March 5, 2015

A month or so ago, Andy pulled a few boxes out of storage.  They were all fun things, but the one I want to tell you about is the box full of 120 old Rubik’s Cubes.  There was a time when they lived in the game room window here at Wunderland.  Friend Jacob Davenport (who can do amazing things with cubes of all sizes!) was over one day and started playing around with them.  What ensued was seven years of cube art!  A bunch of friends got in on the fun, and they can all be seen here.  They’re really quite impressive!

Jump forward to a month or so ago when this box of cubes came back to Wunderland from storage.  So exciting!  But life is busy, and they sat in the window in random order until last weekend.  Shortly before they went on vacation, Andy saw me playing a game on the computer.  “What’s that?” he asked.  “It’s a pixel art puzzle,” I answered.  “Conceptis Puzzles puts them out every week for free and they’re tons of fun!”  “Oh… looks like cube art to me,” he said with interest.

So I decided to use an image from Conceptis Puzzles and surprise them with new cube art when they got home.  And luckily, there was a puzzle that worked perfectly!  I needed one that only used the six colors on a standard cube–red, orange, yellow, blue, green, and white–and that was 12 cubes wide by 10 cubes tall, or 36×30 pixels.  And look what they provided!  🙂

I just traded out the little bit of black for green and added one extra column and I was in business!  Then came the actual doing, which involved graph paper and solving (at least one face) of 120 cubes.  The whole project took about three hours, I think.  And it was tricky, because these are OLD cubes that have stickers that have fallen off… one even has a broken-out hole in it.  So I had to figure out which cube had enough stickers to do which 3×3 quadrant.  😉  In any case, here is the result–snow drops, which are very appropriate given all the snow we’ve gotten lately!  🙂

So now here’s the challenge for all of you:  send me some pixel art–36 pixels wide by 30 pixels tall using only red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and white–and maybe I’ll put it up in the window.  🙂