Last weekend, I discovered the pixel art. The goal is to reproduce a pixelated drawing. Anyone can do this without any drawing skills because you just have to reproduce the pixels one by one (on a squared paper). Kids and big kids can quickly become addicted to this.

Example

For this pixelated ironman, you need only 3 colors (black, yellow and red). At the beginning I thought this would be really easy and quick. It took me approximately 15 minutes to reproduce this. Children could take more than 1 hour to reproduce this, so it’s nice if you want to keep them busy.

Make your own pixel art models

On the internet, there are lots of models. There are also tutos on how to make models with Photoshop. Yet, I wanted to make an R package for making pixel art models, based on any pictures. The pipeline I came up with is the following:

  • read an image with package magick
  • downsize this image for processing
  • use K-means to project colors in a small set of colors
  • downsize the image and project colors
  • plot the pixels and add lines to separate them

I think there may be a lot to improve but from what I currently know about images, it’s the best I could come up with as a first shot.

I made a package called pixelart, with an associated Shiny App.

# Installation
devtools::install_github("privefl/pixelart")

# Run Shiny App
pixelart::run_app()