Pixel Portrait

Png Version

GIF Version

For our first assignment in Year 2 Tech, we have to make a pixel portrait of ourselves. We have to make it 100x150 pixels, RGB colour, 72 p.p.i., and in a white background. When I started this assignment, I looked for a photo of myself for reference. I don't usually take photos of myself, but luckily I have a photo of me in Facebook. With a reference, I made my pixel portrait.

When I compare the Png and GIF version, they look the same. To me, the Png version is  a bit darker than the GIF; probably because Png files has better compression than GIF files adn can support many colours. When I enlarged them, I see no difference except for the picture to be pixelated.

For the pixel portrait, I wanted to accentuate my eyes, nose and mouth because those are the key features that makes a face unique, at least in my opinion. For the colour palette, my hair isn't really black; it's more of a dark brown. So the colour palette would be with lots of browns and some reds. This is important in order for my pixel portrait to look like me.

To make my pixel portrait, I put the photo of me as a layer above the white background so I won't mess with the photo and background. Then I made several layers for each part of my face and labeled it according to my face. This is so that you can still see the photo, but the pixel layers are separate. Then you use the pencil tool to the size of 1 pixel to colour in the face. It has to be the size of 1 pixel so there won't be anti-aliasing. 

For the eyes, nose and mouth, I went from pixel to pixel to pixel to pixel to make it look realistic. To get the right colours, I used the eyedropper tool to pick up the colours from the photo of me to get some gradient effects. This was a long and painful process. It made me miss my wacom tablet at home because it was easier to colour and use the eyedropper tool rather than using shortcuts on the keyboard.

Once I was done that, I filled in the face, neck and hair. I didn't go from pixel to pixel because I don't think it was necessary to do so and also I'm running out of time. For the hair, I used my own experience of colouring hair in the manga style to get it done faster. When that's done, I've put in the highlights.

After that, I saved it into Png and GIF files and I'm done.