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Since the limited run Return box is too expensive I just have to make my own again. idea from retro365.blog

Just realised the lyrics of my source material are 🖤🖤💛🖤💚, not 💚💚💚💚💚. I apologise for the mistake.

Naturally, they belong in a museum! 🤠

Before tackling some of the more ambitious Monkey Island related projects I have in the pipeline, I wanted to start with a project that wasn’t overly complicated and didn’t require a too great an investment in bricks and space. So why not start with the basics? The pixelated character design is such an integral part of the first two Monkey Island games and I’m always amazed how much character those sprites are able to convey with such a small number of pixels and available colors. Those perler beads mosaics are always great fun, and LEGO seemed like a close enough counterpart. But why not take it a step further? Although those character sprites are 2D, we get to view these characters in various poses, angles and movements (powered by the incredible animation), so I figured I might have enough elements to extrapolate a 3D pixel sculpture, as it were, and build it with LEGO bricks. And what better character to start with than with our beloved Guybrush Threepwood, as seen in The Secret of Monkey Island? So using the original animation cycles, I chose a pose and isolated three views of the character coherent with that pose: Now, when searching for reference material for this undertaking, I stumbled upon Neil Chapman’s work on ArtStation, and he had already gone to considerable lengths in conveying some of the main characters from the first two games into 3D Pixel Sprites: You should check is work here: https://www.artstation.com/vomo So I contacted him to collaborate on this project, and he kindly sent me his 3D Pixel Sprites, which now I had to convert to LEGO bricks: My absolute priority was to preserve, down to every single pixel, the look of Guybrush as seen in the first game, so that regardless of what side you were viewing the sculpture, it would always match the respective sprite in the original animation. Matching the colors took some work and apparently, using LEGO studs as pixels seemed obvious enough, but that meant these sculptures could not be in the standard, studs up, LEGO building style. As most of you probably know, a 1 x 1 standard LEGO Brick is not cubic at all, as it is a bit taller that its square base: So using 1 x 1 bricks as single pixels was absolutely out of the question, as the sculpture would become stretched up, the proportions would look all wrong and the fidelity of the model would be seriously compromised. I could increase the scale and make each pixel correspond to this configuration: but the sculpture would’ve become too massive and parts intensive. Besides, it is kinda fun and appropriate to make each pixel correspond to a single LEGO stud. Now, obviously, LEGO studs are square, so making the sculpture using a “studs-out” technique seemed like the best approach, as that would allow to retain the pixel-LEGO stud correspondence, and LEGO studs are square, the fidelity of the model would be kept. LEGO bricks and plates, however, are bit unsightly when seen from their underside, and I really did now want the sculpture to have a good side, at the expense of its back, so I decided to make the sculpture out of two, studs out, halves, that connect to one another in the middle, like a sarcophagus of sort. And this is the final result. I hope you find it fun: I will show some more 3D Pixel character sculptures in the next few days