It's been far too long since I've uploaded anything here. I just haven't been inspired to make anything, and when lately when I did get inspiration I find I don't have the blocks I need. I have every pixelblock color except light yellow and dark blue, and the pixelblocks company is seemingly going dark. Their website has slowly lost features (Digital Stained Glass, then the store where you could order individual colors) and currently just displays a "coming soon". I'm hoping this just means they are scaling back their web presence to focus on other things, but I fear the worst.
Anyway, I've been playing a $#&! ton of Minecraft lately, and since the game is very retro in graphics the art assets are perfect to translate to pixelblocks art. It's a bit tough considering it uses 3D models, and my works are mostly 2D, but I've made it work. To kick off this set, I've started with the iconic Creeper.
For those not in the know and haven't played Minecraft, the Creeper is a creepy (eh, see what I did there?) looking green creature that silently moves across the landscape looking for things to explode. It does so by exploding itself, and has a short countdown before it detonates. They have no arms, 4 stubby legs, and sometimes just stare at you from a distance if you make eye contact. Always carry a bow and arrows and pepper that sucker from a distance.
Been really busy at work lately so haven't had much time to work on my PixelBlocks art. I figured I'd give an update on the process I go through to make these creations. Its sort of something I figured out on my own, and have been refining the process to make it easier and quicker for me to do. 1) I find a digital copy of the character I want to do online somewhere. There are quite a few websites that post "ripped sprites" from video games, so there's a lot to choose from. Couple of the sites I find them from are Game Sprite Archive and NES SNES Sprites . 2) Once I have the sprite, I convert it to a custom color palette in Photoshop. There are only 20 different PixelBlocks colors (and I own 18 of them), so this can be quite a challege. Some colors don't have an equivalent PixelBlock color, so I have to either fake it or skip doing that character entirely. Magus from Chronotrigger unfortunately was skipped for this reason; I didn't have a good pur
Very nice creepy thing!
ReplyDelete