Kids, Squids, Art Memes & DIY Hacks

The Splatoon series is well-known for two things: inventive multiplayer non-violent FPS action and the Miiverse player art accompanying player profiles that often showed some surprisingly intricate artwork. In fact, even though the Miiverse function won't be included in the Nintendo Switch, Splatoon 2 includes a profile function that works essentially the same way... so artists have kept on arting.

Some of the profile art looks jaw-droppingly detailed. Two examples:

How were these done? The two images were made using two different approaches: one involved a lot of patience, and the other involved hacking a game controller to run an external program.

The first image was created by reddit/twitter user Tobi, who explained his process this way:

“I just used a capacitive stylus for rough shapes, a zoomed in copy of the guy's face in 2-colour mode which I constructed in Photoshop, and a looooooooooot of patience to recreate the face. You don't have to be pixel perfect, because the entire thing hinges on visual noise to begin with, but it's nice if the face had some semblance of coherence to it. The clothes and hair are mostly random dots, whose only purpose were to create the illusion of texture and depth.

The second image, however, was not made by hand. Splatoon player and programmer ShinyQuagsire23 figured out how to trick an external USB input capture device to repurpose a fighting game controller to create the input needed to recreate an image pixel-by-pixel . The entire image creation process takes about an hour.

ShinyQuagsire23 uploaded the entire project to GitHub so that the rest of the world can share detailed Splatoon profile art too.

Or use it to make the dankest of memes.