Logo Contest : 1UP Mascot

@flauwy has hosted a logo contest for a new 1up mascot. The proposed logo must be in pixel art. I was a bit intrigued on how to create one, and I haven't created a pixel art ever so this entry took me days to finish it.

First, I came up with a base image. Using Adobe Photoshop CS5, I created my logo model using the shape tools like Ellipse, Rectangle and Line. I have set the shape's anchor point to form a curve. See below image as my draft.

Since the image was not proportionate and did not form a space shuttle, I've cut it in half since the other side looked okay. Using the half of the formed image from shapes, I created a duplicate layer, transformed it and flipped it horizontally to finally form the base image.

Using the base image, I prepared the necessary settings to start my pixel art in Photoshop.

1. On Edit > Preferences > Guides, Grid and Slices..., I have set the gridlines and subdivisions to 1 pixel.
   
2. Set the Image Interpolation to "Nearest Neighbor (preserved hard edges" from Edit > Preferences > General tab.
3. Select the Pencil tool at 1 pixel.
4. Show the gridlines from View > Show > Grid.
5. Create a new photoshop draft - 200 px by 200 px at 72 dpi.

Following the model image, I used the pencil tool in color red to draw the outline/stroke of the image. Then edit the color using the Color Overlay layer option.

Repeating the process of drawing the outline using the pen tool, editing the layer option to change the color, I was able to form the space shuttle in a pixel art. For the text/label, I used the Text tool with "Fixedsys" as the font type as my guidelines.

This concept is inspired by Stack Exchange's Area 51 site background image. This is the first thing that came in my mind when finding some inspiration for creating this logo.

_{Image was screen-captured from Area 51. I do not own the original image.}

The Logo in different image size:

50px x 50px

100px x 100px

500px x 500px

1000px x 1000px

You can find and download the Photoshop drafts and PNGs in my shared drive.

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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