From Trash to Art - 8 Bit Harry Potter

I always wanted to try to do an 8 bit wall art, and since there is a wizarding contest, my subject was found ! So the project began by choosing a model, for that I looked on the internet and found several 8 bit Harry Potter and finally reproduced it in an Excel file.

The finished product is 18x20 pixels (360 pixels in total)

For this project you will need :

• Wooden cubes(obviously)
• Wood glue
• Paint

For the wood, there's two ways of obtaining them, you can either make them as I did or you can buy them. I chose to make them because it feels more satisfying in the end, but it's a lot of work too.

Here are the tool I used to do it :

• Orbital sander
• Table saw
• Miter saw
• Caliper
• Fabric from old clothes (as paint brush)

Once you've calculated the amount of cubes you will need and their size, you can start making them. Before anything else, clean the wood, it is ways faster and easier to do it now than when you will have 360 small cubes to clean.

The wood I had was 2x4,5 cm so I cut it in two length of 2x2 cm using a table saw.

It is time now to shape cubes out of our wood ! Place a stop block 2 cm from the blade, you can now cut your cubes without having two measure it each time, how amazing ! Use the caliper to make sure your cubes are not too off sized (1 or 2 mm is fine).

Here's the long and boring part, some of your cube may have tears out so you will have to clean them using sandpaper.
Once it's done you can paint, for that project I had to make : 118 black, 41 yellow and 40 red cubes.

Now the fun part ! It's time to make the puzzle look like Harry. For that I used a thin board of plywood with two piece of wood in a corner in order to have one square angle to begin with.

Once the pattern is made and you made sure no cubes are missing, you can start to glue all of it together.

In this step you shouldn't put too much glue, otherwise it will stick to the thin board and be hard to not destroy it.

My cubes were not perfectly square so I ended up with a wavy surface, but I like in the end because it forces you to step back yo really see the pattern.

As you may know, Harry Potter is known for is messy hair that don't want to be cut, well it was pretty much the same for me. The gluing step left a wavy shape on the top of the board so I straightened it using a table saw (That way his hair won't grow back during the night). I could also have put two more pieces of wood on the thin board to get 4 straights edges, but I didn't think of it at the moment.

Now that it is done, I'm think about making a frame around it, like real art =)
Hope you liked the 'ible Let me know if you find some other improvements for the making process !