[ART] Under a Shooting Star

 Under a Shooting Star

Resources used:

• Palette: modified palette from Sepia
• Colormap: from Sepia
• Sprites: my own
• Textures: my own, GOTHICTX, COMTEX 
• Source port; format: Eternity, MBF21 (should run on any MBF21 port)

Wad file:

DOWNLOAD 

Description:

This piece is a little bit different, as it's a truecolor image instead of being indexed to a palette. However, palettes play an important role nonetheless. In-game, the scene was rendered in a black & white version of Doom's palette. Afterwards, I used another palette, one which I made a few days prior, to manually add in color to the screenshot in Aseprite. 

The reason I did this is because I wanted to emulate a really interesting process employed in the early days of film, where monochrome film was painted by hand, frame by frame. An example of this in action is Le Voyage à travers l'impossible by Georges Méliès. 

Besides finding it really cool, the reason I did this is because of the subject of this painting. The two ladies sharing a kiss are characters made by my dear partner. The one on the left is Griselda Weiss, and the one on the right is Rosetta Maxwell. They're a pair of students, secretly in love with one another, attending an all-girl school at the tail end of the 19th century. The time period obviously inspired me to emulate the methods present in early cinema. 

Anyways, I wish a wonderful and merry Christmas to all the lesbians out there! 

 

[MISC] Merry Christmas!

 I hope everyone reading this has a nice Christmas! Over here where I live people are predominantly Orthodox so Christmas is celebrated on January 7th. Anyways, I do wonder how many people are actively keeping up with this blog. Feel free to comment bellow to let me know you're reading these posts!

Anyways, thought I'd take the opportunity to explain my current break from using Doomworld and Bluesky. The short of it is that it was motivated by the realization that I've been suffering from emotional burnout, and felt that those sites were a contributing factor. There was also a desire to simply spend less time mindlessly scrolling on the internet.

This isn't something motivated by any event or person in particular, I think it was more of a cumulative thing. Either way, I certainly harbor no ill-will towards either site or anyone on them. Just felt I needed a vacation you could say. And it's certainly helped I feel!

Anyways, take care and happy holidays!  

[ART] Dump of my older art 4

 New Assisi Spaceport

Resources used: Doom 2 textures, sky from Form vs. Content, sprites from Equinox

Wad file: download

Another go at trying to capture the vibe of @nicolas monti's maps. I find this a far greater success not only at emulating the look of his maps but also at putting my own spin on it.

I started with the idea of making a sci-fi setting using nothing besides various outdoors textures from Doom2. I made a couple of edited textures (which are free to use with credit) and also decided to borrow a couple of sprites from BPRD's Equinox. Took a bit to pick a sky, but I settled for the one Monti used in E2 of Form vs. Content.

I can point to various inspirations for the final piece: obviously there's Monti's maps and Equinox, but I'd also point out Catnip II by @DoctorNuriel and the titlepic @Plerb made for Extragalaxial (the spaceship in the sky is a dead giveaway for that lol)

All in all I'm really happy to drop something more substantial in this thread again!

PS: For the optimal viewing experience I recommend listening to Plerb's midis

- 17. January 2025.

 One of my favorite details here is how I used the BFG pickup sprite to represent a turret. All in all a nifty little piece with a nice sci-fi vibe.

Worship

Something a little different. Made in Libresprite using @stephyesterday's Rosy256 palette. Was thinking of starting a new wad painting but I wasn't sure which resources to use so I decided to instead illustrate a scene that came to me out of the blue today.

I've also decided to rename this thread. This shit's not an experiment anymore this is my primary mode of artistic expression. 

- 28. January 2025.

 And by golly it still is! This piece remains quite unique within the scope of my art thread on Doomworld. A regular pixel-painting among a bunch of mixed media shenanigans. I still enjoy the sense of reverence this has.

 ¡Cachagumare!

Resources used: Cachagua2 from The Cacofiles, DreamPal

Wad file: I literally just used Cachagua2 with DreamPal applied. Adding it here would be redundant.

Another experiment born out of my art block. I couldn't think of a scene to make but the Cacofiles came to the rescue. I booted up a bunch of random stuff, including Cachagua2. It's an utterly unremarkable map yet it stuck with me. The pretty blue sky and the realization that the midi playing is a rendition of a song my dad often blasts on his car radio made me stick around in this map for longer than one would expect and soon I realized that I could make a neat looking shot with the barebones scenery available. Soon came the idea of making the place a café of some sort.

