Squaring off with Picasso

My painting of Minecraft characters is an attempt at 21st century cubism.

December 4, 2020

A few days ago, I made a Minecraft painting for my dearest friend as a part of his Christmas gift. I know he likes Minecraft, and I know he likes me, so I figured why not combine the two?

            It all started in my morning Spanish class, during which my mind was drifting off as usual. Although I don’t remember the exact thought process that led me to this idea, I do recall snapping back to reality with the phrase “Minecraft painting” engraved in my head. So, with newfound motivation to complete this entirely unnecessary project, I got to work immediately.

            For those of you who don’t know, Minecraft is a video game in which all the graphics are composed of squares and cubes. The game is played through the view of the default character, a man named Steve. However, more advanced players can create their own characters, or decorative ‘skins’, and import them into the game. This was my first piece of inspiration.

            I started to create my plan for the painting with a simple search of “Minecraft skin customizer” on Google, which brought me to www.minecraftskins.com. This is a site that not only allows users to create their own customized designs by filling squares in a template, but share them on the website for others to use too. I filled in the template twice, one time to create me, and the other to create my friend. Once I had this blueprint, I screen-captured and printed the blank template off the website and cut it out to trace onto my canvas. After tracing, I marked all of the 0.85-centimeter increments on the outline of the cutout and used my ruler to draw the full lines, creating about a hundred or so miniscule squares, and I repeated this a second time. Then, I painted the entire background a beautiful pale pink, my friend’s favorite color, which just happened to create the perfect contrast with the characters.

            In almost all Minecraft skins, there are never any solid chunks of color except for the actual skin tones and the occasional hair; clothes are usually different colored monochromatic splotches of their dominant shade. I pulled out my palette and about six tubes of paints, the most used colors being black and white to create all the different shades of grey in our clothes. These additional details were not difficult to accomplish – all I had to do was spread my paint all over the palette and add more black, white, or grey as needed, without wasting paint or having to clean my brush in between strokes.

            That brings me to my next point: the brush strokes. All I was really doing was filling in a bunch of 0.9 x 0.9-centimeter squares on a canvas, but it was quite an effort to try and reach the corners of each square with my brush without going over the lines. Upon further inspection of my collection of paintbrushes, I noticed that I had a brush that was more or less the same width as the squares. It simply took one short and controlled stroke to perfectly fill each square.

I continued with this brush with for the rest of my character and for his. I noticed that some of the outer squares were a little too sloppy for my liking, and I knew that cleaning up the lines with the light pink paint of the background would not be effective because it was not opaque enough. I decided on using one of my paint pens to draw a shimmering silver outline of each character. To finish up the painting, I drew a red, square-composed heart, added a little white square for highlights, and wrapped it up with one last silver outline.

The painting has been complete for about a week now. I’ve still been meaning to wrap it and place it with my friend’s other gifts, but I like looking at it propped against my bedroom wall. Perhaps some gifts are best not sent.