Koloboks

I have to admit, I have always loved what I considered "big" smileys. They were the ones that were larger than the standard 15x15 types. They were shaded and usually animated. I honestly thought I would never be able to make one in my life. I mean, I figured I might be able to, but I was so intimidated.

As I mentioned, I do love a challenge. Much like my foray into deeper pixel-art, in recent weeks I have discovered the online smiley community. Again, while I knew there were places were people talked about smilies, I didn't realize there were such a large number of artists, and an even larger number of followers.

A few weeks ago, I decided I was going to be brave and do my first "big" smiley. It was one for my parenting site. I wanted to do a smiley in labor, having a baby. It took several hours but I did it and I was so proud of myself. The walls of fear at doing different smileys melted away.

More recently I have learned that the smilies I simply thought of as "big" are actually Kolobok style. I have also learned there are very clear distinction between what is an emoticon/emote, what is a smiley, what is a Kolobok, etc. Wow! So much interest and information on those little pixels!

Today I did my first "unique" Kolobok, with both a base and a character I totally created. Jim has been doing so much coding for me lately. He's so good at it and I'm always in awe of what he can do. The other day we were talking about avatars and I told him he should have a Code Monkey one (or Script Monkey, since that is the name of our coding site). Not finding any good ones, I then decided I would one of my own. Below is what I came up with, along with several other of my more recent tries at "big smilies." I do know I'm getting better and faster, but I can't promise I'll be able to make a lot more soon. Either way, they are here to share. You can use them on your message boards and websites. You can even feature them in a collection. The only thing I ask is that you don't alter the images without permission and please give me credit in the file name.

                                         


*Note that the Code Monkey and Labor are mostly done. I'm going to be doing a little more work on them in the future, so check back later for a better version.

**For Bitmap World fans, the Kolobok monkey is actually a re-design of the monkey that appears in the strip.

***Editing this to add 2 "cowboys" I forgot to add originally. The hat was a modified version of Boss Hog's hat from BMW.