The barebones nature of the map also inspired me to try and add all the details by drawing instead of altering the map in any way. Only thing I did to the map was change the palette.

 - 30. January 2025.

 This was a nice little experiment! It was also a reminder of one of the things that drew me to making art the way I do - perspective isn't my strong suit. It took me a bit to figure out how to draw that window in the middle, still not sure if I got it right :P The roof is also a bit of a mess but I've long since embraced the act of finding joy in art could be considered more janky so I don't really mind.

Zovacspu

Resources used: heavily modified sky picture found on Pexels (uploaded by Szabó Viktor), DreamPal, DaWerecat textures and sprites, Lost Civilization, A.L.T.

Wad file: download

Inspiration for this piece came from two places: A.L.T. and a specific area in Collective Unconscious (a Yume Nikki fangame). A.L.T. inspired the scenery on land, while inspiration for the reflected sky on the water comes from a specific place in Collective Unconscious called Dusk World, which was made by NecreMoon.

Another wad that came to also heavily influence the creative direction of this piece is @meapineapple's Saltwater, though moreso in method than in theme. Basically, it lead me to finding a stock sky photo on Pexels, which allowed me to make my own sky texture. After some tinkering with palette settings in Libresprite, I ended up with a normal looking sky texture and several wild looking ones, and I went with a wild one for this. All the skies that I derived from the original photo are in Zovacspu's wad file.

Overall I'd say this is one of my favorite paintings of mine.

 - 2. February 2025.

 Saltwater is a shining beacon of Doom mapping, play it now!! I distinctly remember listening to a compilation of various Astrud Gilberto songs while making this, and those songs are a huge part of the vibe this piece evokes for me. The compilation can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uMIgPeoHho&list=RD9uMIgPeoHho&start_radio=1 

Pool Party

Resources used: Firerainbow 2

Wad File: download

 Started playing Firerainbow 2 yesterday and finished it today, and I got inspired to make a painting with all of its different fireblu edits. I'm quite happy with how this turned out, think it captures the project's vibe pretty well. Playing around with the HOM and rain effects was quite fun, and adding a cyberdemon to that spot was the cherry on top.

 Special thanks: @Petyan for hosting Firerainbow 2 

- 13. February

 God bless out-there slaughter mappers, they are a veritable factory of interesting ideas. All those fireblu recolors add up to a surprisingly versatile texture collection.

Drevni Vanzemaljci

Resources used: Sky from Ancient Aliens, converted to the stock palette via Image Palettizer, TNT Evilution, Monti's Enceladus and Silurian, BPRD's Grove, Realm667 sprites [Cacti(slim), Dev Nature Props], some of my own sprites.
Wad file: download [needs to be run with TNT.wad to work] 

I was playing Silurian two days ago when out of the blue an idea struck me: what if I applied Monti's gimmick of using alpha/iwad textures to make locations that those textures weren't designed for? That's certainly not a new thought, matter of fact, the second ever painting-map I made - Riverside, features a rustic house mostly made out of tech textures I found in the pyddtex pack, and then there's more direct homages to Monti's work such as New Assisi Spaceport.

Either way, the location my mind decided on, for reasons I'm unsure of, were the early levels of Ancient Aliens. I really liked this idea, so much so that I soon dropped Silurian so I could play through AA again. Beyond giving me inspiration for this painting, playing AA has been lots of fun as well.

Recreating the look of AA with the vanilla palette and TNT's textures + some additional resources was really fun and personally satisfying. If I has made this exact scene with AA's resources I doubt it would have been even nearly as fullfiling to make for me. Something about the act of creating something new and interesting within these kinds of aesthetic constraints deeply resonates with me.

 

Edit: forgot to mention that this picture was made possible by DSDA Doom's OpenGl rendered, though in this case the port I used is Nyan. They recently made it work better for low resolutions which is just what I need. Now I can experiment with different angles and shit. Though I gotta take the screenshot in windowed mode as trying to do so in fullscreen made the game close. 

- 25. February - 2. March 2025. 

 There's something cool about seeing just what can be done with a specific set of colors. Might be one of the reasons I've grown to love 256-color palettes and colormaps. A detail I left out is that the original sprites of mine featured here were made for Rencoret. He made a map that isn't released yet, and wanted to add some more details to it so I decided to make some sprites for that purpose, as well as a couple of textures.

