How to Create an 8-Bit Profile Picture for Twitter or Animal Crossing
8-bit artwork will always be popular online and now there's a way to capture that aesthetic for your profile pictures without a background in image editing. What's more, it's a clever way to create a pixel art image that will help with Animal Crossing: New Horizons designs and make you the talk of all your friends' islands.
Pixel art, or 8-bit art, is one of the truest forms of artistic expression to exist in modern times. It originated out of necessity back when video games couldn't handle the pixels, textures, and polygons that make up modern game imagery. That period of game design, which most people would say ran up until around the arrival of the original Sony PlayStation, forced developers to work with an extremely limited toolset to make recognizable characters appear on-screen. Since many of today's young adults were playing those games throughout their childhood, there's a connection people feel to this blocky, detail-less art style. It's a reminder of simpler times and a way to appreciate how far we've come.
Now, we have the internet and we can express our love for old things in the form of social media posts and Animal Crossing islands. The Google blog tells the story of a man named Sato who developed a love for AI-based image augmentation, leading to him building two web apps that went viral. The first was Al Gahaku, which turns real-life images into pictures that look like classical paintings. The second is pixel-me, which makes real images look like something a Super Nintendo would crank out. That's the tool we'll rely on for our fun, silly times.
The app is about as straightforward as possible. From the pixel-me web page, just click the box that says "Select From The Library" to pull up your file folders and choose an image. It'll handle the heavy lifting and produce a pixel art image a few seconds later. From there, there will be options to change the image's dimensions, share the picture on social media platforms, and export it to Animal Crossing and it's also possible to download the image like you would any other online photo.
Choosing the export option for Animal Crossing will produce a QR code that can be scanned using Nintendo Switch Online, the free app for iOS and Android that Nintendo uses for some Switch games. If you link the app to a Nintendo online account that has played Animal Crossing: New Horizons, it will give you the Designs option, which then pulls up a menu for scanning a QR code to make a design and import that into the game.
The next step takes place on your Animal Crossing island. A few hours into the game, you'll unlock the Custom Designs option for the Nook Phone. Open that and press the + button to download saved files from a QR code captured via the smartphone app (in real life). A few seconds later, it will prompt you to select a save slot for the design. Like all designs, it can be placed as a painting, as an image on the floor, and, after unlocking the tailor shop, on clothing items.