Pixel Art Mosaics - Roareye Black.

During my trip to Japan in September/October 2007, I spent a day scouring the shops of Shibuya and other close areas of Tokyo looking for video game based soundtracks and merchandise. I ended up coming back with a huge Master Chief figure that barely managed to fit in a bag at the airport. However one of the more easily packaged pieces of kit I found was a mosaic kit that was designed and built to appear like pixel art, Space Invaders to be precise.
Space Invaders isn't the entire range however, they have their own website (The only bit of English on the box) which can give you a look at their products including Pacman, Super Mario and more pixel art mosaics. This is a brilliant idea, and something very interesting to play with as a desk toy. Evidently, he Japanese do desk toys better than metal balls on strings.



The box will give you an idea just how little this set costs. 789 Yen is the equivalent of about $8 or £4. That's insanely cheap compared to alot of videa game based merchandise, and it's not as if the quality is low either.
The front of the box gives you a couple of images to show you what you can do with the product whereas the back gives you plenty more ideas and also tells you how many blocks of each colour you get in a set. This set particularly caught my eye due to the neon/luminous colours used which help the imagery pop off of the background grid. Other than a crying Pacman picture on the side (Ment to be a child eating the small plastic blocks and getting hurt) the box offers no background information on the idea, and neither do the leaflets inside the box. The leaflets do give you a product guide however, as well as large scale examples of different Space Invaders you can create and how.



The parts you get are simple. Five different bags of coloured blocks, two attachable stands, two small clips to connect two pieces of black background board, and two pieces of background board themselves. The amount of each coloured block varies from product to product, but there's more than enough for the Space Invaders set.
To start, all you need to do is get the coloured blocks you want, then slot them into the small holes in background board. You're not limited to the examples used in the booklet, so I went ahead and made the Video Games Live logo. With more colours I could have made a background or done shading or whatever, but it seemed like a good example since the VGL logo is a variation of one of the toughest Space Invaders (It's not an exact match, however. The VGL logo is approximately three pixels taller and two pixels wider than the original counterpart).
The overall effect of the image is awesome, but really needs to be on a dark background otherwise you see light colours through the missing holes in the background board. Apparently there are variations of these around England, someone pointed me in the direction of Camden Market in London. How official these ones are is unknown, as I've yet to check up on them, however if they match the quality of this one I'd be very surprised. It is something worth picking up if you're a fan of tinkering with art, and the website sells extra bags of different colours, back boards and stands so you can build up your artwork if you so choose.



Something worth noting is that the relationship between mosaics and pixel art is not new, and has been toyed around with for such a long time, only on a much larger scale. There is a well known French mosaic artist known by the pseudonym "Invader" who goes to different countries and leaves mosaic art of video game characters and themes. The first picture shown below was from Avignon, France and was taken from Wikipedia as a reference image, however Invader does alot of other artworks seen on his site - www.space-invaders.com.

It can be said that pixel art got it's basic design from mosaic patterns, and the connection between the two is quite strong. However pixel artwork was originlly created out of necessity to create a user friendly interface, and it is possible that its creation could have come about without the influence of mosaic patterns. Nonetheless, the close relations between the two artforms are clear, and similar methods can be applied to both to achieve different effects. For example the second picture below is another larger-scale mosaic which showcases video game characters in a much different way, still using mosaics. However rather than the avant-garde approach that Invader commonly uses, Arno Coenen and his group specialise in creating a more detail-rich image, as seen by the detail in the Donkey Kong imagery. Arno Coenen has a website detailing his work in more detail - Rock And Royal - which has his two specilist areas of mosaic works and chandelier design.



Thanks to Taito and Tomytec Japan for making such a cool piece of kit, the official website has the different sets, as well as a shop to buy from should you so wish - www.dot-s.net
Thanks to "Space Invader"/"Invader" for his artwork showcase, his official website is www.space-invaders.com
And to Wikipedia for the image used in this article at www.wikipedia.org
And thanks to Arno Coenon for the showcase of his mosaic artwork, his official site is www.rockandroyal.com