Made as a commission, the smaller section of the smoking geisha grew larger and larger, growing to encompass a paint-style interface and a desktop for a fantasy machine.
Tile-based artwork using custom tileset.
Animated graphic demonstrating four-bit graphics.
Winner in its category for a demoscene textmode competition.
A hexagonal tile for a collaboration where all tiles fit together to make a large quilt. 8 colour palette.
A game mockup in textmode using pico-8 colours.
A board game designed with LEGO pieces - players control one cat and one mouse each and chase each other around the kitchen.
Textmode art for Stone Story using a new custom font called 'midnight dreary'.
A model with hand-painted textures made in Blender
A demonstration of working within limitations, these lego robots were built in Stud.io.
Character design and pixel art using a limited palette.
Using the tileset from the original pokemon gameboy games, I built up a new level, experimenting with the limitations of the space and combining the tileset in new ways.
Nauticrawl is a game about exploring the mechanisms of a land-walking, sky-flying steam machine. I was commissioned to provide graphics for its textmode interface. The graphics appear when the player interacts with entities outside of the cockpit.
Textmode with bright, zingy colours. Pieced together in aseprite to animate it. Made for a Mistigris artpack. The font used for this piece is mostly blocks and triangles.
Part of a textmode experiment with a new font. Uses a set of muted colours to make a nostalgic feeling. Mostly exploring RPG tropes.
A mini gamejam game about giving a disembodied hand clothes for her various odd reasons. The player has to find the piece of clothing that matches the colour.
Wizard made using vaguely PETSCII restrictions (colours, font and dimensions, but has more than one background colour). PETSCII was a font used for the Commodore64 home computer. The piece is a mockup for a game where the player 'spells' short words.
A mock for an RPG game based on a future where androids have become part of society. Textmode with PETSCII limitations.
One of the first experiments with a new font called 'goop'. This one has rounded corners and droplets, so it makes for great natural shapes. Uses a four-colour gameboy limitation.
An old piece of pixel art which was used across my CV and first website. It used isometric pixel art to highlight my skills.
Pixelart which took a few days to complete. Isometric pixelart in two colours for a challenge on pixeljoint. Features cameos from Jetset Willy, Q*Bert, Bart Simpson, Google's disconnected dinosaur and a bunch of other references.
A photo from a series of LEGO photographs, telling the story of private detective Ace Brickman as he hunts down the cookie cook.
This piece is using pure Commodore64 PETSCII restrictions - a single background, PETSCII font, C64 colours and dimensions.
One of the first textmode pieces I made with Rexpaint. The geometric patterns of textmode lent themselves to the style of repetative patterns of clothing in Japanese woodblock prints.
A return to the same format as the first Samurai artwork two or three years after the original. Using the textmode to build the font was a fun challenge.
Limited textmode piece with a very small selection of colours.
Mistigris and Blocktronic members teamed up on a multiple user drawing page. This was my contribution using ANSI restrictions to introduce a space invader to the jam.
Testing out the new folksy palette ( a palette with predefined 8x8 characters printed into it ), I built a mockup of a text-based RPG with limited colours. The use of shadows and foreground gives the scene depth.
After taking a course in Blender I've started applying textmode to 3D objects. The major task in this model was applying nodes to the textures to make the screen glow without burning out the graphics.
Another mockup for a game in textmode. You play as a service robot built by an AI called mother. Despite its sinister overtones the game is mostly about maintaining beta-complex. It makes references to the RPG 'paranoia', a post-apocalyptic setting where all of humanity is entrapped within an underground bunker.
A collage illustration for my wife's book, a translation from a popular Italian children's book. In this image the butter man is safely chilled within his fridge house, wearing an ice pack on his head.
A custom LEGO model (MOC) of a giant robot chicken attacking a city. The mecha chicken is piloted by a small chicken in the back. I made a custom lightbox for the photography - an old cardboard box filled with fairylights.
A weird and abstract textmode game mockup using the PETSCII font and commodore64 palette.
A textmode version of shadow of the colossus using a restricted palette and aquarius font. It was a lot of fun to do the greebling on the outside.
Hackmud is a game where players can write their own javascript programs in a cyberpunk setting. This lead to a lot of custom content built in ASCII. This example is a page for a shop which sells body augmentations.
