Chain of Challenges, episode 13.

We are still making avatar portraits, but the topic this time is open. It still needs to pass as a head, so humanoids, animals, robots, and monsters do count, of course, but a cabbage head will count too, or a house with two windows instead of eyes. Anything you will convincingly pass as an avatar portrait, which includes a "head" in any possible way, will be accepted. The limitation this time is technical, and it will be a hard one, so brace yourselves, pixel challengers.

All your clusters have to be built with 4 pixels and in the shape of a tetris piece. The list of different shapes is as follows: O-shape, I-shape, L-shape, J-shape, S-shape, Z-shape, and T-shape. They can be used in any possible rotation. You can use any shape as many times as you wish. You cannot place the same coloured pieces next to each other; in other words, no two same-colour pieces are allowed to touch directly. You can connect the same-shaped pieces when they are different colours, of course.

There are two exclusions to the rules above.

1) Pieces are allowed to be cut by the border. Every piece that doesn't touch the border of the canvas have to be 4 pixels and tetris shape, but pieces which do touch the canvas, may be smaller if necessary. That means 4, 3, 2, or even 1 pixel shapes can touch the border.

2) It is forbidden to use the O-shape tetris only to make the whole image. It would require just making a half-size image and doubling the size, which would be cheesing the challenge. But if you desire to limit yourself by using only I-shape pieces vertically or horizontally, or only T-shape pieces in different rotations, or any other reductive combination, you are allowed to do so. Using all of the shapes might be the most challenging, but it is not a requirement.

Because the challenge here is mostly focused on something other than palette control, the colour limit will be set to 32. Please try as much as you can to avoid almost indistinguishable colours.
 

Chain of Challenges, episode 12.

After the mobile app, the PJ Nerd needs only one thing: a new avatar. However, this time it needs to be an animal nerd portrait.

Draw a standard PJ avatar portrait of The Nerd as an animal of your choosing. It can be a nerdomorphic animal, or a zoomorphic nerd, a hybrid, a side effect of a magical spell going wrong, or a result of a mutation. It doesn't really matter. It needs to be a face of an animal with some of the Nerd's recognisable features or a face of the Nerd with some recognisable animal traits.

 

Chain of Challenges, episode 11.

Imagine that Pixel Joint has a mobile app, and it was completely redesigned for it. Now and draw how it would look. The new design will need a new logo and of course a new PJ Nerd, but you can design any layout elements you wish from the main menu bar to a search block. You don't need to draw a whole example page, with news feed, weekly challenge countdown, and monthly top ten thumbnails, if you don't have time this week. The main logo bar is the absolute minimum.