Super Mario Pixel Sculpture
So the idea here was easy… I love Super Mario (who doesn’t?) and I’m also quite fond of pixel art, so why not pull Mario out of the TV, give him some depth, and stick him on my wall? Sounds easy enough, yea? It’s actually quite a lot of work…
The first step was to find some sprites to use as reference for the project. I figured I could rip the sprite files directly from some of my Super Mario ROMS, but after some quick google searching I found The Spriters Resource, an awesome website that would save me the trouble. It’s basically a giant collection of free pre-ripped high quality sprite files. Sweet!
I picked out some nice tiles from the Super Mario 3 and Super Mario World collections and opened them up in photoshop to make a scene. At 100% they’re so tiny you can barely see the pixels… thats no good. I scaled the tiny files up by about 600% but that made them all blurry and awful looking… stupid anti-aliasing! I could have tweaked my photoshop settings to get around this, but there was an easier way. I just zoomed in on the tiny images to about 800% and took a screenshot. Easy!
Once I had my enlarged (zoomed) images looking the way I wanted I saved the photoshop files and switched over to Illustrator to establish a scale for the final piece. I decided on 1pix = 3/4″ as my final scale. I picked 3/4″ since that was the only size craft blocks they had at Hobby Lobby and I’m to impatient to order smaller blocks online. I had originally planned on going smaller, but this should work.
I figured I would start with the 1up mushroom since it was the simplest part of the design. The mushroom is 16pix tall x 17pix wide and at 1pix=3/4″ scale that comes out to be 12″ x 12.75″. Kind of big, but it’ll be fine.
Now that I had my scale and materials picked out all that was left to do was paint and glue. I counted out each color and painted the corresponding number of blocks.
That ended up being:
78x Black
78x White
60x Green
The white and green blocks took a little while longer since it took more than one coat to cover the wood grain.
After I had all the blocks painted the next step was to glue them all together. I was a little bit worried that the wood glue wouldn’t be strong enough to hold them together but boy was I wrong. I made a couple mistakes along the way and had to use vice grips to break the blocks apart. Once I had them all glued together I left them to dry overnight.
The next morning I flipped the dried mushroom (haha) over and gave the back a nice thick coat of glue to seal the cracks in the blocks. Once that was dry all that was left was to attach some picture wire to hang it!
I put the 1up mushroom on my wall where it will patiently wait for the rest of it’s buddies. I’ll probably never finish the whole scene but I suppose have to at least do Mario.
More to come!
2 Comments
pordux on December 4th, 2009
nice work man,,
keep doing this
i will share with u my own sclptures,,
hugs
Elrojo on April 5th, 2009
Omg do you have like a million hours spare time? You are like a male, hairy, nerdy martha stewart who comes up with handy ways to do things only 17-28 yr old men would want to do.
Its probably the worlds most untapped demographic for arts and crafts though^^ go for it