Uploaded August 2024 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Look at that absolutely AMAZING thumbnail. I've done it. Perfection achieved. Please stop attempting to art at this point, it won't work out for anyone.

Occasionally I destroy other things, including but not by any means at all limited to good taste:
twitter.com/yuugijoou
discord.gg/bKT9pRW

This made its actual premiere debut on a stream over at:
twitch.tv/sleepysproutzzz

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I was invited to do a "collab" stream with a good friend and frequent co-conspirator of mine who has recently embraced the fascinating journey of putting yourself on the virtual screen through a complex (or not! it's only as weird and interesting as you want and your imagination can conceive!) puppet show, and I was struck by the bizarre urge to do what I always seem to be doing and attempt to capture the essence of his work and repurpose it for my own twisted agenda. Obviously.

His spin on the usual "PNGTuber" concept is not that dissimilar from my own original "haha, it's just an April Fool's Day joke!" shenanigans... but... y'know, with actual effort and thought put in, besides just achieving a simple punchline:
youtu.be/bi8lX-BY7YQ
youtu.be/5CyFDm3LKcs

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Actually, his is a much more laborious methodology that I can't help but respect far more than just the results, because I think he's actually the first "FlipNote Studio Tuber" I've ever seen, since the very specific and limited aesthetic breeds a very particular look and results in some very particular artistic techniques that I myself very rarely consider, let alone actually would have thought to employ.

Although when I went about more or less specifically ripping him off in my roundabout fashion, it DID remind me of the manner in which I drafted and laboriously implemented one of my very rare Splatfest team posts, the one for Vanilla Ice... Cream... Cone...
youtu.be/B56f16sist0

Except a lot less tedious, since I don't have to use a particularly limited chisel and stone tablet set to make it happen. And I don't know about FlipNote, but the Splatoon message box will get interrupted rather easily if you happen to leave it open and the system goes to sleep or gets somehow upset along the way, losing all progress since your last manual "save and work on this later" input.

But the idea of taking a relatively massive resolution image and CRUNCHING it down to the bare minimum pixel data and then just cleaning it up to its barest monochrome data to produce the same general impression with a much... harsher edge to it... is certainly ONE interesting application of the apparently least-desirable resize filter methods. (Nobody respects the humble pixel! Not very nearest-neighborly of them!)

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I was also quite intrigued by the use of a variety of pixel-style "halftone" techniques, which I discovered weren't TOO difficult to replicate, although the method of implementation was a bit weird for me... I would essentially just select the areas of the image that should get the a certain tone and mask out the rest. Although working with certain regions required a little extra thought about the order of layers and making sure that I didn't somehow mess up with my selection area or whether or not I'd messed up with my transplanting of the source layers as I'd cobbled them together externally.

You see, it probably should NOT shock you that a lot of picture-editing software with all the fanciest bells and whistles people are so fond of for digial art... are... not often especially well-attuned to handling pixel art. (And the image editing software I use most frequently for "edgier" raw pixel alterations don't always seem to have the more "modern" and fanciful features to do extensive and excessive layer operations to the point that I can start worrying about tripping over them and bloating my "projects" over them.)

Oh, and if THAT seems tedious and prone to error, just consider what happens when I discover after all those steps that I really don't appreciate the fact that the second image looks a bit more like abject terror instead of just opening wide and saying... "HEY! I'M TALKING HERE!"

(The eyebrows and lashlines are just a "little" softer than the rest of the image, because i could not for the life of me figure out a less-than-insane method of convincing Clip Studio Paint to NOT perform some degree of aliasing on EVERY operation, even if the tool I'm using has an option to set itself to "none" in that regard... but by that point, I was a bit sick of staring at my... ... ... um... EYES, YES. EYES... and just wanted to put the tiny, designated flicker-prone image free and setting it up for the goofy playdate that awaited.)

By the time I got THAT far, I had no interest in even ATTEMPTING to multiply my efforts to make the charming wiggly lines like his do. (Later.)

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... ... ...thank goodness the whole idea was to make someone ELSE play and stream and do all that good stuff, so I no longer have to be bothered with it, huh?

So much easier!