My favourite musician, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, drawn from this reference with my Escorpión palette (on Lospec soon-I'll update this with a link when it's there). The palette was inspired by the video for Omar's track 'Agua Dulce de Pulpo', which you can see on YouTube here. I was very pleased when my partner said the picture looks like Omar's music sounds!

I wanted to push myself in a few ways with this one. I think I've used antialiasing too much in the past and really wanted to focus on creating strong shapes and lines without falling back on it.

I also think I'm generally weak with colour and wanted to try something that used them in ways that weren't immediately obvious.

Finally, since getting a good drawing tablet, I've been trying to settle on a good workflow and I found that doing a quick sketch that got the features in more or less the right places (please let there be a day when I get it right first time every time) then tracing over that with pixel brushes seems pretty efficient for me.

I remembered partway through this that I've drawn Omar before in my first year as a pixel artist. It was for a weekly challenge and was drawn just in the three colours of the Puerto Rican flag but, even without that extreme handicap, I think it makes for an interesting contrast. Click here to have a look (warning: it's bad).

Huge thanks to pixelglade and Umbohr and my partner for the crits.

WIP animation here: https://lospec.com/i/qhld