This repository aims to be the place where I learn, experiment, create and develop my visual and musical lore, producing what I like to call art-fiction1, with a particularly numeric and minimalistic way of doing things. That is, the creation of pixel art and General MIDI musics, using my own tools, Pixelor and Midilith.
I see a match between pixel art and General MIDI (with Midilith), and what (and
how) I aspire to create. Both are very numeric, discrete and exact. Both are
restrictive. Both are about the fastidious process of editing small things with
few abstractions or automations, giving a lot of creative expression. Both can
be refined to death over time, with efficient storage using Fossil. Both formats
(e.g. .png or .mid) are lossless and close to or exactly the thing the
author worked on, thus they can be studied in depth. Both are embedded into
video game creation, especially RPGs, and a lot has been created so there is a
lot to study.
I especially want to make musics and artworks, standalone or combined (e.g. an artwork for a song or multiple songs).
I want to explore fantasy, medieval fantasy, dark fantasy... Items, characters, places, concepts... The mysterious, the esoteric, the divine, the magical.
In this repository, I want to organize and record this journey, versioning everything I try to make, the good and the bad. It is not about the explicit sharing of what I do; these are the sources, the experiments, the attempts, and it will show my progress, if there is any. Then, when something good emerges, I will share it explicitly with others. But, this is where it gets done.
This way of creating contrasts a lot with what I envisioned doing in the past. With a programming oriented approach, I was seeking efficiency, to work smarter, and avoided the idea of doing pixel art, seeking instead a more efficient workflow for visual creation. But I like the result of pixel art, so it felt like giving up on that quality for something quick to produce, less precious, with less artistic expression. I'm not saying that an efficient use of the tool is irrelevant to pixel art, but it should teach me not to be afraid of the tedious (fastidious) aspects of creation and to actually realize my vision, without taking harmful shortcuts. I think generative AI made that point very clear to me.
License
The content in this repository is released under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
- ^ Where art and fiction are inseparable.