Woah it’s been a long time since the last post. Well, at least I have some news to report – I have a channel on YouTube now 🙂

I kicked it off with a livestream of me drawing a pixel art avatar in classic Macintosh icon style – 32 x 32 black and white pixels – for Ron of Ron’s Computer Videos.

The image above shows various iterations I tried for Ron’s avatar. A lot of what I tried was inspired by suggestions in the live chat, which was really fun to do. The reactions by people were really encouraging and there were some really creative ideas for what to try – especially when it came to getting his eyes and eyebrows right! We also had some fun trying different patterns, and eventually Ron settled for one of the classic Macintosh patterns – plaid!

After the stream I cleaned up and adjusted a few pixels that I felt still weren’t quite working. Then I converted it to a PNG with GraphicConverter, transferred via FTP (using NetPresenz on my Quadra 700, where I’d drawn the image) to my MacBook.

Then using GraphicConverter (but this time on MacOS 10.14 not System 7.1!) scaled up the 32 x 32 pixel image to 512 x 512 so it would look crisp when used on modern screens as an avatar, and finally sent it over to Ron. Job done.

Check out the livestream here, and if you enjoy, please do like and subscribe so you can join me for more pixel art on old Macs in the future!