Initially I was going to do a watercolour or acrylic painting (or a series of paintings) showing some characters from the good old 8-bit and 16-bit era. You know: stuff like Mario (SNES), Sonic (Megadrive) etc etc, but then I thought: why bother sitting painting squares when I could just do them in squares… mosaic tiles to be exact.
Above: Bub and Bob mosaic on my wall
(click photo above for a larger photo)
And lo, it was to pass. After a few minutes finding rips of Bubble Bobble sprites I began to glue the mosaic tiles to a sheet of thin plastic. The tiles are actually 1cm (10mm) square which would have made them each about 15cm square! So I cut each tile in to four and used 0.5cm (5mm) tiles.
First came Bub (above, click the photo for a larger photo). The plan was to cut away any visible while plastic that was showing. But the more I looked at it, I realised it would look better with a black outline but I wasn’t sure if I had enough black tiles to do that for Bub and, the soon to be created, Bob. So I left about 3mm of plastic around the outline of Bub then painted the visible white plastic with some black acrylic paint. Voila!
Now Bob (above, again click photo for larger one). Same idea. Each one took about 2hrs to cut the tiles and glue in place with a further 15mins or so for cutting them out of the plastic sheet and the black acrylic. They are both 16 tiles square and blue-tac’d to my wall, perched upon photo’s of my geckos. 
Next: Link from the SNES Zelda game ‘Link to the Past’.
Coming soon: Even more 8 and 16-bit legends. This is FUN!
April 18th, 2008 at 10:43 am
Bubble Bobble was my favourite game and favourite game characters of all time… I really looked that game. So simple, but not so simple as say pacman where it got boring quick.
Every level was different and all 99 levels were awesome… except level 99 where if you didn’t get the magic fruit on your FIRST TRY you were stuck and could not get the ending… that was a pain
Lucky I am in Thailand Mr T or I’d be demanding these