Sonic 3 and the thoroughly fudged colors.

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EternalBarrel's avatar
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Anybody who watches me probably knows that I was working on an ambitious Sonic 3 screenshot bead mural. Well, I haven't made any progress on it since "Game over, Continue?", which I'll reproduce here.Game Over, Continue? by EternalBarrel

There's actually less done than you see there because I had to throw away the segment with a chunk missing. I got kind of stuck, and just had to disassemble a segment I'd been working on because I'm moving.

When you're working with an insanely limited palette, as you are when using fuse beads, nearest-color accuracy is definitely not what you're looking for. You just do as well as you can, and when you can't make it look like the original colors, you work on approximating the sort of gradation used by the original instead. Sometimes you can make a sort of half-tone by alternating colors, but this doesn't always work. What you end up with is often more of an interpretation based on the original graphic rather than a reproduction thereof.

The segment you see above already incorporates several major color compromises that make it differ from the original but look pretty good, I think, on its own. Here, for reference, is the original screenshot from Sonic 3:

Sonic@Kn032 by EternalBarrel

That image is 320x224, the original resolution of the game. However, when I was making my segments I accidentally left out an entire vertical line one pixel wide, which I didn't realize until I had already made two segments. With the line missing and a bit of damage control in the time display, it looks like this:

Composite by EternalBarrel

Not too bad, I hope you'll agree. Anyway, the problem I've run into is those mountains: They are purple. This is bad because your range of purples in fuse beads is pretty pathetic. Here are the ones I have access to:

*Perler Pastel Lavender. This is pretty useful.
*Perler Plum. This fuchsia-looking mess is the most useless color I've ever seen. I'm not sure I've ever come across a sprite for which it was appropriate.
*Perler Purple. This is a fairly deep purple.
*Hama Purple. This is very slightly deeper, and I bought quite a bit of it believing that this would help. I was mistaken.

My original plan was to use Hama Purple, Perler Purple and Pastel Lavender for the mountain layers in the shot. However, when you put Hama and Perler Purple next to each other, they look like one solid color. I'll show you a example image to give you an idea what that would look like, but keep in mind that you should only focus on changes to the mountain area because the rest of the image is already accounted for.

Compositeb by EternalBarrel

This kind of ruins the spirit of the image. I recognized this and started using Pastel Lavender for the middle, forgetting briefly that I had already earmarked it for the top, which would result in an image like this one:

Compositec by EternalBarrel

I think this is even worse. Oh, by the way, I even thought of using Plum. Let's have a look at an approximation of that.

Composite-ow by EternalBarrel

MY EYES! THE GOGGLES DO NOTHING!

So yeah, I'm a bit stuck, and in desperation, I've had to abandon the very idea of purple for the upper layers, kind of like when I made Ecco the Dolphin blue instead of gray. If I use the three greys I have available, it might result in mountains like these:

Composite-grey by EternalBarrel

I think that this looks more acceptable than I expected. It calls to mind an alternate version of the level where the mountains in the background are snowier and more rocky. Because I know some people watching me are better at this than I am (it isn't hard to be), I'd like some opinions on this. What should I do here? Does the grey version work? Let me know. Thanks!
© 2013 - 2024 EternalBarrel
Comments4
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rofucker's avatar
First off, you're incredible already, just for doing this. I can't wait to see this finished. It's completely gorgeous.

Secondly, I'm not a bead expert myself since I do traditional pixel art, but I know what it is like when working with a limited palette, of markers in my case, so I can relate pretty well when you talk about not having enough shades of a color (in my case, skin tones are a nightmare to represent accurately). I personally think the grey mountains are a pretty good workaround the issue, but have you tried with dark and light blues? I know it's a pretty radical change from the purples from the original, but maybe using shades of blue would still give you that very-far-away-and-foggy feeling the background has. I'm not sure if you'd have problems with it blending with the sky above, as I don't know exactly how many shades of blue Hama and Perler have available, but it's a suggestion.

In any case, grey looks good too.