14-September-2022
Doing something consistently for more than a month long can take a huge motivation and a solid reason to do so. I also have tried doing it with pixel art.
The story behind this lies back when I finished a game jam submission, and while trying others submissions I was also checking their creator profile on itch, and while visiting someone's profile I saw his Twitter which had mostly tweets of pixel art having a common Twitter handle being tagged in. and that is how I came to know about Pixel_Dailies.
Pixel Dailies is basically a Twitter handle which uploads a theme everyday to challenge pixel artists to attempt to scope small and make small pixel art pieces which could be completed in one day and make them everyday. This can make them practice consistency.
I noted about that thing down and decided to attempt it too after few days, those few days became few weeks but I did came back to Pixel Dailies Twitter account and after checking out it's theme I decided to procrastinate one more day and attempt later. Fortunately I did that, on that day -- 7th of January 2022 -- the theme was "tent", I looked for some reference images and tried having an isometric approach, it didn't turned out to be as good as expected, but first time none game pixel art being that was good enough to look like that.
As it was scaled up by using Microsoft Paint -- as I didn't knew gimp could also be used to scale it without blurring it -- so it left white empty spaces in the top and left of the canvas, I didn't noticed them before posting it on Twitter. So I left it like that and didn't bothered to do anything except for avoiding it from next time.
After that doing pixel art daily went in a pretty decent way, at some point I also discovered the way to scale it using Gimp. At this point it was hard to remain consistent with it as I was going to school and academy too. I had to do this pixel art thing at night, it somewhat became part of my daily schedule. It was hard to do it everyday but I also didn't had any reason to stop doing it.
After tweeting my 25th Pixel Dailies attempt -- on 31st of January -- I was scrolling Twitter to look for others attempt on that day like always when I saw somebody's tweet showing all his Pixel Dailies attempts of Month of January in one picture. It was so attractive that I also wanted to do it but was 6 days late at starting Pixel Dailies. So that is why I decided I will surely do it next month. As February have 28 days, it would be easier to distribute them as compared to 31 days.
In month of February I felt more burned out than that of previous month. As later this year I read "Atomic Habits" by "James Clear" and realized the reason why that was happening. It happened when I started focusing on goal more than focusing on the process. As he writes a small topic in his book that mentions "Goals limit your Happiness". And I guess that is exactly what happened to me, instead of feeling it like a practice I started feeling it like a responsibility.
There comes the 28th of February, and I made that one frame of my whole months work, but it looked terrible. The reason it looked terrible was because all of my pixel art pieces were having different resolution and could be fitted in same sized cells. It looked bad but I still uploaded it anyways, after all I had waited 28 days for it. The responsibility feelings made me feel so burnt out that even in my tweet of whole month's progress I mentioned I might get inconsistent from now.
The next day it was a religious holiday due to which school and academy were both closed, and the theme of pixel Dailies was also pretty simple -- Barrel -- so just simply made a Barrel for that tweeted it and after that I got inconsistent at doing Pixel Dailies.
By the way I am still doing Pixel Dailies nowadays, but the thing is that I am no more consistent at this. Sometimes while doing some Pixel Dailies attempts I also recorded time-lapse of their process, but never uploaded them as it felt like more responsibility on my shoulders so I didn't uploaded them on that time, but currently I have a youtube playlist showcasing all my time-lapses recorded, and now I try to record time-lapse of the process when ever I do Pixel Dailies. I recently have made a instagram profile to showcase my previous and new Pixel Dailies attempts.