#minecraft map art

[tardigrade-train]

I don't know if it ever got posted so - Cleaned up yami because i wanted to make a mapart of him. 2nd image is bayer 2x2 and uses redstone blocks for the hair, everything else is carpet and flat. Original image/s :

I can't find the source, reverse search pulls up jack shit. Got these versions of it though.

Original artist & link can be found here!

Everyone say thanks to @superspecialawesome for me :p

[leccinum-insigne]

Sigh. I've put them. In minecraft

Just so I can have a custom pixel art "painting" above my bed

[red-string-of-phate]

hard launch minecraft mapart :D

i made this months ago and never shared it holy shit

took around 5 hours - top is an aerial view, bottom is what it looks like in a map - dimensions 128 x 128 blocks - created 21 october, 2025 c:

[genevawrenn]

Tallulah has joined her brother Chayanne <3

[sculkapologist]

I finally finished a NEW CUSTOM MAP ART!!! "Visitor," a portrait of an enderman, is extra exciting because it's my first full-palette map painting, meaning I used block height to access all the highlight and shadow colours available!! More on the full process under the cut, but the short version of what this means is:

ITS A VERY COMPLICATED CONSTRUCTION. I created the art, then planned and built this manually, without any mods or schematics for construction. Huge props again to everyone else in the server for helping me gather all the materials to make this absurd thing possible!!!

This was the original art I made for it! I'm a huge fan of the "compressed" look of the vanilla paintings, so I've been starting with a large image and shrinking it down, though there were a lot of pixel tweaks to get it to read well. After shrinking it to 16x32 (for an art made of two maps), I convert it to a limited palette that I've set up to match the colours minecraft actually has available:

The map palette is actually tremendously limited, so figuring out a painting that will still look good with that constraint is a challenge in and of itself!

Anyway, the way minecraft maps work, a block that is Taller than the block to the north of it shows up with a slightly lighter colour, and a block that is Lower than the block north of it shows up on the map with a slightly darker colour. So when making a key for this one, I marked all the squares with a little arrow if it's the lighter or darker version:

Each "pixel" here is a full stack of blocks on the mapped area: 64 blocks, 8 rows of 8. In order to achieve the affect of every block in a given pixel being taller or shorter than the block to the north of it, dark and light shades need to staircase either up or down. Because staircasing downwards in survival sounds even worse than this madness, I did some planning to make sure each of the "downwards" staircases would touch the ground, so I could simply staircase up from south to north instead. This involved figuring out how many up and down movements were in each individual column and planning out 32 little layouts:

It's worth noting that if you look up minecraft map art on Youtube, most of what you'll find is either, the simple realisation that placing blocks allows you to make custom map art, or an explanation of how to use a generator that will let you plug in any picture and then produce a schematic for you. It's very cool that these exist, but I wanted to do full palette art myself, without an auto-generated schematic, and at the time THERE JUST WEREN'T ANY TUTORIALS FOR HOW TO DO ALL THIS?? Now, having the experience of finagling all this, i think perhaps the reason is that this is a mad undertaking.

ANYWAY: PROGRESS SHOTS!!

I actually love how the staircases look..... its like some kind of modern sculpture

Fewer shots of the second half since I did it on call with friends; the last screenshot is one Thren took of me activating the new locked map to use for the gallery.

Once these paintings are done, I lock the finished maps, make copies, and stock them in the art gallery so other friends on our server can also put these paintings in their homes! It's a lot of work, but really rewarding to see my art decorating various buildings around the server. ;u;

I have one more custom full-palette painting I've done the art for and gathered all materials for; I still need to do the full key and plan staircasing for it before I can start, but HOPEFULLY if my resolve doesn't waver there'll be at least one more of these!!

[beryllineart]

Silksong Art

This is some nice pixel art, huh? Maybe it could look a little nicer, but for someone who never does pixel art, I'd say it's not too bad. My brother hasn't played Silksong in forever... I should ask him to play it during the summer.

You want to know something else about this art that I think is pretty cool?

It's a Minecraft map.

I freakin' built this in Minecraft.

Minecraft.

Anyways, this took me around 24 hours, possibly more, so I'm going to rant for a bit because this was harder and took longer than I thought it would. You don't have to listen to me, but I think I need this.

Not only did I have to use my laptop's trackpad the entire time, but the /fill command mostly worked for just the bell beast's head because when I designed the art, I used the dithering brush way too much, so there was a lot of switching blocks.

Minecraft maps are 128*128 pixels. At their smallest size, each block equals a pixel. That is 16,384 blocks. Since I made a base that I then used the staircase method on top of, that's almost twice as many blocks. Yes, the staircase method was necessary to get the right colors. I don't think it's unrealistic to say this might have been 30,000 blocks.

I realize that I'm really complaining about nothing in particular, and some people do lots of map art that is way better than this. I just wasn't prepared for how long it would take me. I started this on March 28th and finished on April 4th, and I estimate that it took about 24 hours.

I don't like playing video games that much, and I think the only reason I stuck to this was a sort of sunk cost fallacy thing. I'd already spent so much time on it that it really bothered me not to finish it, even if I should have worked on homework and stuff, or even other art instead. It doesn't help that making the reference art was so quick. I think I gave myself unrealistic expectations.

Anyways, here are some more pictures of my reference art, the different versions of the maps, the bats that started spawning (I did do this in Creative Peaceful mode so mobs wouldn't bother me too much) and other miscellaneous things.

Blocks I used:

For Bell Beast's body- light blue and blue terracotta, clay, and quartz

For Bell Beast and Hornet's heads- quartz blocks and mushroom stems

For Bell Beast's legs- cyan terracotta, light gray wool, dark gray wool and stone

For Hornet's cloak- red terracotta, crimson hyphae, and netherrack

For the ground- black, brown, gray and light gray terracotta

For outlines- black wool

oh, also scaffolding was useful even though it's not part of the art itself

And apparently I messed up the entirety of the light blue terracotta sections so that's why the shadows on the bell beast's body are too dark. Whoops.

[koda-want-to-sleep]

Art of grovyle from pmd, with a limited palette because I wanted to put it on a minecraft map If anyone wants to put it on a map too, just ask me and I'll give you the color/block correspondance

I kept a timelapse of the steps for this one

[darkowl-records]

This is my heartsteel Minecraft map art that took me about a year to make. So glad it's done. Never got sick of this image!