About Showroom

Shady Chars

What arr ya buyin?

How it started

This shady pirate popped up back in March 2025 and this time — unlike to many of my other pics — I've set out to do a shady person, selling chars out of his trench coat at a street corner.

As usual, it started during a lunch break and the trench coat was the first thing to be pixeled, followed by a Freddy Krueger like sweater and trousers. I'm not sure why I did a pirate hat, but I guess, coming up with a hat rather than a hairdo was just the easy way out.

As for the shoes, what you see here is the first iteration and they are in fact placeholders as I had sneakers in mind. With the pic evolving, these flats did fit in better and better and in fact ended up in the final release that way.

Here's the first iteration:

Feedback from the F4CG crew was great, even though there wasn't really any need for a pirate, but having triggered some laughs, a nightly tweaking session followed.

The pirate got shortened, the hat's now fully visible and some details added. Changing the eyes was — sry for the bad pun — eye opening and IMHO elevated the whole pic in quality. It's now a propper cartoon character.

A few teaks later, the trench coat got polished, a left sholder added and the swored removed again.

With no need for a pirate themed pic, I decided to go in the opposite direction: a futuristic punk.

Judgning from the release date, one might think that this would be related to my Pixel Punx group, but we're still taking about March 2025 here. All in all, going punk-y must have been somewhere in my brains hidden though.

We're still in the same nightly session, with changes coming and going within minutes, so here's an update using the new coat parts for the punk.

And here's the final iteration of her, now being a bit shorter and a much improved earring. I'm pretty sure we'll see her again in some form or another, because her face is so beyond PETSCII-looking and those boots turned out fantastic too.

Fast forward from March to May and TheRyk's PETSCII compo was just announced and I thought what better time to release my shady character. I had a hard time chosing between Punk and Pirate, especially with Pixel Punx now being around but in the end, the Pirate with his cartoonish expression just topped the Punk.

Conclusio

I can't express how happy I am with the pic and how it formed within a day over a short lunch break and a longer session later that day. Further, I doubt that I could have pixeled this shady char in hires or bitmap mode due to my lack of drawing skills, but in PETSCII, it all fell into place rather naturally.

What's next? Maybe I'll pixel a close-up of those purple socks for Shine :D

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