I am probably going to wind down using Wplace. It was fun to mess around with for a few days, flex my pixel art muscles, see what other people are drawing, see how the canvas evolves, but it’s very much a flash in the pan thing that most people are going to move on again from quickly, myself included. I have dotted down a few more things on the map, this time putting some larger pieces of other people’s art in a few places rather than my own pixel designs.

I put down the Pico-8 logo and a few characters near the Pico Pico Café in Kichijōji, Tokyo. This is a busy area and it has quickly been drawn over again, but all of this is ephemeral.

One of my past brief obsessions was St. Bride’s a strange mock-Victorian girl’s school holiday destination in Ailt an Chorráin, Donegal that in the 1980s promised a total disconnect from modern society and modern technology. They advertised that they had no electricity and did not believe in such things and also published a series of text adventure games for the ZX Spectrum. That is a rabbit to save for a future post, perhaps. I planted a shrunk-down recreation of the title screen of the game The Secret of St. Bride’s in the village where the school was based.

I started using the Blue Marble user script for these which helped with planning out size and position for these larger drawings a lot, as well as speeding up the actual drawing. I dropped a little art of Transy east of Bournemouth. It’s modified from a comic panel but this is the art from this lot that I can probably take the most credit as being “mine”.

I also draw the character select art for Snolf that I originally commissioned from Mars Gainsboro and decided to arbitrary place them on the Isle of Skye Golf Club.

Finally, I also contributed my pixels to my friend Ruby’s big rendition of the art for the P-Model album In a Model Room in Tsukuba, a hotbed for artwork of Susumu Hirasawa. She contributed to helping draw my art a lot as well.

I have some more Wplace art in a new post.

I’ve been spending a bit too much time fucking around on Wplace but it’s been nice to flex my pixel art muscles a tiny bit again. One of the first things I added to the map was a dusted-off pokémon trainer sprite I made a few years ago when playing the ROM hack Pokémon Crystal Clear.

I used the Crystal player sprite as a base for this with the arm of the youngster sprite from the first generation games. I put this down near where I grew up, a pretty rural place. It can be quite isolating to grow up weird or queer in a place like that and it warmed my heart to see someone else had already drawn a few pride flags there including a trans one. I don’t know who drew that but I hope they are doing okay.

I also saw a few local G.A.A. club flags and didn’t think much of it but checking back over a few days it quickly became apparent that some cunt was drawing these to cover over pride flags. This put me in a foul mood but over the next few days the ever-growing retaliatory pride flags made them give up and there is a big, unmolested rainbow heart in the middle of the village now.

After that I set my sights on a few landmarks. These took a few revisions but I’m really happy with how they turned out.

Large collaborative art projects Wplace are cool but it can be frustrating when they do them right on top of cities that are already crowded for space. Still, with a bit of silent negotiation I was able to put these down close to where they are on the map.

I do have one other gripe with Wplace: The gamified system and slow drip of pixels back is unfortunately very effective and leading me back into bad habits of sitting at my desk refreshing webpages that I have been trying to break. At least the ability to get larger charges over time, as much as it plays into those systems designed to be addictive, does give you more room over time to step away from it and not feel like you are wasting your chances to draw something.

The other little unique doodle I’ve done is one of Sadako Yamamura, which I wasn’t entirely happy with but a friend said was really good so I will take that compliment.

I have been dotting some variously-sized Eggbugs and some other small things around as well as contributing to a few larger pieces of art and fixing vandalism here and there. It’s been a fun little time waster.

I was going to sign off saying that I didn’t yet have another project I planned on drawing but while writing this I had a brainwave.

I’ll be filling this in as my paint refreshes.

Flexing my pixel art doodle muscles again on WPlace has been nice