If you missed the r/place artwork, boy, you have to check it out immediately! The artwork was a combined effort by Redditors back in 2017 to create a living artwork where each person could place one pixel at a time. It turned out to be more than just an experiment…

It all started with r/place making the comeback and getting on everyone's radar. If you are oblivious to what this is all about, the r/Place subreddit is an online canvas where users from all around the world can come together and create incredible art pieces. The artwork was created in 72 hours during which anyone could override pixels within the canvas at will.

Sadly this incredible piece of artwork and parts of it were being sold as NFTs without consent by anonymous people. Well, this clearly was news that needed people to be informed in the community. And so we took to our board to recreate this artwork in our own way. 

Using Aseprite I started off, with a larger canvas hoping to be able to fill it with tiny pixel artworks, but Dudly caught this move early on and said that it would be super-hard to finish such a size on time. So we decided to turn down the notch a bit and make it still as good as we can. The next step was listing all that reminded us of NFTs and Crypto to get a fair idea of how we can populate this canvas. We got a decent number of items to fill it up and so we began. 

Almost 80 layers of objects later we had the artwork ready, but we still needed to animate it to look similar to the timelapse of r/place creation. This was tricky, but Dudly devised a really cool way to make this possible. We individually made the artworks erase using a spray tool over a few frames and then reversed it to make it look like it was created from scratch! Woohoo! And then we were just a few steps away from recreating the void and the final vanishing back to white. 

In the end, we feel we captured the essence of the r/place artwork in our own possible ways. We will be back with yet another cool cover next frens!