solon_kitten | Relearning how to make blinkies and pixel art

Today, I bought a dot rule notebook, as well as a 5x5 quad rule (grid rule) notebook, and some erasers. I wanna get back into making pixelart, and I have PikoPixel on my MacBook for the purpose. I haven't done this since my Neopets days in the early 2000s, and back then I used JASC Paint Shop Pro 7 on Windows 98 SE, mostly because it was given to me at one point. Now I'm using an actual pixel art editor that I haven't really practiced with, as well as ImageMagick.

I do like ImageMagick, though. It probably has some of the best documentation I've seen for a FOSS project, and making animations from raw frames is quite easy. Just need to set a few options like -loop 0 for infinite looping, -delay # for the speed of the animation (the higher the number, the slower it is), and then have it take each frame in order to produce a final gif. The blinkie icon I made was 7 frames, with a delay of 20, and infinite looping.

The image, which is my icon on this post, was made in a folder with the following command in iTerm:

$ convert -resize 100x100 -delay 20 -loop 0 solon_blinkie_*.gif solon_blinkie.gif

convert is the command that's used. -resize took a set of 200 x 200 images and scaled them down by half. -delay set each frame to show at roughly 5 FPS (200 milliseconds), as the setting is for a hundredth of a second. -loop set it to infinitely loop, as using any other number will have it loop around that many times before stopping.

The frame filenames (in this case, solon_blinkie_*.gif) told it what images to make for each frame. I had them numbered in order (solon_blinkie_01.gif, solon_blinkie_02.gif, etc...), so the * character just told it to take everything matching the rest of the name in order for the files it needs. The last piece, solon_blinkie.gif (without the numbers), is the resulting animated file, which you're seeing above.

It's been a while since I let myself have fun doing this sort of thing, and it feels nice to relax with just doing something fun for myself, instead of worrying about everything around me again.

So, why am I wanting to get into pixel art? Because I wanna make some for my website, and get back into working on it again with a new 2000s theme. Something a bit more bright and cheerful than what I've got now, and maybe even more fitting for my renewed love of old tech and the old web/indieweb. It's also fun.

Now, I go back to working on ideas again. I've been needing this. <3