(see this same entry in craftgrrl here- http://community.livejournal.com/craftgrrl/10340946.html)

For several weeks now i've been working on a super-secret craft project that i wouldn't tell anyone outside of our house about. All i would say is that it involves 304 wood cubes and it's very nerdly.

It all started when I was at the dollar store and i saw these packages of tiny wooden craft cubes:



And i instantly knew what i was going to do with them... so i bought 4 packs.


What can you do with 304 tiny wooden cubes???

First i found a pixel sprite image that i liked (i love Kirby!)

This is from the first GBA Kirby game, so it's rather complex and has many colours.

Then i blew it up in Photoshop. Waaaaaaaaay up, as far as the zoom would go. Then i added grid lines and counted how many pixels and how many colours and how many pixels of each colour.


Then i printed it out and made a map, of sorts. With a letter for each colour.


I should say here that i thought this was going to be a weekend project, just a quick cute little thing to do. Oh man, how wrong i was. How utterly, tragically wrong.


I don't know what kind of freakish stain/paint they use on that craft wood, but it blasted through 4 layers of white acrylic like nothing. I thought i would just have to give them one quick shot of it but hoo hoo hoooooo no.
Here they are all primed and ready, note how they fit perfectly in this medium pizza box ;)

I couldn't get them to go white, so they look pastel.

So the actual painting began. Oh, the painting. The hours of painting.
I had no idea how challenging it would be to mix 8 different shades of pink, and i'm pretty good at mixing colours. Having to mix them in a different room that the computer didn't help either. But I'm a trooper.




FUN FACT- Kirby has 73 black pixels and 81 main bubblegum pink pixels


Seriously, NO IDEA how much tedious work this was going to be. I spread out the priming/painting here and there over several days.



All the coloured cubes in all their glory!
They looked so cool this way i joked about stopping here. But my housemates were more excited to see it finished at this point than i was. Of course they're not the ones that felt colourblind from staring at pink cubes for hours on end...pink pink pink pinkpinkpink



TOO MUCH PINK!!!

Then i was finally ready to start gluing it all together. Wood glue!
And that's when the real pain began.
First i glued the cubes into rows, then the rows into 3 sections, then the 3 sections together. While i was painting them i wrote a letter on the back of each cube so i could line them up with the black and white pixel map.
Gluing took so much longer than painting. And it was so boring. I did all the gluing on a sheet of glass so they would be flat.


I have no gluing photos to show you, it was pretty dull, kinda like a factory job. Instead, here are some shots of Kratos vs. Unicron, a war that wages daily in our living room-

I brought Unicron a tiny sombrero back from Mexico, so now we call him Mexicron.



Shit this battle is going to be EPIC


I found alcohol was the best way to get over the tedium of gluing. However the work also required precision, so you can see the Catch 22 i was stuck in there. It was a delicate balance. I also watched movies as i worked, there are several films my bf is always saying i should watch and this seemed like the perfect time to get it over with. Anything but staring at pink cubes.

To give you an idea of the time it took, I watched the following while gluing Kirby together:

The Wizard
Blade 2
The Devil and Daniel Johnston
12 "Best of" episodes of The Larry Sanders Show
Unforgiven
The Thing
Big Trouble in Little China
Tombstone
(boyfriend was on a Kurt Russell kick)

It took.....so long.

BUT FINALLY-




KIRBY!


With a pop can for scale.
Boy did i mess up some of those foot colours, but YOU try mixing 8 shades of pink!



On his back you can see the original colours and the letters i marked on each one.




He will hang on our wall and bring joy to all who see him ;)

Overall Kirby took more hours than i can count, spread out over several weekends. Finally, i can leave the house again!