Pointless Art Project: Duplicate the Pictochat GUI
I’m trying to cycle my sleep schedule since I start work in less than a week, so to kill time until Nanostray finally shows up in the mail I had to come up with something tedious and time consuming to keep me up. For whatever reason, I decided I would duplicate, pixel-for-pixel, the Pictochat interface in Photoshop.
This wasn’t an entirely new concept, when I first got my DS, I “ripped” all of the character sets (aside from the Japanese alphabets) to try and create a Pictochat Truetype font. This basically involved staring at the DS screen REALLY close and counting pixels. While that worked just fine with individual characters, I needed to get perfect spacing and dimensions of every icon and box that make up the Pictochat interface for my new project. I finally discovered that my webcam had the ability to focus just millimeters from the screen, and I set about taking screenshots of the different components that I would need to recreate. Then I started with a blank document, drew out a grid for myself at the DS’s screen resolution, and started plugging pieces in…pixel by pixel. Five hours later, I had manually transferred nearly 100,000 pixels for my entirely pointless art project. I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with pixel art for extended periods of time, but it’s a lot of fun because your eyes quit working and your brain tries to escape.
I had to guess on the colors, and they’re just a little off, but other than that, this is a pixel-perfect recreation of an empty Pictochat room.
Enjoy, I guess.
September 27th, 2005 at 2:32 pm
You know what you could’ve done with the five hours you spent replicating PictoChat? Send me love letters. Yep. That way your sense of accomplishment is heightened by the fact that you sent me meaningful letters.