Pixel art contest - Theme papa-pepper

I wanted to do pixel art since long time, but never took time.

I think pixel art is very beautiful.
There is a naive side that I like in pixel art images.
I'd say there's more room to dream with pixel art images than with a realistic "cartoon" image.
It is very subjective of course.
Anyway.

So I discovered #pixelartweekly contest.
If you didn't see other submissions of others weeks, go see them, they are really good (just use the tag mentionned above).

So here is my entry for this week pixelart contest.

And the theme for this week was : @papa-pepper :)

I found a very cool site to draw pixel art online. This website allows you to very easily animate your pixels also!

For my first entry, since I am not very experienced in animating, I decided to do something very simple.
So I decided to just draw papa-pepper's face.
I used this image for inspiration.

I quickly came up with this result.
(Yes I know it is small. It is before I realized I could scale easily while saving my drawing..)

Then I added Steemit logo, added shadows, changed a little bit the skin color (was a bit gray-ish).

And here I thought.. Hey, why not animate it ?
I suck at animating characters (for now :)), so I'll just change the colors of the logo!
Since, the 3 Steemit branches also look like tiny peppers when colored in red, that's perfect!
But how to animate from color blue to color red ?

That is where I found another cool website to blend colors.
You just enter the color value of 2 colors.
Then input the number of steps you want.
And you get N colors in between your color 1 and your color 2.
Isn't it marvelous ?

So the only thing remaining is to add the frames with the specified colors.

And after tuning time frames to get a smooth animation, and adding also a red transparency animation effect.

Here is the final result :

And the smaller version.

For a first entry. I am pretty content with the result and I had a lot of fun doing it ! :)