Hi it's been a while.

Full disclosure this is a bit of a meme and very heavily referenced from a screenshot from the anime adaptation of 16Bit Sensation. I feel a little weird uploading something so derivative but I mean this clearly isn't like the deviantArt 2010's traced anime bases. However this is literally probably the only thing I've made in the last few months that I'm legitimately proud of so here it is!

So your girl has always been into visual novels/japanese graphical adventure games since I was first playing the old Clannad fan translation waaay back when I was like 12-13. As I've been learning more about the genre's history I've been very into the whole PC98 pixel art look, I know I'm a couple of years behind everyone else memeing on Sex 2, and I decided I'd actually try my hands at doing it. Despite this I don't think I really channeled any particular artist in this regard, I just sort of defaulted to whatever the usual nonsense I sketch is. For the record Nagaoka Kenzou's art both during the PC98 era and afterwards is really great.

It's a little trite and overdone now but I'm really in like an oldweb/webcore/web1.0 nostalgia thing right now and I think this obsession with old PC98 art is sort of an extension of that. Or rather they both grew out of the same thing going on in my head right now.

This particular upload isn't my first attempt its actually my second because I haven't actually finished the first one. But I intend to upload that soon enough. Anyway the process of making this is actually extremely therapeutic and kinda... low stakes? Like its an art and I'm by no means confident calling myself any sort of practitioner of pixel art but managing to capture the gestures of my initial sketch just a few dozens of pixels is sooo relaxing and it feels amazing. Plus dithering. Dithering is incredibly fun although I sort of have a love/hate relationship with it. It just feels less intimidating translating a preexisting sketch into a few hundred pixels vs creating a new drawing whole cloth.

So expect me to upload more stuff like this in the future. Just an update since I haven't posted in a while.

Also this is a good little test run of a new sona of sorts? I think they're cute.

If anyone's curious I used Promotion NG and tried my best to emulate the limited color gamut of the PC9801-VX. I'm almost certain there's a work around for getting something like that to work in something like Aseprite. I just found Asesprite really uninviting and I sort of felt belittled by the like retro gamer UI lmao. You could almost certainly do something like this by just color picking from a 12bit RGB (4096 colors) chart. Literally just turning off anti-aliasing in any art program would work I was originally gonna do my first attempt entirely in Krita. I've also been wanting to try my hands at using GrafX2.

This ended up using 13 colors. Which could maybe be better but given the end usecase was a telegram sticker with a transparent background I think its fine. I think it looks nice at least!

And for the record yes, Kanon is a masterpiece.