

The gaming really feeds into my inspiration like me thinking: Oh right, the menu was so janky "Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone"...so janky and all those start screens with the 8-bity music style. It made me really invested in trying to add some, sort of "pixelation" into my drawing. I havent tried pixeling in over a decade and it was SO hard. Pixeling is when you sorta draw the picture dot by dot so the edges are made out of squares that eventually form an image. At first, I wanted to do true pixelation where I manually draw each dot but it proved to be so exhausting that I gave up and just used a "pixel" brush to make the effect looks convincing. '

What ended up happening is that the mini character looks really different that my later creations because my pixel style literally evolved throughout the whole process. Below showed my first attempt and my last attempt LOl. I did keep first attempt because she looks really charming in a funny way.

I designed the Retro Gaming character to be a mixture of a nerdy but cool look. The gunner glasses, unkept hair and oversized fit gives the look of: "I stayed up too late, please don't bother me." But there are aspects of cool like her black earrings and sporty sneakers. I guess if i were to dress back then, it will be my dream look.

After I drew her design, I felt like she looks like a normal tomboy so I want to give her a "charm" or "iconic" look. So I thought of a yellow octopus clip she can wear or hold. The reason why it's an octopus is because an octopus has 8 legs and retro gaming relates to 8-bit. The octopus in my head actually do have 8 legs, 4 in the front and 4 in the back lol.

I spent a lot of care drawing Retro Gaming and I hope you like this monthly theme! ^_^ have a good day!