Intricate process creates characters that look as cool now as they did in the 8-bit and 16-bit eras.
Quite some time ago, we took a look at the awesome artwork from Japanese Twitter user and old-school video game fan @rurue0111. Though a lover of classic pixel-based visuals, @ruerue0111 doesn’t work in the digital medium, nor does the artist use pen and paper for his most impressive creations.
Instead, @ruerue0111 uses stained glass ink to decorate his screen door with tributes to video game characters, such as the cast of Final Fantasy III.
However, after enough time being hit by the sun’s rays, the colors of the Final Fantasy adventurers began to fade, so to preserve the artwork, @ruerue0111 transferred it to a frame instead.
But when you’ve had a collection of 8-bit heroes gracing your living space you can’t go back to completely decorationless screens, so it was time for @rurue0111 to begin a new project: power-absorbing super fighting robot Mega Man (“Rockman” in Japan) and several dozen of his Robot Master adversaries.
Through careful study of the in-game artwork, @ruerue0111 first draws a plan on paper for how to recreate each character. Next, using a variety of colored inks, he dabs the appropriate hues into their corresponding squares of the screen, just like a pre-polygon video game developer adding pixels of color to the grid of the hardware’s allowable resolution.
While it looks like a painstaking process, @ruerue0111 says that having a visualization of the finished product in front of him helps keep his spirits up by giving him something to gauge his progress by. In the end, his determination and commitment paid off, with this being the enviable result.
And since pixel art is so heavily associated with the era in which Nintendo dominated the video game industry, @ruerue0111 has also produced screen art for the original Super Mario Kart, which was released in 1992.
As beautiful as they are, though, someday they too, will start to fade and need to be moved out of the sun. On the upside, that means we can look forward to a new batch of artwork from @ruerue0111, whose projects you can keep up with through his Twitter account here.
Images: Twitter/@ruerue0111
Follow Casey on Twitter, where his current 16-bit aspiration is to finally play Bahamut Lagoon some day.