Pixel Art - A Brief Write-Up

For my 35th official B# Major Designs piece, I finally tackled one of the large frames I had standing around in my room. This particular frame's visible canvas area was around 19.75" x 29.75". Even with only 4 pixels per inch, it's large enough for a good bit of stuff.

Rather than make a random section of a Mega Man game with a robot master standing there, I wanted to do a nice landscape. My immediate thought was Castlevania, but my chosen shot (the ending screen of Castlevania) proved too large. My friend Oberle suggested Contra. I hadn't thought of it, so I perused some of the stages of that tough NES.

I found this

Since most of my previous pieces had been oriented landscape, I opted to get a great swath of vertical space. The ground, trees, and mountain make for a fairly simple piece. I initially planned to use a patchwork of black card stock, but Mother suggested that I get a large single piece. I'm glad I took her advice, as the patchwork's seams would not have been masked enough to look very nice.

And here it is

Long story short, the ground was easy, the trees were a pain, the mountains were easy, and the stars were fun. I accidentally misaligned the trees a few times, so that area doesn't exactly match the initial pixel map. The mountains threw me off while cutting them out, because I thought that I had reversed one at one point. It turned out that I was looking at an already reversed image, used for making sure I cut out the correct pixels.

Complete in frame

The frame was the most complicated one I've worked with thus far. There were screws holding L-shaped bits of metal, bendy metal to push the canvas against the frame, and a large piece of glass in front of everything. Unfortunately, in my disassembly, I made a tiny chip in the glass. Fortunately, the frame covers most of it.

Bonus note: for the tree trunks, I did not have a matching green. I instead used the same light green I used on the tree highlights, but colored it with a metallic bronze sharpie.

Bonus note 2: in the original, you'll notice that there aren't that many stars in the sky. I used three metallic markers and three shades of light card stock to pepper in a few more pixels in the sky.

In the future, I might try another one that size. However, I prefer sticking to nice 11" x 8.5" sized pieces instead.