Over Thanksgiving break, I met the puppy that my parents welcomed into the family a few weeks ago. I fondly refer to him as my replacement, however, his formal name is Albert:
The first thing I noticed about him was his tiny, tiny size: a small tongue, miniature teeth, a diminutive tail, and a high-pitched bark to match. These traits, combined with his innate photogenic-ness, made my petite puppy Albert the perfect subject for my 16×16 drawing:
An issue I encountered with this specific photo was the tilt of Albert’s face. The boxiness of the pixels made it difficult to draw any curves or diagonal lines, since they would turn out jagged and made the drawing busy. This is quite evident when examining the portrayal of his right leg (arm? paw?). I compromised by making his head and tongue flat, even though the original picture suggests otherwise.
The lack of detail inherent in a 16×16 pixel image requires the artist to give up some important parts of the original image in order to clearly convey the subject. I found this assignment was an exciting challenge to figure out how realistic I could make the drawing just by tweaking certain shades or moving blocks of color around. Figuring out different methods to get the same emotion across (how can I still make Albert look cute and smiley??) was the main tool I learned from this assignment.
