Shit, the days are coming down fast. Today I wanted to share something more personal. Don’t worry, I obscured my naked pictures so it’s totally safe for work!

Here’s a little something from my creative process. After getting an idea for an object I would usually start by finding reference photos on Google image search. Even though it might seem that you can’t get any details into a 30 by 30 pixel art image, having a real life reference makes a big difference. Sometimes, however, I would get inspiration directly from things around me and draw them with the object directly in front of my eyes. These are 4 such sources of inspiration.

1. The room

The lava lamp is an obvious example and you can know it’s special to me since I use it as this tumblr’s avatar. It also provided my life with great mood lighting, especially when girls were staying over.

The Chinese flat hand fan is another piece of interior decoration that made it into my pixel collection.

2. The office

When I registered Retronator as an official company those 363 days ago I moved my PC from my room (that’s the big tower under the lava lamp in the previous picture) to an office of an old warehouse. Over that summer, my friends would turn the place into a sports center called Urban Roof, while I was busy in the office creating their webpage.

To liven up the place, I bought a cornstalk dracaena to liven up the place and give me hope that one day I will work under a real palm tree. The manager of Urban Roof brought in the second pixeled object from my office, the solar-powered desk lamp.

3. The art supplies

I knew a picture of me naked with my pens would come in handy one day. Besides the Prismacolor art marker and Pilot G2 gel ink pen I also hold a Faber-Castell liner that I used for most comic style drawings I did at the end of high school.

4. The city I live(d) in

I immensely enjoyed drawing the buildings in this countdown, something I would like to do more of and maybe make a dedicated project for. While I couldn’t directly go paint the Transamerica Pyramid in San Francisco, I did manage to pixel two buildings in Ljubljana. I lived there for 8 years. Up until yesterday, when I moved out of the room, took my little palm tree out of the office and left Slovenia’s capital.

It is a beautiful city and the summer days I spent in the park next to a condominium behind the railway station or across the street of a church near the office will never be forgoten.

Good bye, Ljubljana, these really are days of change in my life. And see you guys tomorrow, before the final piece of the puzzle.