Rad Nauseam · David Cole

Recently I decided to start teaching myself IPA — that's isometric pixel art for average slobs like you and me. Not to be confused with Indian Pale Ales (another thing with which my experience is lacking), isometric pixel art is this sort of thing:

This is the beginning of my attempt to recreate Mission Pie, the awesome pie shop where I used to work (and where my girlfriend still does). I'm actually working on their website right now, which I'll post about another time.

The biggest challenges with isometric pixel art are recreating shadows/highlights and getting intricate curves correctly. A good example of both challenges is the coffee cart in the piece I'm working on right now:

Hue differences aside (this is far from the final version), you can see how my efforts to properly highlight and shade this are in heavy need of improvement. However, my attempts to recreate the somewhat intricate curves on the base of the cabinet came out pretty well. Zoomed in close, though, the pixelated version is a confusing mess. This dichotomy — that creating detailed shapes is harder in the detailed view — is the biggest challenge for me.

I'm pretty happy with how this is coming along, though, especially as a first foray into the genre (?) and I'm eager to have a finished piece.

Update 2/3/08: The finished work can be found here.