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About
I met this guy named Oxeir through a mutual friend. He told me he really wanted a custom profile picture for his Minecraft skin immediately upon finding out mine is of my Minecraft skin. He's a hilarious guy, I'm sure that was why I obliged to make him one even though it's the day we met each other. Because gaming is the only context I met him in, we don't talk anymore since I cut down my time on gaming. He did end up using this as a profile picture for a while, though!
How It's Made
I decided to have fun with lineless art again this time. And again because I see this as a smaller art piece, I decided to use ibisPaint X. Unlike Paint Tool SAI, it has a lot of drawing tools that really helped me and decreased the amount of time I spent on this, like a Bezier curve pen, which helped so much with drawing his arms as you will see below. While drawing those might be tedious, it's nothing close to the real challenge in drawing his character: trying to construct his pixelated face into cartoon.
All his skin is is a solid olive green, crowned with several hues of gold, and a hideous pixelated face. Although this was done before the skin I made for Saber_Foxxo, you can say that trying to get his face right in cartoon was like the reverse of trying to make pixels look nice from a cartoon reference; it's the reverse.
Another thing I should point out is the idea to make his character pop out of the profile picture.
// Oxeir's actual Minecraft skin
// My attempt to adapt it into cartoon
The Body
I started with the circle that'll be the fake outline of the profile picture. This way I know exactly where to place certain parts of his character on the canvas. The parts that pop out of the outline are his extremities and of course his crown.
Then I started on his head and body, using the polygon-drawing tools ibisPaint X has. I made the shadows light to keep it looking soft while maintaining the smooth 3D blocky style.
// head and body
// combined and shaded
The Crown
My next step was drawing the crown. I picked all the colors off a screenshot of his actual Minecraft skin and just made my attempts at trying to make a cartoon version of his blocky crown that still looks like the blocky version. It took several trials but I finally found the look.
// base
// outer spikes
// primary middle spike
// smaller secondary spikes
// refining the shape
// base color
// all colors
The Face
Now it's time for the face. You can't see in the video, but I was struggling; struggling to even think of how to do the face. His whole face is slanted and his smile is a zig-zag, but on the day we met we all started calling his smile sweet and beautiful, so that set the idea for the cartoon smile. Though this gave me the change to make it completely smooth, I chose to represent the big upside down frown using a few somewhat straight segments; I think it's only fair to keep the smile just a little bit crooked, following his natural smile which is limited to its original pixelated medium.
// his sweet and beautiful smile
The Arms
The arms too took a few attempts, mainly because it was curving in a weird way on top of being a 3D block being warped because of perspective. I really wanted to make them pop out of the profile picture window so they had to warp significantly. The first attempt didn't pop out enough because its lines were too parallel for the perspective. The second attempt looked weird because it now looks like the hand is facing up, while I wanted his hand to face down holding the circular window frame. The next attempt is where I used the line-drawing tools effectively. I then shaded the inner-facing side of the arm the same shade as the body.
// left arm first attempt
// left arm second attempt
// left arm successful attempt
Amazingly it only took me one attempt for the right arm since I've learned the best way to do them yet. Then after a few more adjustments to the shape, I gave it the same shading.
// right arm lines
// right arm colored and shaded
Finally is the background to be the world behind the profile picture "window." Right before this though, I also added a shine in the crown to bring it out more. For the background, I went into Minecraft, loaded a matching simple and soft texture pack, and took a screenshot that somewhat matches the perspective that a viewer is looking at Oxeir.
// cropped screenshot
// finished
The Reflection
What I Learned
This served as another good lineless art exercise. In my humble opinion, I can apply this trained skill to draw graphics for interfaces. Windows 11 has that smooth modern style in its theme that I really love. Though through experience I learned that many things are possible even without the proper tools, having access to some gives you a big advantage and spawns a door for your potential to free itself.
My Next Steps
This is only one instance of this style of drawing that I do. I can see more and more modern visuals gravitating towards a smooth style like this one, so as I have said before, I think it's very applicable to building modern interfaces as well.