Pixel Art

In this assignment, we had to design a retro toy and draw it in an isometric pixel art style. I decided to do a robot toy as was recommended, due to the simple shapes and bright designs. 

Here are the reference images I used. 

Here are my initial sketches. 

I picked my favourite three and turned them into silhouettes to see which design was best. I went for the first one because it was my favourite one from the sketch stage. Also, I felt like the 3rd one would be too hard to do in the style on my first try, and the 2nd one was too common a design. 

I made three different colour concepts. The first one was based on the iconic robot design (top row, middle image in my moodboard above), so I decided against that one due to it being already done. I picked the pink design because I could imagine it more on shelves than the bright green one, especially as it is more gendered and toys were more gendered in the 40s and 50s, when these robot toys were most popular.

Using the tutorial, this is what I ended up with, at it's original size, at a bigger size and also integrated into the image provided. 

I think it blends in quite well with the picture, partly because I directly colour picked the colours from the scene after noticing that all yellows were exactly the same (except for the cheese which is lighter). Unfortunately, the design had to be changed while I was drawing it in the isometric pixel style. I found triangles and circles/spheres to be very hard to work with, so I changed the head and torso to cubes. I also changed the feet to yellow as I felt like the initial design had too much pink. Also, the image is a little too big. We were asked to have it at 128x128px but mine is 150x200px. This made it difficult to integrate into the scene because I needed to resize it, but whenever I tried to make the robot smaller the quality was lost. I got around it by sizing up the robot 200% and the scene 300%; this made the robot appear to be around the same height as the other toys in the scene so I was happy with this in the end. Next time, I will keep the canvas size at the required pixels from the start.