A pumpkin with hand-painted textures just in time for halloween. Built in blender, designed to use as few polygons as possible. Uses subsurface rendering to give the pumpkin that faint glow.
Most of the fun in this piece was adding the small details - like the padlock on the gate, the peeking eyes in the wall, the spider in the top left and the key hanging from the back wall.
The collage is a combination of photocopies from a magazine with additional graphic pen linework over the top. The fins of the goldfish are actually photocopies of photos of fabric from a dress.
A meme produced for a teletext event. It's built using restrictions from the original teletext/ceefax, (including the special encoding characters which are involved as elements of the art).
A textmode mockup for an RPG which plays much like the choose-your-own-adventure games of the early 90s. There's dice rolling, branching narratives and sexy textmode graphics.
A combination of mockups for an unreleased textmode RPG.
A limited textmode piece exploring the potential of 3D graphics with textmode. As you may have come to expect the text is incredibly weird and esoteric.
What would happen if a mult-armed duckbot attacked a city? What if it was made out of voxels? What if it put cars inside its metal body for keepsies?
After making the duckbot city in Magicavoxel, I attempted to recreate it in LEGO. The voxel model had many vantage points to observe the model from inside of the tall towers and staggered steps.
After making the duckbot in voxels I remade it in LEGO. The model uses a technique called SNOT (Studs Not On Top) to build out in different directions, adding texture and depth.
This image uses the colour palette Mail24 by Hyohnoo and a simple block font. By increasing the resolution of the font the shapes look smooth and almost vectorised.
This was one of my early explorations into lighting and modelling in Blender. The character is a 'Gondola' - an internet character which is often depicted relaxing and observing different environments.
A full scale 1-bit pixel art piece. It took roughly a week to complete and is flooded with references to things like Susan Kare's artwork and early computer games.
Pixelart version of Dungeon of Flowers. On the right is the original cart by Ribbon Black and my artwork on the left. The pixelart version uses the pico8 palette. (Posted with permission of the original artist)
This was made as a demonstration of a new font which includes characters within the 8x8 tiles, mixed with my book of Kells palette. The washed out colours and NES-like menus give it a nostalgic feel.
One of the first pieces I made when discovering textmode art. It uses the Mail24 palette. The mockup game is about a dragon that lives on its hoard, fed on information fed to it by its Kobold slaves.
Four colour palette, uses a new font with rounded edges and curves. The rounded shapes prooved very useful and are used again and again in the fonts I make.
Monster Maze was an early game for the ZX-Spectrum which used textmode for its graphics. This is a homage to that game using a limited gameboy palette and a more varied font. The original t-rex sprite for the ZX-Spectrum is visible in the bottom right.
Pico-8 colours and restrictions - this was made as an experiment in Pico-8 to see if it's possible to use the textmode tiles as game tiles. The restriction loans itself to big, blocky shapes and limited menus. He gets pissy if you buy anything other than bones.
Using the pico-8 colours and restrictions I made a few demonstrations of what might be possible using the pico-8 virtual console.
Textmode calculator. The joke is a subversive of writing 'boobs' on a calculator.
The image is made in textmode using the limited colour palette of Hackmud. It started as a photograph, ran through a program to quantize the colours into the restricted palette and displayed in pixels. From there it was coded into ASCII block characters.
a 16x16 textmode game using bright colours from a limited palette. The aim is to build efficient pipe work to supply broken fish tanks in an aquarium via a push puzzle.
Pixel art practice featuring the Spongebob Squarepants character Smitty Werbenjagermanjensen.
An experiment with the default Rexpaint font in black and white. The maze pathway spells out 'Polyducks'.
Pixelart practice for a repeating tile. Uses a limited palette of blue-greys.
Textmode airships using a steely-grey Gameboy palette. It was an experiment in how detailed I could make the textmode characters.
One of the first textmode pieces I made. It uses mostly block and triangle characters.
Using the original sprites from pokemon Blue, I built up a little village in Crocotile3D. It was difficult to translate some of the 2D tiles into 3D, with the fence being one of the bigger challenges.
Famine was one of the first textmode game ideas I had - drawing out the graphics into a notepad doc.
