Appropriation

For the appropriation brief I chose to take basic pictures of sunsets and gave them a less realistic and more aesthetic and cartoonish feel. To achieve that I decided to turn them into pixel art. So in my research I discovered the work of pixel art animator, Paul Robertson. After watching multiple tutorials on how to convert regular images into pixel art, I loaded a series of images unto Photoshop. A major step in converting the picture to pixel art involved reducing the number of colours or colour shades that where in the image, so before doing that I altered the levels of each image, increasing their saturation levels to counter the dulling effect the later stages of the process would have. After that I proceeded to increasing the contrast to a level where I felt would aid the selection of shades and colours without jeopardising the overall look of the images by making them look to harsh. To finally convert the images, in indexed colour on Photoshop, I reduced the number of colours used in each picture according to my liking, trying out different figures to different results, moods, etc. One thing I noticed was that the lower I went in number of colours used, them more computer chose a particular one until I hit about 15 colours max and the images started to turn black and white. That was all for the palette. The final steps included adjusting the diffusion rate to where I felt it looked most like natural hand drawn pixel art. And lastly I resized all the pictures to literally bring out the pixels. This depended on how big the images where to start of with, but the process was the same for all of them, I would reduce their sizes significantly in pixels, then experiment increasing them in percentage. This was what really made the difference in terms of how pixelated the first picture of the blue sunset looks in comparison to the second picture of the fisher man where the sense of reality is lost without it being as dramatic as the first.