Pixel art with Rubik's cubes: where Rubikcubism came from
I came across a long article on Habr about how the Rubik's Cube became an artistic medium, and it has a lot for anyone who loves pixel art. The author has been building mosaics from cubes for several years and explains why this genre sits so close to digital graphics.
The main idea is simple: a colored tile on the face of a cube is essentially a pixel. Each face has nine squares, and the palette has six colors, so a group of cubes can form a low-resolution image that resembles the screen of an old computer or an arcade machine. The timing also lines up: the golden age of 8-bit games like Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong coincided with the Rubik's Cube craze of the early 1980s. According to the author, the term "pixel art" was first used in 1982 by Adele Goldberg and Robert Flegal of Xerox.
The article then traces the genre's history. The earliest experiments are attributed to the British artist Fred Holly in the mid-1980s. In the 1990s, programmer Jacob Devenport documented mosaics of several dozen cubes, including the first two-sided one. The real breakthrough came from the French street artist Invader, who in 2004 built his space invader character from nine cubes and called the style Rubikcubism. His 330-cube "Mona Lisa" sold at auction in 2020 for 480,200 euros, and in 2022–2023 the MIMA museum in Brussels hosted an exhibition of more than a hundred of his cube works.
What I liked most was how the author describes the process: first a pixel diagram in six colors, and then, for more complex pieces, Photoshop to check the colors. It's the same path any pixel artist takes, except the "pixels" here are plastic cubes. For anyone working with a limited palette, it's a good reason to look at familiar techniques from a different angle.
Source: Habr
The main idea is simple: a colored tile on the face of a cube is essentially a pixel. Each face has nine squares, and the palette has six colors, so a group of cubes can form a low-resolution image that resembles the screen of an old computer or an arcade machine. The timing also lines up: the golden age of 8-bit games like Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Donkey Kong coincided with the Rubik's Cube craze of the early 1980s. According to the author, the term "pixel art" was first used in 1982 by Adele Goldberg and Robert Flegal of Xerox.
The article then traces the genre's history. The earliest experiments are attributed to the British artist Fred Holly in the mid-1980s. In the 1990s, programmer Jacob Devenport documented mosaics of several dozen cubes, including the first two-sided one. The real breakthrough came from the French street artist Invader, who in 2004 built his space invader character from nine cubes and called the style Rubikcubism. His 330-cube "Mona Lisa" sold at auction in 2020 for 480,200 euros, and in 2022–2023 the MIMA museum in Brussels hosted an exhibition of more than a hundred of his cube works.
What I liked most was how the author describes the process: first a pixel diagram in six colors, and then, for more complex pieces, Photoshop to check the colors. It's the same path any pixel artist takes, except the "pixels" here are plastic cubes. For anyone working with a limited palette, it's a good reason to look at familiar techniques from a different angle.
Source: Habr
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