Princess Peach a la 3D Pixel Art

Princess Peach

Now that I have a useable desk, I've been able to repair a sculpture I gave my fiance a while back, and she decreed that this must be on imgur. (As for why the repairs were needed, peach got beheaded during a move)

I've since lost all my working notes on it, but it's comprised of somewhere around 750 1/2" square blocks I cut, sanded, painted, and glued together. I have no clue how long, exactly, it took me - just that it took a looooooooong time.

Close Up

I don't have pictures of the actual process, but I am working on a Mario version and will do my best to fix that.

As for a how-to...

I went searching for sprites from the Mario games on SNES (they were about the resolution I was looking for), loaded them up in Photoshop, made some minor tweaks, and then counted out the number of pixels of each color I'd need.

Next, I went out to the local hardware store and bought an armload of 1/2" square dowel rods to cut my cubes from.

Finally, I went to an art shop and bought an armload of small bottles of acrylic paints that were roughly the shades I'd need. I didn't try mixing my own colors - too complicated. (OK, not that complicated, but difficult to duplicate if I screwed up and needed to go back and re-paint)

Closer Close Up

Once I had everything, I stole a miter box and a finishing saw from my dad and set out cutting cubes. Initially, I was going for perfect cubes, but since that became such a pain in the ass to maintain, I figured the varying heights would end up looking more "artsy" (I'm an engineer, not an art major)

Once things were cut, I clamped my dad's pad sander upside down and used that to sand down the top edges of each block. (Not exactly safe, and my fingers hated me for it, but it was the only way I could quickly sand 750-odd blocks of that size.)

After that, paint the right number of each color, and glue together.

Tadaa!!