Something I initially did as a doodle for  teirusuki and then decided to use it as a bit of practice at a hand at pixel art again. This is based on an early conceptual design for a baby/classic version of her Julia character. The design is still a work in progress but this design I think is fairly on-point for 90s era Sonic in my opinion anyway. As I was finalizing the pixel art I felt the pose felt very much like the ending screens you'd see following the pre-credits (or post credits in the case of S&K) jumping pose and thought given the character's background perhaps she had made use of her father's train as a means of travel home not unlike the ending of Mega Man 4 (of which this background was ripped from the recent Genesis fan port, for the sake of full discloser).

As an aside it seems like pixel art is under examination again, particularly on Twitter. There's a bit of balance here between the use of hard outlining as well as the use of mesh dithering which was fairly common on the Genesis to expand the visible color palette when viewed on a classic CRT. Of course this technique has it's routes going even further back but it was effective for a reason. But now the discussion is if modern pixel art should be beholden to this style and essentially the validity of its use when now they're viewed on modern LCD displays to which I can understand WHY it'd be silly to harshly conform to the idea especially when proper CRT viewing is becoming almost impossibly rare nowadays and we certainly arn't beholden to palette limitations like the Genesis was anyway. In this instance it's certainly valid since the intent is to emulate the Genesis colouring style, but it's a curious discussion going forward that I think is just going to have to hinge on the context of the art being used. There are many examples of why and how you draw your pixels for a CRT display, and the proper and effective difference of that is night-and-day when you look at the skilled craftsmen of the day, but the use of it on modern displays can come off as garish or even offensive. Donkey Kong Country is still an artistically strong game, as well as looking at character portraits in many Square RPGs of the day, but the loss of CRT dithering does make them lose a bit of their majesty (also God help you if you want to effectively read the text in a modern port of the original Paper Mario, the pixels are so sharp the anti-aliasing will cut your eyes).

I think something I should consider if I continue moving forward with pixel art is making an effective CRT shader I can use to more effectively convey the look of classic displays, even if the end result may end up with a significantly larger image. This wouldn't be the first time for me considering all of the Game Boy filter art I've done, and it's not my first time playing with CRT like filtering, but I think I can certainly do much better since I've grown to understand better just how CRTs work in the first place.

... so I certainly didn't expect to type at this so early in the morning on this subject when I first started posting this, but I guess projects and ideas like this that art getting my dormant art drive going again. I'll just hope I can keep this trend going and do it justice going forward x_x