Minecraft is now being used to recreate impressionist paintings

Because of its nature as a sandbox game closer to LEGO than anything else, Minecraft has been used to construct entire cities from famous works of fiction, blocky versions of real-world places, and even a bipedal war robot made of slime and TNT cannons, but it isn’t unheard of to see 2D art recreated with Minecraft’s palette of colorful cubes, too.

a moody, abstract work rendered in the bulky cubes of Minecraft 

With the freedom of Minecraft’s Creative mode, players have made 2D art ranging from retro-style pixel art sculptures to this intricate “painting” of Kerrigan from StarCraft, which took 23 weeks and over one million hand-placed blocks.

Now, there’s this: a Minecraft version of the impressionist painting Hard Rain by Leonid Afremov. It isn’t quite as bright as an Afremov, but the color palette is there in all its brilliant purples, blues, greens, oranges.

It’s interesting to see such a moody, abstract work rendered in the bulky cubes of Minecraft, especially one that works in screenshots, as a 2D recreation of a painting, and as a 3D space that reveals each impressionistic “brushstroke” as strange, floating objects when viewed at different angles.

The proportions of the structures on display here are huge, which allows for a level of detail (mostly with the burning gas lamps and multicolored raindrops) that standard Minecraft structures can’t normally obtain. The creator even emulated the reflections in the asphalt using stripes of colored blocks. You can see all of this in the video “tour” of the painting above.

Minecraft was also recently used to host a number of brutalist structures.

See more screenshots or download the level from Planet Minecraft.