The Planet Minecraft Group Picture! + How to make your own character!

- The PMC (PlanetMinecraft) Group Picture is a piece of art made by Stubbs1. It uses a pixel-art style, heavily inspired by the Minecraft Biome Vote videos, to portray an array of different members from the PlanetMinecraft community. The goal of the project, is to create a picture containing 100 different members of this wonderful community!- The idea of a group picture was sparked in October of 2017 with the rework of the GreenLeaf Creative server. On the server, there was a reward called "The Wall of Awesome!". It was, simply put: A group picture of the most active and most well-known members of the server. It did not have anything near the known pixel-art style which the PMC Group picture had. Instead, the Wall of Awesome looked like this:




- Around 2019, with the opening of GreenLeaf Creative, the idea for a PMC group picture was set into motion. On the 17/07/2019, the first PMC Group Picture was opened up! With a total of 92 people wanting to be a part of the picture, with a few unaccounted members. Only 11 members made it into what would eventually become the final picture.

- I completely underestimated how many people would want to take part in it, as well as how much work each character took. So eventually, I abandoned the project and started learning how to do Pixel-art. Pixel-art seemed easier and faster to make, due to it's simplicity and focus on only the most important details.
Soon I would stumbled over the Minecraft Biome Vote videos and got a kick of inspiration to create a similar style for my characters. I ended up with the character design that is used in the successful rendition of the PMC Group Picture.

The first characters I designed was my own Minecraft character, and my ex-girlfriend's Minecraft character:


I then used these characters to create 3 different character templates:


And eventually ended up with a satisfying result.

- On the 09/07/2020 the PMC Group Picture was reopened with this being the very first rendition of the picture. Only featuring a few friends of mine, but it laid the groundwork for the new PMC Group picture!




- Following the re-release of the PMC Group Picture, in quickly gained traction, getting over 100 replies in the first 2 weeks. Multiple ideas and plans for the future bloomed from those 100 replies, and eventually it was settled that pt. 1 of the project would be complete once we hit 50 players inside the picture!


- Pt. 2 then started a month after pt. 1 had ended, and on the 18/08/2021 - After almost half a year being in a state of hiatus, it was decided that pt. 2 would become the final part of the project. The remaining spaces left would be given to random members chosen from over the 550+ replies that the forum post had gained. (Wall-post confirming this statement)

The end of pt. 2 has yet to be reached, and the future is uncertain for when it will be complete. But whatever might happened, Thank you all for the immense support from day. 1 of this project!




- After laying out the basic colors, you now need to add an outline to the character. Choose a color from the basic coloring you've made. Then make that color a little darker on your pencil and draw along the outside of the colors. This creates a darker outline which makes it easier to see the shapes of the character.


- Now it's time to add the details. Just like with basic coloring: Go for the biggest details first. With the example character, that would be the hair. The clothing of this character is rather simple, which means there is no need for further detailing than the basic colors.
- After adding the biggest and most obvious details, you can sort of do what ever you want from here on out. Detail as you please, and once you're satisfied with the result, then you can move on to Step. 5

- Select the shadow layer (The top layer) and make your pencil a pitch black (HTML_notation: 000000) Then start marking all the areas where a shadow would fall. If the character has a jacket on, there would fall shadows on some parts of the jacket. There would fall shadows right under their heads, on the back of their hans, and various other places.- When you are satisfied with the result. Select the Shadow layer and find the Opacity button. In GIMP 2.8, the button can be found in the top of the Layer menu. It looks like this:



Turn the opacity down to around 21% +/- and then go grab yourself a cookie, because you've done a good job and made your very own tiny Minecraft character :)