I have a Pok3r with Modern Selectric. Bright white keyboard, dark black keys. I was really struggling to find a way to represent it with pixels. If I emulated the white plate with a 1px white border around all the keys, it was way overpowering. I tried doing a middle gray, but that just looked weird. Obviously, in real life, the portion of the plate that's visible between the keys is WAY less than 1/3 a key width, but at the pixel level, it's not possible to represent that.
So I was considering how an editor would render a photo that was shrunk down to the same resolution of the pixel art, and it would obviously sample a zone to generate a single resulting pixel. So I was thinking about how to accomplish this, and I think I've got a solution, looking for feedback.
A lot of you are using MS Paint for these, and while it's sufficient, I prefer something a little more robust to give better control, specifically layers and selection tools. I'm using The Gimp, but there are plenty of options out there.
So what I'm doing now is to have everything separated by layers. All the keys are in their own layer, which I duplicate, then run a 1px x 1px Gaussian blur on the lower one. This basically causes the key colors to "bleed" over into the plate and subdues the effect. But the top key layer retains the sharpness that we want.
For legends, I do the same thing, but then I hide the original legends layer so the transparency induced by the blur takes effect. I keep the original around for cloning, recoloring, etc.
I'll probably run a tutorial on this at some point when life calms down a bit.
Anyway, here are the results. Click through for the album where you can compare to a photo of my collection.
Oh, also, I didn't see where anyone made an Atreus, so I did. Feel free to steal and recolor mine.
