This all started because the wonderful poet Sam Tuff (@frivolousphilosopher on Instagram) bought a Game Boy Camera. Very cool device.
Basically, you slap this cartridge into your Game Boy, have a round of Nintendo’s lost game “Go Touch Grass”, and then boom. You’ve got funky lil pictures all dithered up in your handheld. Unfortunately, though, you needed *another* peripheral to actually get the images off- that being a Game Boy Printer.
Lovely lad that he is, he hasn’t acquired the printer (yet), so he took screenshots via the Analogue Pocket which render in black and white. Of course, the Game Boy doesn’t naturally render it’s images in grayscale- in fact, you’ll get a veritable who’s who of nuclear fallout greens. So, inspired by his sharing, I went ahead and edited these black and white screenshots back into the original GB palette.
Ooh, putrid!
In experimenting with colour palettes I found the incredible Lospec, which is a site where folks submit their own palettes for people to use in pixel art. Very snazz. Following an Aseprite tutorial by David Thomas, I resampled a picture of Klaus Nomi yoinked from Michael Halsband’s very good and excellent archive and changed the colours to this cool Darkseed inspired palette by Ricardo Juchem.
What’s cool about Lospec is from the sheer quantity of palettes it’s possible to index and resample all sorts of cool images. Especially for folks exploring retro content on the personal web, this feels like an easy win for having fun with those funky lil jpeg and png files.
I really wanna do the blender donut but I’m committed to sharing whatever the hell I make no matter what, and today Sam showed me cool pictures and I already downloaded a jpeg of Klaus Nomi to print with my label printer (lol) so sometimes you end the day and you’ve done this and then you post it. COOL!