Photo manipulation ideas can come from anywhere. For Aditya Aryanto, inspiration struck from the wildly popular computer game called Minecraft, in which players build things out of textured cubes in an ever-expanding 3D world. Similarly, his series called Minecraft in Real Life (or Anicube) imagines photographed furry animals in the same cubic format you’d see in the game. Aryanto uses public domain photos of various creatures like a cat, polar bear, and tiger, and he retouches them to have blocky, hard-edged bodies and squared snouts.
Aryanto’s real-life Minecraft animals are both bizarre and intriguing. They occupy a place in the uncanny valley; they look almost lifelike, but not quite enough. Rather, these creatures elicit an out-of-place feeling when you see them among the non-cubic landscape. But despite this slight uneasiness, it’s a fascinating—and undoubtedly amusing—way to imagine the virtual world off the screen and in the wilderness.
So, how did Aryanto create this series? If you’re familiar with Photoshop, it’s easier than you might think. He used the Liquify feature on the program to stretch and compact the previously-soft forms into rigid anicubes.
Aditya Aryanto has created Anicube, which imagines real-life Minecraft animals.
The bodies of creatures are stretched and compacted to have rigid edges and square snouts.
So, how did he do it? Aryanto used the Liquify feature in Photoshop.
Aditya Aryanto: Behance | Instagram
h/t: [Colossal, PetaPixel]