After my first son arrived in 2018, I didn’t have much time to work on the time-intensive Mount Fuji pixel art series any more (again, I hope to get back to this somehow soon).

However, I enjoyed clicking all the pixels on and off and wanted to keep doing it.

So what could I complete fairly quickly rather than a project that drags on?

What was small and could still give me the fun of creating something intricate?

Well one day it hit me — a bit obvious — but emojis are all little tiny works of art. I could recreate them as 1-bit pixel art.

Another neat thing about emojis — they kind of have the same vibe as what icons were like back when all we had was small screen resolutions and 32 x 32 pixel icons. Limited space in which to get across an idea — a great creative constraint!

So, for a few weeks in Summer 2019 I noodled about recreating a bunch of Apple’s emojis.

In the end I drew 42 of them before I got tired of it. Here they are for your amusement:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Feel free to use in your projects, just give me some credit and a link back here please.