My plan moving forward is to create the models that I shall use to build the animations. As I showed in the last post, the Bobo doll has been created, but I still need Dr Bandura, Mini-Me Dr Brown and two delinquent children. I have started my attempts at Dr Bandura but, so far, I am not satisfied. I started with a Goolge image search:
This provided me with plenty of pictures from different angles, but I have decided to start with the front. I took one of the portraits, straightened out the face and superimposed grid lines in Gimp.
The grid squares represent 2×2 pixels on my Pixelorama canvas. I tried to recreate this as pixel art and I played with the colouring.
It is not a good likeness. The white-haired face is the original. The one on the left is where I tried to make the colouring closer to the original, but I think that it doesn’t look like anything when it is small: too indistinct. You can see the scale of it by comparing it to the Bobo doll where it appears in the preview window.
I thought that scaling down the original to the size of the pixel art might help. It has given me some ideas on how to move forward and it has also helped with the proportions, but I do not think a direct copy is desirable. The face needs to be slightly cartoony for it to be recognisable as a face at this size. Also, the complex colouration of the photograph would require a lot more work to animate with little reward.
I could only get the pixels to be distinct viewing it through the Gimp editing software and making a screenshot. Image viewers tend to blur the pixels together.