Z-bert the Feesh
This guy... THIS guy. This all started due to meeting al_my_pal_, who wanted to integrate something new to their stream. We lacked the knowledge to pull off what Al was going for, so we pivoted to pixel art. "That's something I can teach!"
When I was going over the basics of pixel art with them, I suggested practicing on something small and contained, like an icon of an item in a game's inventory. Nothing terribly ambitious, just enough to get a taste for it. Since we were discussing fish and playing Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, Hyrule Bass came up as an option. It's an important shape to get correct, has clear opportunities to blend with gray and experiment with anti-aliasing, and there's enough detail to warrant learning how to do single-pixel lines. To me, it was a great candidate for Someone's First Pixel Art, as it were.
And so it began... I began teaching lines vs. shapes for sketching, color ramps, anti-aliasing, selective outlining, hue-shifting, lighting basics, dithering, and so on. We focused on things that maintained momentum, and would come back to things after a round of something that was going smoothly. That allowed the motivation to stay consistent and the pieces to be finished.
As an artist, I know how easy it is to get lost in, and defeated by, details. They'll suck up every ounce of your momentum, because you get in the zone and start thinking, "I must do these tasks in-sequence." Unless your target task depends on another task to be done before it, there's no reason you can't switch focus to different part of your project, and let that momentum push you further to completion in some direction, even if it's not the one that's really bugging you. You can come back to the difficult details with more confidence and a fresher eye.
Before long, we had both completed our own Hyrule Basses. Huzzah! Then someone came up with the genius idea of naming them. I still don't remember how we landed on Z-bert and Al-bert, but, yep.
He's the laughing emote on my stream, has a redeem to sing with Al-bert, relays ideas to the Discord server, and sometimes shows up uninvited, as a feesh can do from time to time.
And it all started because someone asked me to teach them The Way of the Pixel. It was a lot of fun, both to make this and to share my passion for pixels. To be real, this piece was pivotal to the momentum I gained in 2025.