Minecraft Forums

I suppose if I were to highlight a point of interest about myself that is relevant to Minecraft and my interest in making mods it would be that I'm a professional artist. (I don't care much for how that sounds a little boastful, but then again I tend to be pretty modest.

My interests in art started early, but really took off when I fell in love with the old 16-bit art style of video game sprites in middle school. After finding out about how nice pixel art could look in 16-bit games like the 'Metal Slug' series I spent much of middle and high school ravenously studying the old school game graphics. I can vaguely recall staying up late into the night on school nights, searching for the coveted ripped sprites and graphics from old games and trying to find material from more games than I had ever thought existed.

Cutting more to the chase, this love of digital art resulted in working towards my degree in digital art. Truth be told, my artistic interests have become much more centered around sculpting miniature scale art and ways in which to create it with computers. While my classmates and fellow artists were working on large and medium scale sculptures and paintings I would be painstakingly crafting details that frequently measured less than a millimeter.

This characteristic of my work in recent years often results in others asking me how I can stand to work in such small detail. Other times I get comments from other artists about how they don't think that they would ever be able to sculpt on the same or similar scales due to what they commonly describe as insane or inhumanly large amounts of patience and steadiness of hand they perceive me putting into my sculptures. Truthfully, to me this skill set does not seem nearly as "impossible to achieve" as others describe it as to me. It's just something that feels natural to me and I do it because I find the process both relaxing and rewarding.

There's just something special about spending a few weeks carefully cutting/carving/sanding/painting/etc minute details into a tiny sculpture, then entering it into a gallery or competition and seeing the reactions to it. Many people seem to gush about how the work must have been incredibly difficult and/or stressful to do. I suppose that it probably is a difficult skill set for some people to pick up. Not everyone has the patience it takes to work in such detail.

It could be that my ability to do this type of art now has something to do with spending so much time studying and playing with all those pixel art graphics/sprites from old games. Alternatively it could just be that I'm the type of person who has a natural knack for this type of art. Whatever the case is I just look at it as being something I enjoy doing, find relaxing and see plenty of potential markets that such an art style can be used in.

How is this relative to my earlier mentioned interest in Minecraft? Well that would be because after learning about Minecraft and getting hooked on the game I started remembering my passion for pixelated graphics. Now I find myself wanting to try my hand at miniature scale art of a different sort: minecraft mods.

While I am admittedly not fluent with Java or other programing languages, I do plan to gradually learn how to code Minecraft mods myself, starting with basics and hopefully working my way up to some of the more complicated Java programing.