well the timing was a coincidence but MAN, this has been a BIG project and I'm so excited to have one complete -- as you can see from my off-hand here, this is map art!!! I kept having the thought "wow I wish minecraft had more paintings" and then realised.... maybe i could make this happen....... process under the cut!
I really like the sort of ambiguous, compressed, pixellated look of a lot of the 1x1s and wanted to try to mimic that, so I designed this by making a simple drawing in Map Art Safe Colours, shrinking it down to 16x32, and then converting it to Map Art Safe Colours again to get the final picture I'd be making (and also adding a frame, so it'd look like a minecraft painting):
I was trying to stick to a flat map (i couldnt find any tutorials for staircasing that weren't just "and then plug it into a schematic program," and I wanted to try to do this by hand), which meant my palette was SUPER limited, probably the most difficult thing about creating this; there were a LOT of previous attempts that just didn't have enough colours available to let them shrink nicely. BUT THEN IT TURNED OUT the palette I was working from was accidentally all the LIGHTEST shades rather than the middle shade SO I HAD TO LEARN TO STAIRCASE ANYWAY
For anyone unfamiliar, the way the "shading" works on maps is that a block has a middle shade if it's the same level as the block north of it (flat), a lighter shade if it's taller than the block north of it, and a darker shade if it's shorter than the block north of it -- so in order to get a whole section to be The Same Lighter Shade, each "line" of the section must be taller than the previous one, leading to a staircase effect.
in order to make a 128x128 area into a 16x16 pixelart, each "pixel" is A FULL STACK of blocks in whatever colour, so HUGE shoutouts to @stopboorider and Maf for gathering all these blocks for me! BOO MINED A TRULY TERRIFYING AMOUNT OF TERRACOTTA LMAO. And thanks to maf and @himochi and @bazelgeuse-apologist for building the block-catching area underneath, and helping me tear the first map down to build the second piece!
While tallying up blocks, making a paint-by-number-looking key for myself to reference, putting out a Needed Materials List, and of course actually creating the art all took additional time, I put out the materials list and a call for help with block-gathering in mid-october... this took only a couple of weeks to build??? Admittedly I was VERY excited and focused on it haha.
I'm hoping to make more of these... there are two more designs included in the Needed Materials list that we just need to finish gathering blocks for, and I've made a few new designs utilising the Whole Palette now that I feel pretty confident that I understand staircasing, which I still need to tally up blocks for... so we'll see if I can pull those off!!
