It's been a while since Flash Party 2023, but I had no time to write about the contribution with which I was able to win the ANSI competition until now.
For starters, I had not drawn an ANSI since exactly November 10, 1996. 27 years ago! Back then, I used Acid Draw for MS-DOS, but I now find Moebius much better.
But let's talk about the process of creating "Skate Kittens".
I'd love to say that I'm an excellent illustrator, but the sad truth is that I'm pretty bad. Because of that, I've always used references for drawing ANSI.
This might sound as simple as copying an existing drawing, but in reality the process is much more complicated than it looks. This is because of the limitations of the format:
You draw using ASCII characters, so the resolution is terrible. It's very difficult to adapt small details.
Only two colors per character, 80 characters per line.
One of those two colors must be picked from a fixed 16 color palette.
The other color must be picked from 8 available colors. (16 if using iCE Color™)
While you can apply some dithering and get more shades of colors, the available palette is very limited.
This means that you need to adapt many details from the original reference in order to represent them as ANSI. Colors need to be changed. Find a way to trick the eye into reconstructing details that are not there anymore.
Here's a small tutorial by Lord Soth / iCE where many of these techniques are explained.
Back in the 90's I used to work with references from comic books, because it's a style that is better suited to adapt to ANSI. Now I'm using Midjourney to generate multiple images and then make a composition in Photoshop, fixing those typical AI errors in the process.
Once I have a reference that I think might work, I load it into Moebius so that I can layer it behind the ANSI using transparency. From this point onward, I make two draw passes. In the first one I focus on basic flat colors and shapes. The result looks somewhat like EGA pixel art, if zoomed out. The second pass focuses on color shading and finer details.
For this case in particular, it took me 16 days to get to the end result. And thanks to Moebius' autosave feature, I was able to keep each step of the process and see how it evolved, day by day.
Here's a video where you can watch said process from the start.