Canvas is a yearly Fediverse event similar to Reddit’s Place - it’s a collaborative art project where any Fediverse user can place colored pixels on a shared canvas over a period of a few days. It has a dedicated community at !canvas@toast.ooo - the canvas itself is here.
This will be its third year; the first time, there were some minor furry drawings, and last year, we were a bit more organized, with a bit of collaboration between Pawb and Yiffit. The full canvas from last year can be seen here - we had a small spot carved out in the lower left corner, as well as a few scattered things all around.
I’d be great to actually start organized this year, and create something substantial together.
Anyone else interested in participating? Any thoughts on what we might make? Anyone with artistic skill want to sketch something out? If we can get a few ideas, maybe we vote on them prior to the event itself?
Edit: Template Here
You must log in or # to comment.
I kind of hate how restrictive the color palette is with regards to actual colors. Things with an excess of browns and greys are very easy to make work, but anything with an abundance of color ends up looking very basic. For example, this guy looks fine when converted to the palette, but trying to do it with a green (for example) character just looks like a mess.
Here’s all of the ones that’ve been posted, plus a few others that furries will probably find familiar. Some (like the Yiffit logo) will need to be cleaned up if we end up using them, and some are obviously too large as they are (and will need to either be behind other elements or be trimmed down), but they’re all using the right palette.
I’ve got them in separate layers in aseprite and I don’t mind making the final template / doing the cleanup, but I’d like to get some feedback from folks on arrangement. I’m a pretty shit artist.
Even if you want to just toss things in a rough position in MS Paint, that’s fine - input needed.
Ethanol, tblFlip, l_b_i: If you want to get your sonas or favorite character included, I’ll take care of pixelifying it for you, just give me a source image (ideally with high contrast).
@OmegaMouse@pawb.social @Ethanol@pawb.social @green_copper@kbin.earth @tblFlip@pawb.social @l_b_i@yiffit.net
ok, wonderful moment to figure out that lemmy does not send me push notifications. at all…
but lucky me: the color palette is not diverse enough to get me on there anyways! :D
My current proposal. I think we should also talk about the sizes of easier-to-scale elements. The Pawb logo is one of the smallest, but I scaled it that way as we currently already have quite the amount of pixels.
That actually fits together pretty compactly. We could omit the boykisser, there’s been boykissers elsewhere on the canvas for the last two years, anyway, and it’s the only component that doesn’t fit in nicely.
If no more edits are are added 'til tomorrow I will allocate an area and add a comment to the template-finer thread in c/canvas (but no pressure, I will edit the comment if the template should be changed afterwards). Any wishes for position? If not I will gravitate towards the top right corner.
@KoboldCoterie@pawb.social @OmegaMouse@pawb.social @Ethanol@pawb.social @l_b_i@pawb.social @tblFlip@pawb.social
The right side will be in the middle on the final canvas (assuming it goes the same as last year, with the size doubling mid-way through). Not a bad thing necessarily but worth noting.
As noted above, though, this is too large - we’ll never get this much space to ourselves and we’ll simply never finish it.
This is a composite of the templates currently posted there - top right corner doesn’t work as we’d be competing with another group.
Compacted a few things, removed boykisser, and swapped Omega and the paw to make it a bit more compact; this is the most compact layout I can find. Total outline is 216x180, though, which is way too large. We’ll never get that much space to ourselves, and we’ll never actually be able to finish it.
Hmmmm, yea the size is problematic. How should we decide on what to omit or try to shrink further (e621 has much potential)?
Other possibility would be to assign priorities and when something couldn’t be finished, then it is what it is.
Okay, new proposal: We trim some elements and omit others, leaving us with this:
We put it at (0,390), with the understanding that we’re going behind (rather than over) the tree that’s going up right beside us; that will also help box it in.
In the event that the canvas gets extended twice instead of only once (which will result in another 500 px below the initial square), we extend the two cut off pieces down into the new area, if we have time.
Total area here is 176x110, which is still ambitious, but plausible.
The other option is we design something that fits on the right edge of the canvas and plan to continue into the expanded area the first time it expands (which will probably happen, the second one is less likely.)
(It’s not really about being able to place all of the pixels over the course of the event so much as it is being able to command presence of our area. If we’re working slowly and filling things in a little at a time, other art will move into the area we’d planned to draw in, but we can take advantage of the expanding canvas to solve for this.)
The alternative is that we take all of the individual elements and place them around the canvas, and build them separately. We really do just have a collection of small things, so we could fit them in around other artworks rather than trying to capture an entire corner / area.
Out of interest, will everyone be contributing to any/every piece of art here? I might adjust Omega’s eyes slightly on the final thing so they’re a bit more even :3
That’s the intent, yeah - whatever we decide on, we just work on it as a group, via the template we’ll set up.
Definitely feel free to make any adjustments you want!
How’s this? I think it should be pixel perfect
Though when I try and open the image and zoom in on my browser, it looks blurry. Unsure if that’s just a browser thing, or if it should be saved as another file type.