Moj stari prijatelj Vinčenzo

Resources used: Picture of Castiglione della Pescaia, Italy taken by Petr Ganaj [Pexels]; modified Doom palette by me

Description:

Wanted to mess around with image palettization and drew a silly blue fella whom I've name Vincenzo. I also used a palette I was making with Libresprite, though idk how to import palette files into a wad so for now this picture is the only way to see said palette.

- 9. March 2025. 

 Vinčenzo is such an interesting little guy. Turned from a random creature I thought up spontaneously into someone I consider a hallmark character in my work. Ayba dedicating a painting to him and later on Rencoret featuring him in P'al Hipocampo definitely helped cement him. Also love how I incorrectly transcribed the name Vincezo into my own language. In order for it to reflect the Italian pronunciation, I would have to write it as Vinčenco. Doesn't matter tho, I'm sticking with Vinčenzo.

[ART] Twomb

 Twomb

Resources used:

• Palette: Hexen 2
• Colormap: Generated with CIEDE2000 in Slade 
• Sprites: My own  
• Textures: My own, Hexen, Juggernaut, /3/ Anon Old Stuff [3DWORLD textures, Marlin Studios great Textures of Orient, NuGraf textures]
• Source port; format: Eternity Engine UDMF

Wad file:

DOWNLOAD 

Description:

  This one's interesting! It's inspired by the resurrection of Jesus, specifically the idea that the resurrection is something that manifests itself in day-to-day life in a variety of ways. To take myself as an example of what I mean: I've been struggling with a variety of strange and harmful thought patterns that have hurt me and others for quite a while. They're things I see as having sprouted out of various unhealed wounds and trauma. I see the pain that caused these things and the subsequent pain they caused represented on the cross and the grave. A manifestation of death. Recently however, I've been blessed with moments of peace and clarity, where despite my troubles, I was able to choose love and kindness over fear and mind traps. I see these in the resurrection - a manifestation of life.

Mysticism aside, there's a funny story behind this: I happened to be listening to a song from Skaldowie and the video had some pictures of the band. I really liked the colors in the last image and I was inspired by them to make a new palette. While brainstorming, I remembered that the Hexen 2 palette had a similar vibe, and after checking it out again I found it really nice. It made me look up the game itself, and seeing as it was on sale for a bit over one Euro I bought it and it's quite a cool game! A bit confusing sometimes but that's Hexen for ya :P 

Anyways, I ended up using the Hexen 2 palette here! It's a really interesting palette, and it was quite fun working with it! I've definitely developed a love for working with palettes meant for games that aren't Doom - each has its own quirks, vibe and personality.

[ART] Dump of my older art 3

 Homecoming

 

Resources used: 

Resource wad for Cacodemon197's unfinished wad, Bajando Pa' Puerto Aysén, which can be found in bundled with a ton of other stuff here.

Resource credits from said resource wad: lostres, Hexen, COLONY_1.wad, HacX, P41R47, XMAS / DOOM, Heretic, Fistful of Doom, A.L.T., Extremal Doom, Lost Civilization, Evilution, STRAIN, Akeldama, Requiem, Roger Ritenour, Memento Mori, Plutonia, Otex, Hackjob, Taw Tu'lki

Wad file: download (needs to be loaded with 4cuartosplaypal from the Cacofiles, linked in the resources section above; the palette in the map wad is the unmodified 4cuartosplaypal palette, idk why I put it there :P)  

Special thanks: @Cacodemon187: (now known as Rencoret) 

When I stumbled upon the remains of Bajando Pa' Puerto Aysén while browsing the Caco files, I knew it was something special from the get go. Chile is not a place I'd have ever thought of when thinking about winter, and yet it's a Chilean mapper who captured the kinds of feelings I associate with winter perfectly. Pretty soon I started thinking about trying to make something with the wad's framework. And lo and behold, here we are! This piece wouldn't exist without Caco's work, so a proper shout out is warranted.

