Surprise! Sprite Art Saturday is not cancelled–yet. First of all, I can’t think of another alliterative series to run on Saturday, and second of all, I might have to put Tabletop Thursday on hiatus until I’m playing tabletop games more regularly, because I have zero inspiration aside from “gosh, I wish I was playing tabletop games.” Finding the time to play with people is vital to my inspiration to write about tabletop games. You can’t make great games without people to play with.
So, what’s a good project to get my creative juices flowing? Working at a small size is always my preference, but it’s also a good way to feel like I’m succeeding, since pieces are finished relatively quickly. But if I’m going to make Sprite Art Saturday a real project, I don’t want to just do one-and-done sprites. This inspired me to do a picrew–a type of dollmaker popular at the moment that lets you combine pre-made layers into one custom image. That lets me create a bunch of variations on a theme for these Sprite Art Saturday articles, so I can show off a bunch of my takes on hairstyles, faces, shirts, pants, accessories, etc, in a style.
But what style to start with? Well, as you can tell from the blog header, I’m a huge fan of Undertale. And the Undertale fandom is currently all excited over the Undertale Yellow fangame, which features an original fallen child character. The fallen children are a great size for a project like this–the whole sprite is only 20×30, so clarity and simplicity is the name of the game.
Today, I’d just like to show off some style tests, sprite art I did of my own Undertale human kid OCs trying to nail down elements of the style and options that might be available in the picrew. There’s an unchanged Chara sprite for reference, but I did decide to alter Frisk, since I don’t like the yellowface Frisk sprite and I do happen to have a Jewish Frisk design I’ve been intending to use in a fangame of my own someday. So here are my style tests, at actual size and 400%.
Important note: I do not own Undertale or any related works. This is a labor of love, and Toby Fox has officially sanctioned this kind of work, but none of my art of Undertale characters is mine to make available under Creative Commons.