One of the ways I hope to make it through my children’s teenage years is to make games with them. I think we’ll be able to skip over drugs, alcohol, tattoos, skateboards, and pubescent love entirely if I play my cards right.

To that end, I’ve made decent progress on getting my kids to learn about coding. However, we need to be artists too. My second son is particularly keen on drawing, so this week I showed him the world of vector art via Gravit Designer. He and I worked independently through a giraffe tutorial. Here’s my end product:

After some initial and unjustified frustration with the interface, my son has asked to make something in Gravit Designer every day since. But he wants to make everything fuzzy with the blur filter, which really violates the vector art aesthetic. Maybe I should let him get a tattoo of one his blurred creations.

My sons and I have started taking a Coursera MOOC on pixel art. Our first assignment was to create a barrel, like that which might appear in a “pirate game.” Here’s my interpretation:

I’m not sure that I thought about pirates at all as I laid down those pixels.

As part of this project, we’re both trying to grow our 3D modeling skills. To that end, I modeled a husky with few polygons:

I followed along this YouTube video, running at 0.25x speed, with many stops and starts.

Last night, my oldest son gave us the task of creating pixel art of a living creature. All my kids are in love with cats right now, so I found some examples online and emulated one of them:

I wish I’d gotten into pixel art twenty years ago. The process of creating many art forms is incredibly opaque. But with pixel art, I can see everything the artist did and do it myself.

Stella is a kaleidoscopic drawing application. The user draws on a canvas, and the drawn pixels are automatically mirrored and repeated around the canvas with radial symmetry.

Here are few examples made by family members after the frenzied coding session that brought Stella into this world.

Here’s my first creation: a crate.