Kenobit is a Gameboy music project by Fabio Bortolotti aka Kenobit. We are in the same guild of extraordinary gentlenerds (members list undisclosed). We often chat about everything videogame related, mostly from the golden age. Moreover Kenobit and Andrea Babich (said to be grand master gentlenerd, but he never told us if it's true) run their own radio show called Outcast Sound Shower, THE radio show about videogame music, my favourite programme to ever grace radio wave broadcasting.
Well, he asked me for a record cover for his debut album and guess what: I did it with immense joy and pride. This is one of those rare moments where client's culture and yours perfectly overlap, so I could express my vision in every detail possble and he perfectly nailed it. I was completely free.
The cover itslef represents the originary recipient of a gameboy console, back in 1989, a 12 years old japanese boy coming back home from school, running into a nuclear explosion that is starting to unsettle every object in the scene with it's shockwave.
I must say that I really love pixel art since I was a child, Deluxe Paint (by Electronic Arts!) remains my favourite graphic editing software of all time, but I really hate all the eboy fashioned stuff that tried and actually managed to bring pixel art to print media. Pixel art is meant to be experienced on video and is born on crt low resolution screens. So if you are doing low res pixel art you WANT that pixel light leak that crt has by default. Working with hi def pixel rendering is absolutely the death of pixel art. The best printed media experience I had with pixel art was when I was a child, reading videogame magazines. They often used blurry pics of actual games as magazine covers. Like this or this . I extensively talked about it here (brataccas.blogspot.com). So I decided to try to make the cover a tribute to that "right" way of rendering pixel art on paper.
Bottom line: the whole image is done in indexed color pixel art, using a 1989 Super Nintendoish color palette. The boy's face is glitched using a 8x8 pixel tile object grid. The whole image was then printed on a true CRT video monitor and captured on a DLSR camera. Some tweaks with after effects pincushion to straighten the lines of the screen and finally, some slight color correction and overlapping with the original pixel image to have a sharper result in the center and a weird blurred look on the image edges.
I don't like post modern art and all that retro vibe of "let's make it look like the real thing" is something I really don't approve. I assure you that I did it as a work of pure love for the medium and the content, and this is not something looking like the real thing: this IS the real thing.
Hope you'll like it! Some work in progress in the gallery below!