Pixel Art Space Invaders

25 Apr 2007

Note: We actually did this a few months ago now – But I lost the ‘making of’ pictures and only found them again recently.

We’ve already got some art up on the walls in our dev room at work, but two walls were boring and mostly white.

I decided to take some inspiration from one of my old Uni house-mates, Mark , who happens to be a great pixel-artist.

A while back Mark got bored and made something very neat out of a lot of coloured paper and geekyness. “This will look awesome on a big wall” we all agreed.

So we got started…

Time for an Art-Attack

Follow closely and you can recreate your own life size Pixel Art Space Invaders at home!

We got a rainbow pack of 3×3” sheets – from staples, or Rymans, or some stationary shop – for a pound or two

Step 1: Get Coloured Paper

We cut down the largish squares of paper in to quarters with a scalpel/metal ruler.

Then mocked up a ship on the desk.

Step 2: Cut and plan your Invaders

We used copious amounts of blu-tac. You might want to use white-tac as the blue showed through a little bit on the lighter colours.

You also want 3 or 4 people standing and watching whoever is putting the squares up to constantly tell them “It’s not quite straight!“

Step 3: Attach to wall

This one was a bit difficult to make as the scale version compared to the normal ships is quite a lot bigger – which looked weird on the wall – so we had to shrink it down a bit.

Step 4: Build the bonus ship

Extra points for the mother ship – shoot where it’s going to be.

Step 5: Place bonus ship just out of reach

The final result. Not bad considering it was all done rather spontaneously over lunch one day.
Step 6: Admire your handy-work

More Pixels and Space Invaders

There’s been loads of other great pixel/paper art, most of which blows what we did out of the water, but these ones are absolutely amazing and definately deserve a look if you haven’t seen them before.