Description:

I've expressed some of the main points in the previous section so this is gonna be a bit shorter. This is my proudest work yet I must say. Beyond the obvious influence from Caco's stuff, I've also taken inspiration from a recent trip to Sarajevo. The Romanija plateau (not to be confused with the country of Romania) is home to some stunning winter scenery. Inspiration for the embracing spirits in the foreground mainly comes from Yume Nikki and its fangames, which sometimes have similar solid color figures contrasting with more grounded scenery, and a little Marathon sprinkled in (the static is inspired by the S'pht death animations)

I took some time to settle on the spiritual motif. I mainly arrived at it by the need to have something going on in the foreground and a desire to incorporate more hand drawn details. I placed the frozen corpse quite early, and it eventually served as the main starting point for the scene.

- 2. - 22. December 2024 

 Homecoming is still a banger, I love it and it remains one of my favorites. Lots of feelings and nice memories come with it. I started working on it while I was still using my grandma's TV as an emergency monitor, and finished it on my new monitor. Seeing the color difference for the first time was a wonderful experience.

Here's a bonus pic, which was an alternative direction this painting was going in. I saved this in-progress snippet of it before undoing some of the changes and turning the painting into what it is today.

 

 IDK

 

Resources used: Pyddtex, hue shifted Eviternity palette

Wad file: download

Description: 

A long time ago, maybe in 2021 or so I was first starting to toy with making custom palettes. At one point, I got frustrated with the whole ordeal and decided to just take the Evieternity palette and hue shift all of it. I found the resultant palette fascinating and made some maps with it, though those were never released. Wanted to try and make a painting with it too but it went nowhere pretty much. 

- 22. December 2024 - 12. January 2025

Yeah this one hasn't got much going on. I do find the star shaped tentacle floor quite neat.  

My nodebuilder has lead me to places that I wouldn't even go to with a gun
+ Favillesco Sigma

 

Resources used: Doom 2 textures, TNT sky

Wad file: download

Description: 

I've been blasting through @nicolas monti's wads again. He is one of my favorite Doom mappers ever and I adore his visual style. I wanted to try and make something mimicking it.

As soon as I released Cubes Deep I began developing the idea and eventually settled on doing something funky with Doom 2's textures. Basically I took some of the MODWALL and ZIMMER textures and messed around with them in Libresprite until I had something that looked interesting.

I tried to build a scene but it took quite some time to get something that looked alright. I made several attempts at starting something and they went nowhere. I decided to leave the barely started scenes behind in map01 and started fresh on map02. Eventually I got something after a bunch of bullshiting, and interestingly enough, when I accidentally started a new game and went back to map01 it looked kinda neat so I decided to develop that as well.

And so I ended up with this two-for-one deal.

These are the first shots I took via @Arsinikk's Nyan Doom, which proved to be a great source port. 

Also, forgot to mention that I was cosidering using a snippet of an Edvard Munch painting "Stjernenatt" as the sky. It looked like ass in the stock palette so I moved on from that idea, but the snippet is still in the wad. That's also the reason the wad file is called "Munch"

- 12. January 2025.

I still love Monti's wads. I highly recommend his latest wad, Trappist. Also recommend State of the art. And the Favillesco re-release. And Form vs Content. And Kreatura...

 

[ART] Jesen

Jesen 

 

Resources used: Quake palette, my own resources, Happy Time Circus 2, Zekhmet project, Texture Town, /3/ Anon old stuff archive [Marlin Studios Great Textures of Europe, Truespace 4 textures], System Vices, DaWerecat, Mek's Box 'o Skies, Comtex, LibreQuake, Ikwhite texture pack by Killjoy featuring edited Iikka Keränen textures

Wad file: >download< 

Breaking news: 97TH CENTURY FOX HAS DONE IT! Done what? Well let me tell you. Just shy of a year ago, I posted Finitude Engine to this topic. I wanted to make something using the advanced features that the Eternity engine offers, although the main focus were undoubtedly sector portals. However, I wasn't able to wrap my head around how they worked, and the whole thing turned into a mess and I became too frustrated to finish it. That was the end of my escapades into Eternity mapping, until almost a year later, when I was adding my old art to this blog. As I was writing some additional commentary for Finitude Engine, I found it quite interesting. Something about the way the classic Doom colormap lighting looks on slopes was quite cool to me. And so my interest in Eternity was reawakened.

