About Showroom Workshop

It's Full of Stars

aka TMA-0's point of view

How it started

Believe it or not, but it all started out as a quick Genesis Project logo but it went off-rails right after doodeling the G. Goal was a round G and it got a bit too round, starting to look like a little swirl. Neat, huh? Let's see if I can mirror that swirl in to create a double swirl. Huh? Neat!

I don't save a pic of the original G but here's a recreation what it looked like in four stages:

Still love that last G and I'm hoping I'll find a possibility to follow up on that one someday later.

Again, there's no pics of what followed next but one big double swirl turned into two and with a small offset, they started looking like eyes. Someone's mesmorized here.

Space Beaver

Yes, that's a beaver. Why? Well, I just started drawing using the triangle chars, hoping to find a correctly sized head for my eyes. Also, I secretly hoped that some triangle-dithering would suddenly happen in a revolutionary way but, well, yeah, nope. Failed big time. The beaver though came alive thanks to those beautifully yellowed teeth.

With that silly beaver making me laugh through my lunch break, I just had to tweak it some more and given the already galaxy like eyes, it's time to send him off to space! Here's a screenshot (don't have this particular workstage anymore) of the spaced-out beaver running on micro64.

With the beaver still cracking me up a day later, I'm motivated to work on it some more. A more interesting face is needed, something that could make use of the available space and woud also allow me to fool around with coloring some more. Let me introduce to you, space chimp:

With the basic shapes done, it's time to come up with details. At first, I tried the ol' background color isn't the background color thingy, which would really make the eyes pop up but I just couldn't get it to work.

Now it's a full-blown spaced-out chimp with the benefit of smoothing out the contour made way easier.

This is becoming fun. Going for a more varied outline and, uh, what's that? Pupils? Nah, not working!

Next up, more colors for some shading and depth.

Removed the creepy pupils and the teeth aren't working either, so begone!

Nose needs to be shifted and the mouth tweaked. Also, not (yet) comfortable with blocky PETSCII coloring but I guess, I just need to tweak that a bit more too and maybe try some dithering here and there.

Also, at this point, I've decided to keeping this one for the Moonshine Dragons 2024 party, because it would fit the "Ancient Aliens/Ancient Mysteries" theme perfectly and I've found the nerdiest name for the pic: "TMA-0's POV"

More tweaks... nose needs to be shifted and the mouth tweaked. Also, not (yet) comfortable with blocky PETSCII coloring but I guess, I just need to tweak that a bit more too and maybe try some dithering here and there.

No workstages for the failed dithering but our little money got emotional starring at the Monolith. Add some more (needed) color to the picture.

Last but not least, the nose get's tweaked some more and the mouth too.

And let's call it quites!

Conclusion

I had a blast. It's silly and it made me smile (still does), it's clever in one way and really not at all overall. Let's wait and see what how the Moonshine Dragons 2024 crowd will vote on it :-)

Post party edit: Onlyl heard my wife cheer, but let's face it, that's the best kind of cheer :-D

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What's CSDb thinking about it