A few weeks ago, I was watching the Discord stream of a friend. She was playing some music in the background and one of the songs sounded really cool to me! It was a song by MF DOOM.
Now, I don't really listen to rap music, but this guy was really something else. My friends were surprised i didn't know about him, and recommended I should listen to some more songs.
Well, she started playing an album (Mm.. Food) from the beginning. We finished it and immediately went listen to another one. And just like that we entered a rabbit-hole and listened to six of his albums, for six hours straight. I just couldn't get enough of it!
I don't really care as much about a song's lyrics as i do about the non-lyrical aspects, which i guess explains why i'm kinda indifferent towards rap in general. But MF DOOM's tracks have some beautiful melodies, strong harmonies, even esoterical rhythms. And even for someone like me, the lyrics are really cool indeed, and quite humorous often times.
PixelJoint has been organising this little 'album collab' on Discord, where each participant makes a pixel-art version of any album cover art. So I decided it'd be nice to try and make a pixel-art interpretation of Operation: Doomsday, the album containing the song i first heard, and one whose cover art is interesting and simple enough at the same time.
I must say this idea sounded better in my head. xD I wanted my drawing to be as accurate to the original art as possible, so, although i didn't trace it, i did carefully use grids to make the proportions almost exact.
This dynamic feels really different compared to drawing original art or even using references normally. I must say I didn't enjoy it much. Trying so hard to be accurate wasn't even worth it, because the supposedly 'accurate' version looked like shit to be honest, so I ended up having to clean up many sections whith a more natural approach, and the drawing improved a lot.
The letters were particularly hard to make readable. Again, I first drew both 'DOOMSDAY' and MF DOOM's logo with the grid method, and the result was HORRENDOUS.
I then remade them with a normal approach and I honestly think they can't really get much better than they are... Look, those letters have a lot of details and are really small. There's only so much detail one can achieve to include in a canvas this small.
DOOMSDAY ended up looking great I would say! Probably what I'm the proudest about from this drawing.
The logo doesn't look too good. Especially if you zoom in, it looks like random noise. xD But I think the 'vibes' of it are still there, if that makes sense.
'Operation:' was of course impossible to make readable. I was also struggling to make it not look out of place, and a friend helped me a lot figure out how to make the outlines so as to get this final result.
The face was hard to make and doesn't look super good, but neither super bad, so I'm cool with that.
Anyways, I don't regret having participated but I probably won't pixel another cover. :(