To understand what I'm about to show you, we have to jump back to when I was about 7 or 8 years old. It was a time when all the cool kids in school collected hockey cards. This was right before the boom of Pokémon happened. I don't claim to have ever been one of the cool kids, but I did manage to get my hands on a few pretty impressive looking cards.
I collected mainly goalies, and I remember really enjoying the cards of certain teams for their logos and colours. The Boston Bruins with their rad yellow, black and white colour scheme and the Pittsburgh Penguins with... well, a penguin!
Just like everyone else, I was looking for the shiny cards. The eye candy, the shiniest and most metallic lick-your-lippiest drool inducing cards. But unlike the cool kids, who enjoyed the cards for their stat readouts and personal memories of watching games with their dads, there was something hindering my enjoyment.
The names of the players and the names of their teams, plastered all over my precious cards. Heck, even the players themselves could be taken off the cards and I would have been a much happier boy!
Fast forward nearly 30 years, and you'll find me in my bedroom chasing nostalgia. This past week, I've discovered and fallen into a rabbit hole of something called Hitomezashi or one stitch Sashiko patterns. They are very simple japanese sewing patterns with rich history, and I have become engulfed with generating new ones using various randomisation tools including dice, words, and even poetry.
I've been drawing them on paper, making little cards and keeping them in plastic sleeves on my desk. My favourite of the bunch was based on the golden mean and pi, which surprisingly made for a very symmetrical pattern:
Then it hit me. These patterns are perfect for experimenting with pixel art! After several iterations of designs, I finally reached a point where I could "mass produce" these entirely digital, arbitrarily collectible pixel art cards. No words, no stats, no monsters. The pattern is unique for each card, generated using different words pertaining to the colours/inspiration behind that particular card and I have made 7 of them so far.
These are the 1st Edition Hitomezashi Pixel Cards by qooob:
If you're interested in how the patterns themselves work, there is a great Numberphile video on the subject that started all this for me: Hitomezashi Stitch Patterns by Numberphile
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