[image: a pixel art drawing of kirby's smiling face (just his face, not his limbs) against a cyan background]
this community hasn't had a post in five days, so here's something i just finished today! (it only took forever to get that mouth looking reasonably good...)
edit: moved the eyes and cheek blushes closer together because it turns out bandee would've been too wide otherwise. also revised the mouth, again. it's hard to make it look good with such a limited number of pixels, but that's the tradeoff when working with low-size pixel art: fewer pixels that need to be worked with, but also fewer pixels to work with.
edit 2: changed the background colour because it was too close to elfilin's colour.
for a while now, i've had an idea for some reasonably low-effort oc content that i could post here. would take quite a bit of upfront work (which is what i'm currently doing), but afterwards i'll hopefully be able to put something out semi-regularly for this community. not sure when i'll be done, but again, this community hasn't had a new post in 5 days (and it hasn't had a new post from someone other than KirbySSM in 11 days), so i'm making this post now.
in the meantime, i might be posting some non-oc stuff over the next few days, just so c/kirby has some new stuff to look at. i encourage everyone else to do the same -- and also comment on other people's posts, if you have something to say!
i'm pretty much done with everything! expect to see the final product sometime tomorrow (well, in my timezone, technically today).
all of the necessary portraits are done! (as are some unused ones that were convenient to make from other portraits.) i also spent an ungodly amount of time on an "hd" (read: 144×144 instead of 48×48) version of a certain portrait. which you won't be seeing in the project itself but maybe i'll post it at some point. i was going to do the same thing with the other characters' versions of the portrait but then i decided against it because it would require an even ungodlier amount of time and effort.
all of the other portrait work, in contrast, was actually quite easy. thankfully.
i was going to post just that back when i finished the portrait stuff, but then lemmy.world was down so instead i started work on the rest of the programming that i had to do. that was... a journey. tougher than i expected, but not too bad. somehow the code actually got less messy the more i worked on it???
anyway! just a few final things and i'll be ready! i have a near-final version of the thing at hand, and... well, it wasn't exactly the scene i was imagining in my head, but i still like the final result! i literally just had an idea as i was looking over the thing as i was writing the previous few sentences! so i'll do that, do some final checks, transcribe things into a screen-reader-friendly form, and then i'll be set to share it all with you guys in somewhere between 6 and 18 hours depending on my sleep schedule! =D
i thought i was done, but then some time later there were various tweaks and changes i wanted/needed to make to the portraits. making bandee more red, correcting elfilin's nose colour (it was originally the same as his inner ear colour for some reason), changing a certain portrait type to make it convey its thing more effectively, etc.
i'll be checking things over again, one last time if i'm (un)lucky (it's lucky to catch things in time, but it's even luckier to not have anything that needs to be caught). assuming everything goes smoothly, prepare to see a new post from me in 1-3 hours.