I really like your Idea to place it for possible convenient expansion. Expansion to the side is likely yes, but I think it looks better with the horizontal cut like it is now.
i honestly really like the idea to turn this into a collection that is just placed wherever we can. there is no strong reason that we have to bunch everything up in one place. it actually makes things a lot easier. if we have more time than expected (those are “only” 10k pixels after all :P), we can always add more. running out of time? omit some of the later designs
The advantage of a collection in one place is that it is easier to make a template of and so to organize.
yeah, it is a lot easier to create a template once and be done with it. that said, i don’t think that making a template for a more scattered approach is the hard part. organizing and communicating to everyone what the latest revision of that template is would be
with one big image (where everything is collected in one place) we would also have to quickly set a boundary around the entire design before anyone else starts to claim parts of it. focusing on one or two smaller designs instead could make the initial rush a good bit more survivable, while also allowing us to utilize space left in between other projects as the event progresses
Just realized I didn’t have OmegaMouse’s pixel art version in there. This is what it looks like when reduced to the Canvas palette - it’s workable, but it’d need some work. Up to you which one you prefer.
this is pretty cool! Well done on the arts! :3
I think we should compact the arrangement, so that we don’t compete for so much area.
The blue Pawb logo can be shrunk and then put into the space between RAM and the Kobold. The green dragon head fits under the sword (to the right). Boykisser can then take its place.Do you have a Gimp project-file? Because this PNG is not to scale and I would like to help with the refinement of the Yiffit logo. I can also create a shared Nextcloud folder if you want.
Oh for sure, I’m not proposing that this is the design, just arranged everything spread out enough that they could be cut out and moved around if someone wanted to propose something. (The red kobold doesn’t need to be there in its entirety, either; it’s quite large. We also don’t need to use everything here, obviously.)
I don’t have a GIMP file; I’m working in Aseprite, but I can export a to-scale PNG. I can also share the Aseprite file (with layers set up and the color palette loaded) if anyone else is using it.
I tried to Pixel RAM, here is the result:
I also did another one, but I think the first one is better.
They are not very small (96px on the long side) but scaling them more down made the results to bad.
This is great; have you confirmed that your color palette is supported?
You’ve got about 4000-4500 colored pixels here, or 6650 if you’re thinking to have a solid background behind it; that’s a lot - you might need to trim it down to just a bust (for example) to cut the size down, unless you’re planning to be super active. (There’s a ~30 second cooldown between pixels you can place, so drawing something that big takes a long time. To put it in perspective, the entire area we were working on last year with 3 or 4 of us very active and a number of others popping in for shorter periods was about 7500 total pixels.
@tblFlip@pawb.social @Ethanol@pawb.social @l_b_i@pawb.social @OmegaMouse@pawb.social Do you all (and anyone else, but you all have replied here) want to supply some character images, too? We can put together a collage with all of them around a paw or a slogan or something to tie it together.
I have this pixel art I did years ago
I also like this headshot I did recently
Buuuut I’m not sure how well it translates to pixel art x3
Here’s an attempt at conforming it to the Canvas color palette; could use some cleaning up, but it’s quite workable.
I’d like to get a kobold or two in there, too - still mucking with it, but something like
or
Do we want to include a paw or some text or something? Furries of the Fediverse! I don’t know.
We could do all of the headshots surrounding a central paw, maybe.
Aw great work on cleaning up that mouse headshot!
The second kobold there is my favourite :3 And yes I love the idea of a central paw!
I’m good tbh, I don’t have any pixel arts to supply. We should also be careful not to take up more space than we can manage :P
Also here is last years canvas color palette as a png:
I found a post which has the palette in bigger + color-codes.
Very helpful!
Have you got a fursona you’d potentially want to include? If you’ve got some non-pixel art art, I might be able to make it work. I’m not much of an artist, but I know my way around Aseprite, at least. Just don’t want you to be left out!
Also maybe we should create a collage of all planned Furry-Pixels and allocate a space here.
I checked the color palette and made all pixels fit. The background is transparent; so other small artworks can be integrated in the empty spaces.
I think I will start from the head and the see how far down I can go.
sure, i’ll be around for the whole thing. should the impossible happen and lightning strikes me indoors, causing me to have an idea for what to draw, i’ll post it
hell yeah, I love the canvas events :3
I took the liberty to extract the designs from last year:the cute critter (@OmegaMouse@pawb.social) in the middle of the rainbow owos:
the knot lipstick combo:
the pawb social logo:
the rainbow owos:
the yiffit logo:
some kind of tribute to yiffit might be nice to remember it.
Hey, this is great!
It’d be awesome to have some cohesive (larger) design this year rather than just adding things as we think of them. :)
I miss yiffit. I loved the vibe there. I believe the cute critter is @OmegaMouse@pawb.social
oh yeah, thank you for providing a link to the creator!
Nice work! Would be fun to recreate these or something similar :3
I’m uncreative as fuck but as soon as there is a template you have my
axepixel.If nothing else, we could always make a little collage of everyone’s sonas or favorite characters. Would require everyone to supply their own image, though, and we’d have to get them all sized, arranged, and reduced to the available color palette.
I could try (emphasis on try) to create a pixel version of RAM. If anyone else wants her on the canvas, any help for the template is appreciated.
