The Pixel Puppy Series is a small project I did for fun so that I could have a couple stickers to sell at my college’s art marketplace! It features a bull terrier puppy, a daikon radish puppy, a French bulldog puppy on fire, and a puppy in a sock. I had a lot of fun drawing them! Exploring dimension and the conveyance of color on a smaller resolution scale was a fun challenge and I feel I got a lot of experience out of this.
Daikon Doggy
This drawing was the first one I made, it is 64x64, and based off of this image of strange looking daikon radishes that I saw on Twitter. I thought that the middle radish looked a lot like a sitting dog, and so I redrew it, turning it into a dog-like radish creature. I gave it a silly face with its tongue out, and a common looking collar that people associate with dogs so that people can recognize it more as a dog.
You can see the original tweet here: https://x.com/kinaco_bd/status/1271268484077346816?s=20
Bull Terrier Puppy
I found that for the rest of the dogs, for a little more clarity I was willing to up the resolution to 128x128, though I didn’t end up using that much space, as there is a lot of negative space. This one has a hand involved, I also took it upon myself to give the puppy a heart nose. I really like how the shading on the hand turned out! I tried to not add too many colors, because I recognized while coloring this one that the more colors I added, the less charm there seemed to be as I was trying to realistic render something that doesn’t even appear realistic to begin with. I am thoroughly pleased with how cute it looks.
French Bulldog Puppy on Fire
This drawing is based off of the many trending images and videos of these puppies with the Instagram or TikTok fire filter on. Don’t worry! They are not actually on fire. I have noticed a trend of many of these puppies wearing a knit heart sweater. It was a little challenging to figure out the flames, as well as the texture of the knit sweater. This is where I started experimenting with dithering, and I think I balanced it out well. I knew that adding dithering to the entire sweater would be too much. As for the fire, I took inspiration from the late Akira Toriyama’s super saiyan auras. Trying to exactly recreate the filter would have been more complicated and more convoluted than stylizing the fire, it is more recognizable this way anyways.
Puppy In Sock, Sock Puppy
This drawing is also based off of a trending image of a puppy asleep in a sock. This one was a challenge color palette wise, but I think it works really well. I got to try out some more dithering exercises and started playing around with line placement as texture with pixels. It can be seen especially on the top sock, but on the left side of the bottom sock as well. The texture turned out awesome, it reads like a sock, especially the very bottom part of the bottom sock. I kept overall shading to a minimum as I felt it strayed too far into the realm of realism.