Welcome to Gaia! ::

Still trying to think of how to get this together.

If we go with the book store/ novelty store, we could always do customizable display collector cases. This would be a large display gif that housed the pixels they bought for it, once off. Like they buy the case, and it has three shelves for 9 slots total, which means they need to buy nine items to go in it (of their choice). Unless we want to do author specific cases. Like the Edgar Allen Poe case could have a raven on it, or something. Then we give them this huge display case jpeg/gif/png that houses the items inside. So instead of giving them 10 different pictures to save to their own server, they only have one.

Or we could do it like the paper doll shop where we do give them the 10 pictures to save, and they have to put it together themselves, that way the items can be where they want them.

They're more softies than pixel books, but here's the link:
http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/mini-shops/bookstore-train-limited-new-items/t.58126855/




I buy a lot of pixels. There are shops I walk into where I buy everything then when they add new items, I come back and buy everything they've added. I've also placed orders that have gone in the 100k+ range. I'm not the only person who does these things and going in and out of shops I see other people do it to. So what I'm saying here is that I don't think it is necessary to make a display case so that people only have to save one thing instead of ten.

Another thing to consider is that people like to post their pixels in toyboxes, signatures and sometimes both. While toyboxes are not a problem, if the display case is huge such that it cannot fit within the 500x500 signature limit then nobody can put the pixels in their signature. There are shops I only discovered because someone had pixels in their signature, and I asked them where they got them. [There are people that have done the same with me.] Even if we aim for a 500x500 display case, it's still space that could be used for making each individual pixel item the absolute best it can be without worrying as to if it will fit within a display case or not.

I was thinking primarily of that 500x500 signature space. My only goal is that I want to make pixels people want to buy and will place in their signature space because that's like free advertising. 3nodding


Anyway my thought was maybe we can do it as a joint pixel shop where the overall theme of the entire thread is a bookstore and each artist maintains a post in the thread that represents a different section of the bookstore.

However we don't have to stick to traditional book store section names.... like instead of comics, someone's section could be called Super Heroes... so everything that artist does is super hero stuff... comic books, action figures, etc.

Yea, if there's only three of us than that wouldn't work. I was thinking of Bonte d'Hiver when I suggested that which was a pixel/softie shop where each artist had their own post section [like in a traditional art shop] and each artist dealt with a different holiday.

Unfortunately I'm already doing blood as food for the Halloween Collective because I would otherwise say that we should team up and make a shop where all we do is serve up humans as food called "Eat Moar Hoomanz".... but maybe we should do that anyway at some point because it would be hilarious.

Yea, and I'm a vampire... so either way, we see humans [or "hoomanz"] as food. I technically only started recently pixeling.

Here's my original bloodtini.
I googled images of martini glasses because I don't own any. This took me about an hour.


Then I added a charm to it [based on suggestion].
That was another 30 minutes for both drawing the charm and adding the animation as my computer was running a virus scan thus super duper slow at the time.


Then I took it upon myself to go back and add dithering.
That was about another three hours as I was drawing each pixel dot individually but so worth it considering how much better it looks.


So in total 4.5 hours. I did most alternate versions in 1-2 hours, but the angel and demon ones were both another 3-4 hours just because of drawing flames on the liquid and wings on the glass.



Even if one is technically done if I can think of a way to improve it, I'll reopen my .PSD file and create a new layer. Having PhotoShop [even if I'm using an older version] does help a lot just for the layers feature. Dithering or at least the way I'm doing it would be a lot harder if not impossible.

My comment there on that image would be to stop using .JPG format as it's barfing dirty pixels all over your art. Unless I'm animating something, I only save in .PNG format.

I'm also really slow if you haven't noticed from my other reply.
This took me.... really long; don't ask




I've been plagued by migraines all weekend and feel another coming on, so I probably won't draw anything today.

I use PhotoShop 7 because of the layers feature. It makes things so much easier for me. The jar full of kompeito has a total of 78 layers.
signature - 1 layer
"sample" text - 1 layer
jar and cork - 4 layers
kompeito - 72 layers [each piece of candy is in its own layer]

Pretty much what I did was I made 1 kompeito in a layer by itself, then duplicated it into a new layer and recolored it... then repeated that step for each color type. These were my template candy, and I dragged them up to the top of the jar. I would duplicate them into new layers in turn such that each piece of candy was in a layer by itself so that I can move them around as needed. I kept duplicating layers and moving them until I filled up the jar....

Seriously, I couldn't imagine using something like Paint to try to draw that out.