Monday, September 10, 2012

The Wedding Present

I know I said that my next post will about the working Taokaka claws, but I haven't gotten around to putting all the pictures together. What I do have put together are pictures of a wedding present I made for two very good friends of mine who got married.

So both friends are avid fans of Zelda and are crafty so it only be fitting that their present be of both worlds.

I don't know what the official name is of this thing I made but it is 8-bit magnets from the first Zelda on the NES put on to a metal whiteboard.

To start off with the project (sorry for not having any screenshots of the process written below), I started up Zelda and took screenshots of the game. With the all the screenshots, shot, I didn't want to just cut out pieces of the screenshots and just use that. I wanted hi-res images for printing, even though its supposed to be 8-bit, pixelated art. :p So all the squares that were printed, I re-created in Photoshop, 1024x1024. In Photoshop, I just created a 64x64 pixel pencil brush and went to the screenshots to eyedrop for the proper colors. I laid out a grid on the screenshots and on the blank canvas and recreated everything by just counting how many squares I had to paint in. Everything else was just me sitting down and cranking everything out in the same fashion.

When I finally finished re-creating everything, I re-sized all the squares to 1" x 1" and laid everything out to fit a 8.5x11 sized paper. The squares weren't printed on just regular sheets of paper, they were printed on 8.5x11 sticker sheets of paper that can be bought at any Office Depot. In fact they are Avery Labels 3383. When printed, they look like this: (Oh, I forgot to mention that I sprayed the printed sticker pages with fixative so there wouldn't be any fading.)



As for the magnet part, I found some 5" x 8" magnet sheets with sticky back from Michael's for about $2.50 a sheet.



I cut the printed sticker sheets in half and stuck them to the magnet sheets so that the two printed 8-bit squares fit on 4 magnet sheets.



When the time came to cutting everything, I didn't use scissors. I cut everything with a utility blade.



Looking back now, I think it could have been a better idea to use scissors instead, but I think a blade gave me a better edge and a better cut. Oh well, it turned out good. :p



Since I work next to a Container Store and they sell metal white boards, I bought one from there for about $30, I think, and just put all the magnets on there. Here's how it looks like when done:



Whats pictured in the picture wasn't how I laid everything out. Since I forgot to take a picture of everything before I wrapped it up, I had to take a picture of it when I saw it later and it was already played with, but you get the idea. :) And, thats, that, actually. So if you want to make a set of your own, its really not that expensive, especially if your gonna use your refrigerator as your 'white board'.

So my next post will be the WIP working Taokaka claws that I hope I'm given a chance to get another crack at and it should be up before the year is out, so do tune in later for that if your interested. If you have any questions, feel free to ask! ENJOY!

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