I decided to top my previous picture (no pun intended) by drawing Gio in 2.5D on top of an isometric 3D building with another isometric 3D building in the background. The view is a distorted bird's-eye view in which objects in the background (like the glass building behind Gio) get wider the closer they are to the camera. Since Gio and the building he's on are very close to the camera's viewpoint, there is almost no distortion, except that the viewing angle is more sharp than the glass building in the background whose far edge (on the left, above Gio) that appears to get wider the closer it gets to the camera's viewpoint.

To make Gio appear 2.5D, I took my drawing of him and skewed him vertically to match the horizontal slope of the building he's standing on, which is -(negative)76 degrees (or 4 pixels to the right for every 1 pixel down [in the original scale drawing of this one that I enlarged and redrew to make the one you see now - which was 12.5% of its current size at 36x36 pixels, with Gio added in at 1/2 the scale of the background (at his lowest resolution) when I doubled the size of the image to 72x72 pixels to add Gio in so that he would be correctly proportioned to camera's viewpoint of the buildings and background]) and redrew him to account for the distortion caused by the vertical skewing.

For his shadow, which is on the vertical plane of the building he's standing on, I colored a silhouette of Gio in a darker shade of the color of the building he's standing on and skewed it 26 degrees horizontally (a positive slope[, at 2 pixels up for every 1 pixel to the right, in the original low resolution reference I drew and enlarged to make the picture you see now]). The result is that Gio appears almost 3D, hence why I say 2.5D, as he's normally drawn in 2D (i.e, flat, with no visible depth, or the illusion of it) with (sometimes, simulated) 3D objects - namely his sunglasses, fangs, and belt buckle. I also even managed to give him realistic looking human-looking hands and feet (he is supposed to be a humanoid cat, by the way) - despite the fact that he's at 50% (1/2) of the resolution he was in my previous drawing of him here: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/58640599/ .

His left hand (right from our perspective) actually has 5 fingers, not 4, on it (which includes his thumb), with visible joints and even visible skin creases on his palm - which is rather uncanny (as in uncanny valley creepy), as you would not expect this level of detail on such a low resolution pixel art drawing - and especially not one of a non-human character (in Gio's case, he's an anthropomorphic, specifically humanoid, cat - which doesn't help). Combined with his human-looking feet (and especially his left foot, with 4 of his 5 toes visible), this level of realism has rarely (if ever) been achieved in pixel art - which is why it is so uncanny (creepy), even for me as the original artist who created it, to look at.

And, all of this (including the [isometric] 3D building views) was done by me using only Microsoft Paint (the Windows XP version), with no 3D software used whatsoever for the buildings, shadows, or background.

This picture consists of 30 colors, at 50% Luminescense, with a tint of 128 Red, 32 Green (a brown color, which is the same color as milk chocolate, or cocoa powder), and is at a resolution of 288x288 pixels. As you're seeing it, it is 5 times larger, at 1440x1440 pixels, for (your, the) viewers'z convenience, and also so that I could add the screen blur effect, which I did by enlarging the picture 5x(or 500%) its original size (288x288 pixels) in the new Windows 11 version of Microsoft Paint without enlarging the canvas to the new size (1440x1440 pixels) to create the desired effect - by using the anti-aliasing-when-resizing-an-image-larger-than-the-canvas glitch in the new Windows 11 version of Microsoft Paint as a feature.

I don't know how I'll top this picture - yet. I may have set the bar too high for myself on this one.


- Gio

Friday, November 1st, 2024
4:12 A.M. Central Daylight Time (CDT)