Faking It at 48x48

I’m not a pixel artist. I don’t really draw. Most of my background is in 3D, production design, and UI/UX. At work I make sports gambling ad's. But HeavenX needed desktop icons. A lot of them. And they had to look like something you'd find on an old school desktop, and they need to look decent.

The process is simple and I stumbled into it by accident. I start by collecting references. Mostly stuff from the old archives of windows icons that exist on modern windows machines:

%systemroot%\system32\pifmgr.dll
%systemroot%\system32\moricons.dll
%systemroot%\system32\mmcndmgr.dll
etc.
(I found these locations on this site: https://www.digitalcitizen.life/where-find-most-windows-10s-native-icons/ -- I set some of my modern windows 11 icons to these for fun)

Then I photobash together rough icon concepts in Photoshop. I literally pull stock pngs off google and collage them -- taking parts of other things, resizing, recoloring, etc until it starts to feel janky and old. Its actually kind of fun.

Once the idea is somewhere remotely OK, I shrink it down to 48x48. That’s when it breaks. The result isn't pixel art. It looks fucked up and stupid. But at this point its more about skipping the "sketching" part of what I'd imagine a "real" pixel artists process might be, and jumping right into polish/rendering.

From there, I start manually painting over it. I sharpen the silhouettes, repaint, etc. I use a LUT to lock things into an oldschool color space. Most of the “drawing” is really just tracing over what is there and getting rid of the scaling artifacts.

This is the point where I start to feel more comfortable drawing on new stuff from scratch, as I have something to jump off of. Our in universe email client is called "Edict" -- so I figured maybe a big letter "E" would be better than the globe.

It’s not mindblowing but it works. I’m not a pixel artist, and I don’t need to be. The goal is to make believable icons that blend into the narrative of the game and I think this gets us there.

– Matt