From a Rooftop in Dali to Pixel Avatars

I recently switched to a new avatar, this time in pixel art, and I’m really happy with it. My wife has the other half of the pair.

The original photo was taken on a trip to Dali last year. We were staying at a guesthouse by Erhai Lake and had a photo taken together on the roof. When I felt like changing my avatar recently, I cropped each of us out of that photo, from the upper body up.

We were sitting on the ridge of the roof, with Erhai stretching out in front of us and layers of mountains behind us. Under the blue sky, the mountains and water seemed to run together. Our photographer lifted her camera with its enormous lens and caught the scenery and the two of us in one frame. It became my favorite photo of the whole trip.

Still, I wasn’t quite ready to put the retouched photo of us on my profiles. We both happen to love Stardew Valley. We farm, fish, and head down into the mines together, occasionally blaming each other for forgetting to put out hay for the animals. So we decided to turn the photo into pixel art.

For mine, I chose a sunset background close to the header image on my X profile: a little orange afterglow beneath a blue-gray sky. The avatar and header sit together more comfortably that way.

My wife’s version has a sunrise over the sea. She prefers the sea to the mountains.

Getting there took more work than I expected.

At first, I just wrote, “Turn this photo into pixel art.” The AI would casually change my face shape, hair, and sunglasses, even making me look younger and more cartoonishly cute. On its own, the result looked pretty good, very much like something you’d see online. It even reminded me of old QQ avatars (not the penguin, but those default portraits with side-swept bangs). It just didn’t look like me…

Later, I split the prompt into two parts: lock all the person’s features, and only allow changes to the pixel size, color steps, and background. But changing the background still affected the person. In the end, I had to generate the sunset separately and composite it into the avatar, keeping the pixels of the person from the earlier version.

The colors took a few rounds too. The orange in the first version was too bright. Once shrunk to avatar size, it looked oversaturated and stood out too much on my profile. Lowering the saturation made it dull instead. I finally found a balance I liked by brightening the face and midtones a little, toning down the orange, and making the color steps in the hair, sunglasses, and clothing more distinct.

This made me realize how much care pixel art needs in its color blocks and outlines. Simply shrinking a photo often just gives you a mosaic. How the shades are grouped, how an outline steps around a corner, and how much of the person’s likeness survives at 48 px all affect the result.

An avatar may be a tiny image, but behind it are a relationship, a memory from a trip, and a game we both love. All of that means more to me than the image itself.