I've certainly had a fascination with Eternity for quite a while, but I was never able to fully get into the port. It's got its own quirks and sometimes using it would get frustrating in some manner and I'd move on to some other port. However, it holds something special that's unique to it. A promise of keeping that classic Doom feel while taking the game into all kinds of interesting and new directions. It's something that kept me from simply forgetting about it. And so I came back. Last Monday, I decided to try out The Hellspawn Spectrum. I found myself instantly amazed at all the interesting new geometry, and even more so at the fact that it all still felt like Doom to me. I think I was sold. Over the course of the week I've been getting a better grip on Eternity mapping. It took a while, and it did get confusing and frustrating, but eventually I was able to figure out how to make a functional sector portal! I gotta shout out @Meerschweinmann for these example maps, which proved vital for helping me figure portals out.

Another thing I figured out is how to use the fact that Eternity saves low res screenshots in 320x200 to my advantage. After some digging I found out how to use Aseprite's pixel ratio feature to stretch the image to 4:3 without distorting it (I followed this guide) and after I was done editing the image, I simple enlarged it, thereby keeping distortion to a minimum. A lot better than my previous process, where I had to downscale a 1440x1080 Nugget Doom screenshot to 320x240 before working on it.

After I felt confident enough that I had figured out how portals work, I moved on to making something substantial with them, and this is the result! The table is the most visible example of portal use, but there's also a roof on the building to the left which became mostly obscured in the final shot. After the scene was done, I decided to draw an old friend of mine.

Fun fact: I added a ton of tree sprites, and as I usually do I renamed them all to existing Doom sprites. However, I renamed one to COL5A0, which I had forgotten was the first frame of the beating heart pillar sprite. That certainly caught me off guard as I placed one of those trees and saw it blinking in and out of existence. I found it funny so I reckoned I was just gonna time the moment I take my screenshot so that it's on the frame where the tree is visible. Well, by the time I got around to actually taking it, I had forgotten all about it, and I just realized that I took it when the tree wasn't visible :P

[ART] Dualität

Abend auf dem Land

 

Resources used: Quake color palette, Some of my own sprites and textures, Lost Civilization, Quaddicted texture wad collection [jf_obtex - textures by John "Metlslime" Fitzgibbons; qedsamp - not sure where they're from, might be this], Foxhead's Comtex, Mek's Box 'o Skies

Wad file: included together with the next painting's wad, see bellow

 

Mittag in der Stadt

Resources used: Quake 2 color palette, Some of my own sprites and textures, Lost Civilization, Happy Time Circus 2, Zekhmet, Biolage texture pack this skybox, /3/ Anon old stuff archive [Artbeats, Dosch, Marlin Studios collections], Texture Town, Foxhead's Comtex and Foxtex, Juggernaut textures found here, midreja2 texture by Rencoret.

Wad file: >download< 

 Dualität

I feel it's appropriate to talk about both of these paintings at the same time, since they're very much connected, and contrast each other in interesting ways. The first painting, Abend auf dem Land (evening in the countryside) started out as a simple scene, and I wasn't sure who would inhabit it. I had an idea of featuring a character inspired by a late family member, who was remarkably photogenic back in his day. At first I tried to make a simple solid-color silhouette, but after some thinking I decided to draw said family member instead. I used one of the photos of him as a reference, and gravitated towards a more realistic presentation, which in the end left me dissatisfied. The way he looks feels more awkward rather than elegant.

Mittag in der Stadt (noon in the city) came about in response to the previous piece. I conveyed my subject in a way that's more in-line with my regular artstyle, and the atmosphere feels closer to the one in the photos that inspired these paintings. I originally him with way more exaggerated proportions, specifically with really wide shoulders, which I progressively narrowed until they looked more natural.

What I find most interesting about both of these is their various differences, which is why I included them both in this post and titled it Dualität (duality). There are many aspects in which these differ: setting, atmosphere, stylistic execution, lighting, and what I find particularly interesting - color. The color palettes from the first two Quakes have become a mainstay in my art ever since I began using them in August. I find the slightly less saturated look of their colors pleasing, and they've both become dear to me. They both convey different feelings, and have each a unique character even when they exist outside of the respective games they belong to. Exploring them has become something I really enjoy. Besides the palettes, the colormaps are different - the former piece had its colormap generated with the default, RGB palette conversion setting in Slade, while the latter had its colormap unintentionally generated with the CIEDE2000 setting; I was experimenting with CIEDE2000 in the context of converting graphics from one palette to another, and I hadn't switched back to RGB when I generated the colormap for Mittag in der Stadt. I think CIEDE2000 and the other CIE color settings in Slade have a lot of untapped potential. 

PS. The titles are all in German because the photos I mentioned were taken in Switzerland.